Ahhh..lookee here. It seems that my commentary on Gail Dines and her appearance on Penn and Teller: BULLSHIT! seems to have attracted some interest.

Particularly, the good folks at NoPornNorthhampton, who just so happened to break me off a comment attempting to refute my and P&T’s takedown of Dines’ fundamental makeup of porn and its supposedly harmful effects.

In particular, this section which I wrote in the original:

OK….so the fact that it’s mostly girl/girl sex and solo masturbation scenes and mostly “vanilla” hetero scenes found in most porn sites and movies which make up nearly 80 to 90 percent of the porn being viewed in the US means absolutely nothing to Professor Dines; it’s that nasty-ass gonzo and the circus-sex acts of facials and anals and gangbangs that really count… [....]

Apparantly, Adam or one of his groupies had an issue with that; using a “recent academic study” that attempted to analyze porn DVD titles from the Adult Video News website to prove me wrong.

Wosnitzer: “We went through Adult Video News every month. [It] publishes a list of the top 250 best sold and rented adult DVDs… [W]e avoided the issue of ‘What is pornography?’ because AVN defined it for us, in a sense… We took the top 50 from each month, went back over a six month period, randomly generated took the top 50 films. We coded by scene. We had a total of 304 scenes that we coded over this randomly generated list of the top 50 films…

Wosnitzer: “We can read aggression and violence defined as any action causing or attempting to cause physical or psychological harm to oneself, to another person, animal or inanimate object, intentionally or accidentally, whereby physical harm is understood as assaulting another verbally and nonverbally…”

Bridges: “…I’m going to begin to talk about what it is that we found after looking at these 304 scenes in these 50 top selling pornographic films. In total in the 304 scenes we coded a total of 3,376 acts of aggression. That ends up averaging…to an aggressive act every minute and a half. The scenes on average contained eleven and a half acts of verbal or physical aggression…”

Now first off: these folks do know that analyzing this “random generated” (more like, pulled out of their asses) list or “top 50 videos” ignores the main point that most of the more popularly consumed and produced porn comes directly off the Internet, not from the major porn studios…and that analyzing 50 videos out of nearly hundreds if not thousands of adult videos that are released every year probably wouldn’t reflect the true diversity of content of porn in the first place.

Then there is their quaint and very open definition of “aggression”. which could include anything from an overly aggressive kiss or an insertion of the digits into another person’s naughty bits (remember, in Dines and NPNH’s worldview, any means of penetration of a woman is de facto defined as near rape, regardless even of the woman’s stated wishes), to open-handed slaps on the face or breasts or buttocks; to direct physical attacks designed to maim or injure. Not to mention the “verbal aggeression”, which basically can be reduced to: “He called her a WHORE, a BITCH, a C*NT!! He said one of those seven dirty words!!! Oh, the humanity!!!” The notion that dirty talk is designed more as a turn-on for the woman as much as for the man seems to be absent from their “studies”…but then again, actually pursuing the opinion and thoughts of the actual actors in those scenes probably wasn’t in their minds when they cooked up this “study”, now wasn’t it??

Bridges: “We also coded for, what…we’re calling loosely in this talk, ‘extreme acts’ (of sex acts). The only sexual sequence that we coded, which is…when one thing follows another, was something called ATM…’ass-to-mouth’. This literally involves anal penetration followed by oral sex…she is literally eating her own shit. That occurred in 41% of the scenes that we coded…”

Ahhhh, dude…I’ve seen my share of ATM (and ATOGM) scenes, and I can attest with absolute certainty that there is positively, absolutely NO “shit-eating” involved at all. In fact, the performers of such acts are thoroughly prepared well in advance for those scenes through enemas and douching and all other precautions to insure that no “accidents” even remotely occur. Perhaps you got that confused with the “scat porn” study???

And considering how open your concept of “aggressive” sex acts are, how can we know that you have not taken liberties with your definition of “extreme” sex acts, too?? Would that include plain anal scenes (of course, taking a dick up the ass must be total rape, because no respectful woman would ever enjoy such a deviant…errrrr, patriarchial activity?? Or…gang bangs (read: sex with more than one man)??? Or blowjobs leading to facials (because REAL women prefer their sex strictly missionary, and with none of the nasty sperm present…eeeeeeeewwwwwwwww!!! How gross!!!)

And why deal with percentages, anyway…..why not just state the number of scenes you saw that contained the offensive acts….or, better yet, just name the movies and the scenes so that anyone wishing to analyze your study for accuracy can see them for themselves??

Bridges: “Slapping happened 30% of the time… Most of the aggressors in these films were men…73%. By far the most common recipient of aggression was a woman. Even when women were aggressing, they were generally aggressing other women…”

Bridges: “How did the person respond when they were aggressed?… In 95% of these 3,000 and some acts of aggression, the person was either neutral, as in no change of facial expression or verbal expression, or was sort of saying, ‘That feels great. Keep doing it. Right on.’ And in only 3% did we see some overt expression of displeasure or pain. Again, it seems to be very important to the people who are watching this to believe that the recipient of aggression is fact enjoying it, is choosing it at some level…”

Ahhh, but you do know that there is a fundamental difference between a mild to moderate slap to the butt or breast or even to the face designed to stimulate the nerves and enhance sexual pleasure, and a genuine slap intended to hurt, maim, or injure the person. I would guess that the women who consented to doing those scenes already know the difference quite well, and would probably not appreciated outsiders interpreting their views for them. Maybe there reason why they reacted as it there was no pain was because…well..there really wasn’t any pain, and that it didn’t get to the level of violence or injury??

But, so much easier for antiporn ideologues to believe that women are either lying about this or dupes of the patriarchy, right??

Bridges: “…in couples research we know that couples, even couples who fight a lot, as long as there’s a lot of good in the relationship, about five times more good than bad, they actually do pretty well.

“Less than 10% of the videos showed any kind of a positive act, and that included kissing… caressing happened maybe twice. Something like a verbal compliment, ‘Gosh, you look pretty’, not, ‘Slut bitch, come over here,’ that happened maybe five times in the 304 scenes. So we have a ratio of positive to negative behaviors of 1 to 9, which is not a sustainable, happy relationship.”

Oh, I see…because the kind of porn that you analyzed does not meet some arbitrary ratio of “positive behavior” (kissing, caressing, and such) to nasty, negative, degrading behavior (dirty facials, anal sex, slapping), that proves your point that porn should be banished from the earth?? Never mind that there really is a subgenre of porn that emphasizes exactly what you see as “positive” (do the names Tristan Taormino and Candida Royalle ring any bells??). Is your issue really with porn content, or is it really about women and men who don’t meet your narrow, hyperromanticized standard of sexuality as being only legitimate for “emotional intimacy”?? Does it ever enter your mind that these are ACTORS performing SCENES that may not reflect upon their own private sex lives; that these women and men may be perfectly capable of having strong emotional personal relationships while still depicting acts they may enjoy on the side for their own pleasure??

But even all that ignores the main point: this is still (however NPNH may attempt to spin and distort it) a small minority of the porn that is available for consumption in the United States; and most of it still remains quite vanilla: het couples performing mostly standard sex acts; single women masturbating; and girls sharing each other (sometimes with their BF’s or husbands watching). To emphasize this small sample and attempt to condemn the whole genre of adult sexual media is not only a big lie, but a huge slander on everyone: the performers, the consumers, and those who defend consensual sexual expression.

Sorry, Adam and NPNH, but your old dog still can’t get beyond the same old trick. Try again when you have something new.

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Tags: antiporn nonsense, nothing but the fisk