Hell, scratch the usually part, rape is about power and control.

WHOA.

That is completely and utterly false. Most rapes are acquaintance rapes, this is true. What isn’t true is that most rapes occur when one or both participants are under the influence of drugs alcohol. That is completely, totally, utterly, and absolutely false. Go tell every child who has ever been raped by a relative that they were drunk or that their rapist was drunk every single time that they were raped. Go tell every old woman that they were drunk when some man who was supposed to be caring for them raped them in a nursing home. Go tell every woman whose husband raped them in their own home that they, or he, was drunk. Go tell every teenage girl who has been raped by her boyfriend that they were drunk, or that their partner was. Go tell every woman who has ever been raped during war that they were drunk or that the soldier was.

I don’t know where men get the idea that most rapes occur when one or both participants are drunk (I’ve heard this before) but it is complete and total fucking bullshit.

Rape absolutely is usually about power and control.

Well, maybe some SM stuff that doesn’t have a genital focus, but that doesn’t strike me as any reason to think of the guy as uninterested.

Where I’m from it is illegal to show an erect penis. I have seen only one on moving image (in Genet and Cocteau’s 1952 film Un Chant D’Amour)and I found this incredulous and I have seen zero in still shots or other images. I don’t know what the law is in the US but there is plenty of mystery surrounding mens’ bodies where I live. This is another reason I don’t find porn appealing: the absence of apparent male participation and ethusiasm signaled by flacid penis’s is very off putting for me as a heterosexual woman! so perhaps this is the part of mens’ bodies which is veiled, to be slowly revealed to us women…

But… since we are going down hypothetical lane, and dealing with Wolf’s supposition…

Making women “safer” – the obvious counter argument is, which women? Because that starts to sound a whole lot like attitudes around the turn of the last century, where people were okay w/ there being red light districts in cities bc it kept “respectable” women safe from rape. So what about the women *in porn*? Are *they* “safer” under this asinine assertion? If one believes that participating in porn is inherently damaging to women, then the answer is obviously no and this is an unsatisfactory argument. I, as should be obvious by now, do *not* believe that participating in porn is inherently damaging to women – but that there are cases where it *is* dangerous, and that’s determined by what the work environment is like. Your assertion does nothing to address this.

The work environment of porn and the broader impact on consumers thereof are independent variables, or at least nothing requires that they be necessarily dependent. You said that you don’t believe this. Addressing the impact of porn on the women depicted in it can be done completely separately and independently of the issue as to whether it makes other women safer. I was discussing all women in the aggregate, however. If you want a real nasty but internally valid argument: if the number of women directly harmed or potentially harmed in the production of porn is less than the number of women who would be spared harm by the hypothetical de-sexualizing effect, and given the relative numbers of the relevant populations we’re discussing here, maybe thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of women in porn versus billions in the population at large, that’s highly likely; then even porn that has the worst and most destructive impact on the women in it would produce a net reduction in harm. Like I said, nasty argument, but there it is.

(2) Making women “less prone to sexual assault, violence, and exploitation, by making the majority of women less an object of sexual fantasy” – This assumes that rape, sexual assault, and other violence against women are directly the result of some kind of unbridled male sexual desire. Which easily sets up the trope of it being the woman’s fault again – she shouldn’t have tempted him, how dare she wear that short skirt, he just couldn’t resist. Once again the man is a hapless victim of his desires – which is pretty insulting to men, and I’ve never understood why more men aren’t up in arms about this portrayal of them as mindless automatons. And remember, feminists have been saying for years that rape is ultimately about power and control. So does that go out the window?

Again, I don’t disagree with you that men are responsible for their own behavior, but the Dworkin / MacKinnon-type argument holds that women are put at risk of sexual assault, violence and exploitation by porn consumers due to their consumption of porn. This contrary narrative challenges that directly.

And the “ultimately about power and control” claim, in my view, ought to have gone out the window, or at least come in for some serious evaluation with regards to its validity in the real world, a long time ago. I’m sure that it has some validity with regards to some rapes, but out of thousands or millions of rapes and sexual assaults every year in the world, what evidence is there that any one factor plays such a critical role in all or even a significant number of occurrences? Would a claim that all murders, or all of any other sort of violent crime, are ultimately motivated by one core cause, be so readily accepted without scrutiny? Did the original promulgators of the “power and control” line do any sort of empirical analysis before they said it? Sounds to me more likely like something that was probably said 40 years ago at a rally somewhere, and over time took on the undeserved mantle of some weighty sociological observation. The majority of rapes are acquaintance rapes, that occur when both participants are under the influence of alcohol or other drugs. Are “power and control” reasonably proximate and significant factors under that common scenario? And even if one should accept the “power and control” narrative, for the purposes of the porn hypothetical, which is dealing with sexual desire, the “power and control” narrative does not obviate or eliminate a sexual desire component in most rapes. Asserting so mistakes a debatably necessary condition for a sufficient one (i.e.: most or all rapes would still occur, absent sexual desire, purely motivated by power and control).

(3) The wording “real women” and “the majority of women” – The former is dangerous bc it sets up women in porn as not being real women. Which is how they and other sex workers are perceived by much of society already. (I wrote about the “real woman” trope a while back.) The latter reinforces the incorrect stereotype that only a certain body type is represented in porn.

When I was using the term “real women”, I was speaking in reference to the putatively “mainstream” type of porn, airbrushed and trimmed and probably photoshopped to some extent, and all. In that circumstance, by definition, those aren’t “real” women and, in any circumstance, the argument remains that the depictions of many types of porn, particularly of the “mainstream” variety, depict scenarios unlikely to occur with great frequency in the real world. You know, the whole “porn tells lies about women” claim. Neither argues that somewhere behind the airbrush and the scenario, that there isn’t a “real woman” somewhere.

As to the second “majority of women” point, that’s part of why I posted my follow-up corollary on the potentially changing nature of porn. This may be changing as porn might be diverging and expanding beyond the “mainstream” type (including pro-feminist porn). Nevertheless, given that porn generally serves it purpose best for the consumer when it depicts participants who will be physically attractive to that consumer in some way, however expansive or limited that definition of attractiveness may be, and given that there are many people in the world who are not very attractive (sorry, but it is true), porn is, on the whole, always going to depict a non-representative sample of the human race. As Abraham Lincoln said, “The Lord prefers common-looking people, he made so many of them”.