Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
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'Can sex films empower women? Following former home secretary Jacqui Smith's BBC Radio 5 documentary about pornography, Gail Dines, sociologist and author debates the issue with Anna Arrowsmith, a pornographic film-maker and former LibDem candidate...' --The Guardian, March 2011
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Professor Gail Dines has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. She attends industry conferences, interviews producers and performers, and speaks to hundreds of men and women each year about their experience with porn. Students and educators describe her work as "life changing."
In Pornland the culmination of her life's work Dines takes an unflinching look at porn and its affect on our lives. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. But, as Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly different from yesterday's Playboy. As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. To differentiate their products in a glutted market, producers have created profitable niche products like teen sex, torture porn, and gonzo in order to entice a generation of desensitized users.
Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines traces the extensive money trail behind this multibillion-dollar industry one that reaps more profits than the film and music industries combined. Like Big Tobacco with its powerful lobbying groups and sophisticated business practices porn companies don't simply sell products. Rather they influence legislators, partner with mainstream media, and develop new technologies like streaming video for cell phones. Proving that this assembly line of content is actually limiting our sexual freedom, Dines argues that porn's omnipresence has become a public health concern we can no longer ignore.
Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines reveals how porn is affecting our lives and why its omnipresence is detrimental to our sexual freedom.
In Pornland the culmination of her life's work Dines takes an unflinching look at porn and its affect on our lives. Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it's no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. But, as Dines shows, today's porn is strikingly different from yesterday's Playboy. As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. To differentiate their products in a glutted market, producers have created profitable niche products like teen sex, torture porn, and gonzo in order to entice a generation of desensitized users.
Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines traces the extensive money trail behind this multibillion-dollar industry one that reaps more profits than the film and music industries combined. Like Big Tobacco with its powerful lobbying groups and sophisticated business practices porn companies don't simply sell products. Rather they influence legislators, partner with mainstream media, and develop new technologies like streaming video for cell phones. Proving that this assembly line of content is actually limiting our sexual freedom, Dines argues that porn's omnipresence has become a public health concern we can no longer ignore.
Going from the backstreets to Wall Street, Dines reveals how porn is affecting our lives and why its omnipresence is detrimental to our sexual freedom.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A potentially useful discussion spoiled by ideological correctness,
By
This review is from: Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Paperback)
Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women's studies, mother of one boy and girl and an anti-porn campaigner. She has done as much research on this subject as she could without, it seems, subscribing to any adult sites, but with attending an AVN Conference in Los Angeles. On occasion, the descriptive writing made me wince. Her research is anecdotal and comes from talking to and with undergraduates (for whom her lectures are often mandated), sex offenders and the men who would voluntarily attend such a talk. This is worth what it's worth, but it isn't transferrable to more adults with more robust attitudes.The argument is spoiled by Dines' feminism, which force her to make "men" the problem and women the victims. In one chapter, she explains why she thinks that (not how) men grow up primed to be perpetrators, and in another how women grow up the knowing but helpless victims of pop-culture. Both chapters will dismay decent men and self-confident women everywhere. The bit where she is shocked, shocked, to discover that the porn producers are in it for the money, not to spread the word about how sex is about fluffiness and warmth, is truly... ingenuous? naive? silly? Much of what she says about the porn industry can be said about many others, but she doesn't make the connection. Run by creeps? Check. Damaging to many people's spirits and souls? Check. Tossing aside the staff when they get older? Check. Pandering to human weakness? Check. Making things that people don't need and don't do us any good? Check. And that's just the tobacco industry. Or the garment trade. Or any business that fills the Chinese air with pollution and its land with poisonous chemicals. She describes the degrading terms in which the women are addressed in gonzo porn, but then doesn't notice that she could well be talking about the dialogue and atmosphere of a large chunk of soap operas and drama, which rely on the same dysfunction, hate, anger, insult and treachery. Is it the creeps, exploitation and nasty emotions she doesn't like, or the sex? She has me convinced that Girls Gone Wild is not something that post-modern capitalism should be proud of, and that the gonzo porn, full of the freaky (in the bad sense) stuff she describes, can be omitted without loss from even a broad cultural education. After that, she starts to lose me. Her feminist creed means that she simply can't take seriously what one of her troubled students tells her: that the problem is those parents and schools that do as appalling job of telling children about sex, and set a rotten example in their own behaviour. (Note: many parents do a fine job, mainly by having a thriving and affectionate marriage.) Dines goes nowhere near these issues - which for an American academic is only prudent self-preservation. Personally, I'd quite like a world where garment makers would never think of making sexualised clothing for twelve-year old girls, where Lads Mags were not on public display, nor were there unfeasibly slim Eastern European models wearing H&M swimsuits on public transport. I'm with Dines on all that stuff, but I can't support the puritanism, the demonising (of men) and victimising (of women) that she's obliged to parade to ensure she stays in line with what's expected from a professor of women's studies.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Readable and convincing,
By Steve (By DUNDEE Scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Paperback)
Dines' study is a readable, accessible account of the dangerous direction that mainstream pornography is headed in. She nails a few myths about the industry which seem to be quite prevalent. Firstly, porn is a business: its about market shares and profit, although unlike selling popcorn, it involves exploiting (mainly) young girls for the benefit of middle-aged men. She is also very good at highlighting the fantasies that porn users construct to rationalise their porn use (in a manner not dissimilar to sexual offenders). Another myth of porn is that it is somehow progressive and liberating, although Dines shows, through the genre of 'inter-racial' porn, that porn exploits some of the most hackneyed and offensive racial stereotypes. One can take issue with Dines in some respects: what about porn made by women that is non-exploitative? This is a fair point, but any such porn that does exist is swamped by the nasty stuff, so Dines' point holds: she is talking about the mainstream, and it does appear that mainstream is getting harder and more extreme, pushing girls into more and more risky and dangerous acts (this is driven, of course, by the desire for profit, which must continue to recruit users who are jaded by the more 'vanilla' sexual practices). More worryingly, what does this increasingly violent mainstream porn say about society in general? How many more Josef Fritzls are out there? And what might the relation be between mainstream porn and a wider culture of sexualised violence?One might make more rarified theoretical objections (what might the 'authentic' sexuality Dines calls for be like, for instance?) But this is nitpicking. Dines' main argument is sound, and it needs to be taken seriously.
9 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Rather Large Contradiction.,
By
This review is from: Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Hardcover)
The book is an interesting, highly subjective and personal view of the Porn Industry, and should be read as such. There are no hard facts or empirical statistics of consequence to back up Gail Dines' thoughts and feelings on her subject matter. It is useful for those who have little or no understanding of the porn industry and some of it's more questionable fetishes and tastes. However the whole book is the antithesis of cool observational study.The irony of Gail Dines is that the very industry she seeks to denounce is the source of her personal profit. Without the porn industry Gail Dines would not have a writing career, it would seem. This contradiction sits uncomfortably with her hectoring, Mary Whitehouse style of writing. A curious first person view of an industry, but sadly devoid of deep or truthful analysis.
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