Pornography is Sexual Liberation and Celebration, Right?
Free Eros, Eros is in Chains
SUSAN: Reads from her book: Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
One is used to thinking of pornography as part of a larger movement toward sexual liberation.
In the idea of the pornographic image we imagine a revolution against silence.
We imagine that Eros will be set free, first in the mind and then in the body by this revelation of a secret part of the human soul.
And the pornographer comes to us, thus, through history, portrayed as not only a "libertine," a man who will brave injunctions and do as he would, but also a champion of political liberty. For within our idea of freedom of speech we would include freedom of speech about the whole life of the body and even the darkest parts of the mind.
And yet, though in history the movement to restore Eros to our idea of human nature and the movement for political liberation are parts of the same vision, we must now make a distinction between the libertine's idea of liberty, "to do as one likes," and a vision of human "liberation."
In the name of political freedom, we would not argue for the censorship of pornography. For political freedom itself belongs to human liberation, and is a necessary part of it. But if we are to move toward human liberation, we must begin to see that pornography and the small idea of "liberty" are opposed to that liberation.
These pages will argue that pornography is an expression not of human erotic feeling and desire, and not of a love of life of the body, but of a fear of bodily knowledge, and a desire to silence Eros.
This is a notion foreign to a mind trained in this culture. We have even been used to calling pornographic art "erotic."
Yet in order to see our lives more clearly within this culture, we must question the meaning we give to certain words and phrases, and to the images we accept as part of the life of our minds. We must, for example, look again at the idea of "human" liberation.
For when we do, we will see two histories of the meaning of this word, one which includes the lives of women, and even embodies itself in a struggle for female emancipation, and another, which opposes itself to women, and to "the other" (men and women of other "races," "the Jew"), and imagines that liberation means the mastery of these others.
For Full Article Interview with Susan Griffin - http://bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/wstudies/griffin.html
Reality of the Chains on Eros
- 89.8% of the scenes included either verbal or physical aggression.
- 48% contained verbal aggression, mostly name-calling & insults.
- 82.2% contained physical aggression.
- 94.4% of the aggressive acts were targeted at women.
- 70% of pornography's audience is straight males watching alone.
- Pornography is involved in about 70% of sexual abuse cases.
- Watching pornography may lead to one partner wanting to recreate the on-screen actions & perhaps even film them.
- The content in pornography is getting harsher & harsher.
- Joe Gallant, of Black Mirror productions, admits that he thinks the future of American porn is violence. Torture-like scenes are already produced.
(Example: Kink.com.) Authors: Chyng Sun, Ana Bridges, Robert Wosnitzer, Erica Scharrer, Rachael Lieberman. ( Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol 32, #3, Sept 2008) http://tinyurl.com/ll3gkb Read full study at:http://tinyurl.com/lnz6j5 VIDEO presentation of study results, presented by the authors: http://myspace.com/stopporn... See "Mapping the Pornographic Text: Content Analysis Research of Popular Pornography."TEXT SUMMARY of video presentation w. more stats from study is at NoPornNorthampton.org. See "Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today's Top Selling Porn Films." http://3.ly/uQD