The Pornography Debate, Part Two: Gender Bias

In Part One I looked at pornography from a historical perspective and how we know porn today is a new concept and how that might have some baring on the use, or as some view it, the over-use. This time I am going to take a peek at gender biases and where lines get drawn between the sexes.

I am currently reading the book Pornified by Pamela Paul and there are many things that do not sit well with me in the entire pornography debate. When it comes to the world of pornography everything seems to be a double standard. Actually, it's just not what I am reading in Pornified that is bothering me, it's everything that I have read on the topic from both sides.

Those who seem to be protesting the loudest are women and the highly religious. I am not going to begrudge anyone their religious beliefs, they are entitled to them. However, I have a problem with one group wanting to dictate one standard of morality to the entire population.

Then there are the women who complain about "men and their porn". Even the men who jump on the anti-porn bandwagon, such as Val Richards in his paper Pornography - Safe or Sexual, quote the anti-porn feminists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in their stance that pornography dehumanizes women, that women are presented as sexual objects who like pain, humiliation and being raped and that it's all about violence. They don't say, "I am a man and I am against porn because..." They just state what the anti-porn feminists have been preaching over and over as if they are brainwashed into believing it and can't form their own opinion. What's funny about this is that you don't hear men complaining about women looking at pornography.