Awakening and the Rejection of Pornography

If humanity was awake, then all lives would be respected. If humanity were truly conscious/awake, then movements such as feminism would not exist. It would not need to. When the voice of an individual feminist rises above the rest, men express their fear of her with anger and hatred. Men are accustomed to being the dominant masculine-gendered sex, in subtle and not so subtle ways. So, therefore, articulate and reasoned arguments against inequality are misinterpreted as an advocating for a tipping of the scales in the other direction, instead of what feminist discourse is: a critique of societal and personal entrenched systems, and normalisations of male power and dominance and the accompanying subordination of women. 

Pornography is one such example of this subordination. Pornography is a deceit, a lie.  It propagandises men and women's sexual roles. It shouts at the viewer, loudly and repeatedly; women and girls are nothing more than holes to be used and abused, and all men are nothing more than erect penises relentlessly in a state of perpetual arousal, violently and repeatedly abusing those holes. 

Pornography's existence is just one more representation of capitalism's self-serving indifference, indeed; callous disregard, for suffering. My innocent optimistic hope is that once all humans see the truth of existence: that all living beings are manifestations of the one consciousness, then the unfortunate, anachronistic, harmful structure called the porn industry, will crumble.  We all suffer, feel fear and pain. There is no separation. Pornographers essentially place women outside the moral community in order to enslave them. The deeper issue therefore is the normalisation of using girls and women at all. 

The societal enforcement of subordination as represented in porn, for profit, essentially enslaves both men and women to assigned gender roles.  This unfortunate paradigm must be seen for what it is, and undone.  

The awakened man, does not watch pornography. He sees all life as being of the one consciousness, and therefor as equal. He respects women too much to watch them being reduced to three holes and two hands. And he does not want his brain tyrannised by violent, base acts that are the opposite of loving intimacy.  A porn-colonised brain would prevent him from enjoying 'the real thing': passionate, reciprocal love-making with his partner.

 Men whose brains have been colonised repeatedly by such images, become less able to give to a real life partner, because they lose arousal. Seeing his lover's naked body, and enjoying the privilege of touching and arousing her, is no longer appreciated as it once was. It is seen as inferior to porn. The more pornography a man watches, and has watched, the more likely he is to deliberately think abut porn during sex in order to maintain a arousal, and his ability to experience pleasure from intimate behaviours with his partner is reduced.  I feel for young women today. So few of them will get to know what it is like to be truly appreciated and physically loved by a man who is spontaneous, playful and intimately loving. 

Male capitalist institutions such as the pornography industry, strip clubs and prostitution, place females outside the moral community. In a world where women and girls were respected, these would not exist. Women are commodities; reduced to 'flesh'. It is the normalisation of using people. Any use of  humans for profit involves enslavement and abuse. This unfortunate paradigm must be seen for what it is, and undone. It is about Awakening: seeing the truth of existence, then the world can be seen as it is, so what can be created is a better reality of equality and respect.

The Awakened man at some point had ceased to unzip his pants and search 'porn' in Google. Instead, with both hands, he began to type: 'anti-porn', 'how porn harms', 'how porn hurts women', 'porn and sex trafficking', 'how porn kills love', 'porn and erectile dysfunction', 'porn watching is cheating', 'porn reduces women to objects to be used, abused, broken and discarded', 'how porn exploits male sexuality', 'porn is a patriarchal system of capitalist exploitation', 'the harsh reality for women and girls in porn', 'porn is filmed prostitution', 'some porn is filmed rape', 'porn removes women's humanity, and when men masturbate to it, it also removes THEIR humanity'.

To all the Awakened men and women who speak out against sexual exploitation; you are respected and appreciated.

                                                   -Mountain Daughter

5 Myths About Porn. By Matt Fradd

April Garris is a good friend of mine who, while working as a “porn star,” made around  20 movies. She left the industry in 2001. Below she exposes 5 common myths people believe about the pornography.

Myth # 1 – The first, and most commonly held, myth is that the girls in porn enjoy making the videos.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. What people who hold to this myth fail to realize, is that these girls are acting, plain and simple. None of it is real. In all of my experience, I have yet to meet a single girl who actually enjoyed making pornography.

Having been in the industry, I can tell you that it is not a pleasurable experience. The sex itself is painful, and the girls are exposed to all kinds of abuses, both by the pornographers and the people on set. It is beyond degrading, and for many of us, the only way we could endure the shoots was by numbing ourselves with drugs or alcohol, telling ourselves that it will all be over in a couple of hours, and completely zoning out, sort of disconnecting ourselves from the whole experience.

Most of the girls who get into the porn industry do one or two videos, then get out. If the girls enjoy making porn so much, then why is there such a high turnover rate? Luke Ford said, in an interview with 60 Minutes: Most girls who enter this industry do one video and quit. The experience is so painful, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating for them that they never do it again.

Myth #2 — The girls who do porn must love sex.

Well, there are several reasons why girls get into the porn industry, but a hardcore sex drive isn’t one of them. I know, because that’s what I used to tell people in interviews. I would tell my fans about my voracious sexual appetite, and how I couldn’t get enough. I would say it was all I ever thought about.

The sad truth, though, was that I actually hated sex. Sex meant nothing to me, as it means nothing to anyone else involved in porn. It’s just something that you endure to get paid. I’m not saying that it is like that with every single girl in porn, but I am saying that this is the norm and not the exception. In the case of every single girl I’ve talked to and have known, it’s the same thing.

Myth #3 — The girls are there voluntarily. 

This is not entirely true. A lot of times, the girls are threatened or manipulated by the pornographers. This happened to me, and I’ve seen it happen to other girls also. They are told they will be doing one thing, but when they arrive onset, they are told that they will be doing something else, and if they refuse, they forfeit their pay.

A lot of the girls are young and inexperienced, and they feel like they are obligated to go through with the scene….a scene that they did not agree to, and do not want to do. They may be scared of the pornographers, or they may be scared that they won’t be able to work anymore. They feel trapped.

Even if they are not manipulated, the truth is, no girl actually wants to be there. Just because they might have agreed to do it doesn’t mean that they enjoy it, and any girl who tells you otherwise is either outright lying, or isn’t telling the whole story.

Myth #4 – If they are getting paid for it, what’s the harm? 

While it’s true that the actors get paid a lot – typically hundreds of dollars per scene – the twisted irony is that once the porn stars end up leaving, they come out broke and with nothing to show for it. There are several reasons for this. One is the drugs. Drugs are all over in the porn industry. It’s rare to find a set that doesn’t have drugs or alcohol, and many of the people are addicts.

Drugs are something you use to endure the humiliation and hardcore sex, and for many it’s what you use to numb yourself. The money that you make in porn you spend trying to numb yourself from the lifestyle.

Another reason is that a lot of the money they make goes right back into porn, with makeup and clothes and just the general cost of upkeep. They spend what they need to keep themselves looking good. So, even with the hundreds of dollars they make per shoot, in the end, they are left with nothing…..emotionally, spiritually, and financially bankrupt.

Myth # 5 – There are no, or at least minimal, health risks in the porn. 

This is absolutely wrong. People are tested for HIV, but not for all sexually transmitted diseases. The majority of porn performers have one or more STDs, and many girls have reported contracting cervical cancer and HPV from their time in the porn industry.

The girls who come into porn are not made aware of these risks by the pornographers. Just this year, the L.A. County Health Department shut down production of the mainstream porn due to several reported cases of HIV. The porn industry knew about the HIV, but never reported it, because they didn’t want to shut down production.

Most of the girls in porn are prostituted women, which means that they can contract HIV or some other disease from one of their johns, and give it to one of their co-stars whom they work with. The pornographers will say that the performers always use condoms, but that is a lie. It is very easy to catch a sexually transmitted disease in the porn industry, although the pornographers and performers will tell you that it is completely safe.

Women Are Not Sex Objects, And They Need To Stop Seeing Themselves That Way. By Miya Yamanouchi

Internalized objectification, self-objectification, female self-objectification … call it what you will. It’s seeing ourselves as sex objects for male sexual pleasure, and we need to talk about it NOW.

While the sexual objectification of women is well-understood by most, female self-objectification is an entirely different concept that remains largely unknown. The theory underpinning female self-objectification is that being regularly exposed to objectifying experiences socially conditions girls and women to engage in female self-objectification. This means that women accept being viewed as sex objects worth the value of their combined body parts, and they internalize this depersonalization.

When we, as women, start internalizing and accepting the beliefs which our society projects upon us, self-objectification ensues.

Female self-objectification is a direct consequence of societal sexual objectification of women. Perceiving ourselves as sexual objects leads us to develop self-consciousness, or the habitual monitoring of how our body appears outwardly. Internalizing our society’s sexual objectification practices and engaging in habitual body monitoring creates a disturbance in our consciousness. This pervades our emotional, attentional and motivational states.

In her 2013 TED Talk exploring the harmful impact of sexual objectification, Caroline Heldman noted that the average woman engages in habitual body monitoring every 30 seconds. According to Heldman, the more we as women internalize sexual objectification by viewing ourselves as sex objects, the higher our rates of the following are:

• Depression
• Body imagine issues and eating disorders
• Body-shaming
• Depressed cognitive functioning (Habitual body monitoring takes away time from cognitive functioning.)
• Sexual dysfunction (We impede our own sexual pleasure and enjoyment by engaging in “spectatoring” during sexual activity)
• Decreases our self-esteem
• Decreases our academic grades
• Decreases our political efficacy (the belief that we have a voice in politics)
• Decreases our ability to build rapport and make connections with other women as we engage in female competition

Female self-objectification is the result of women internalizing societal sexual objectification. Our society has conditioned girls and women to see themselves through the eyes of men as sex objects or body parts for male sexual pleasure. Self-objectification leads women to engage in self-surveillance which causes significant psychological affects and potential mental health risks.

We’ve created a female population that is practically incapable of self-love and self-acceptance. While this continues, the world will never fully benefit from the full and amazing insights and perceptions of women. It’s time to put a stop to this harmful culture, once and for all. It’s time to let women shine. 

Why Oppose Pornography?

This excellent article was copied from a blog titled 'Pornography is Oppression.  an anti-consumerist, feminist view.

Here is the link:

https://pornographyisoppression.wordpress.com/oppose/?blogsub=confirming#subscribe-blog

WHY OPPOSE PORNOGRAPHY?

WARNING: This page contains descriptions of pornography/sexual violence.

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Pornography is a product created through the exploitation of non-unionized labor within a multibillion dollar industry with ties to most major media corporations including News Corp., AOL Time Warner and Disney. Its effects are profoundly detrimental.

Despite the frequent assertion by unquestioning, unconfronting parroters of pornographers’ sales talk that pornography is fantasy, the truth is that it eradicates fantasy. The consumer/masturbator is not fantasizing but passively taking in the pornographic imagery. In the absence of any active cogitation, the pornography colonizes the consumer/masturbator’s imagination.

To aver that this colonization does not occur, or that pornographic media does not have profound effects upon the viewer would be absurd. A cursory examination of contemporary culture shows quite clearly that media affects thought and behaviour. If it did not, advertising wouldn’t work. Producers are even able to manufacture desire for things people never before felt that they needed (e.g. spinning hubcaps, triple penetration).

So, what is the content of pornography? What are these colonizing images and what thoughts, desires, attitudes and behaviours do they enforce/reinforce?

In its most seemingly innocuous form, pornography is pictures of nude women in postures of sexual access. This type of “softcore” pornography enforces the notion that women are sexually available to men by right of purchase – that they can be reduced to two-dimensional images, consumed and disposed of without a thought given to their humanity.

“Hardcore” pornographic images of unsimulated prostitution aggressively enforce the status quo by conditioning the consumer/masturbator to associate sexual pleasure with domination. Women in pornography are frequently slapped, choked, spit upon and have penises forced into their throats until they gag. These are real women; in order for these picturs to be made, these acts have to be performed upon people. In pornography, words used to refer to women are usually abusive. Not content to limit themselves to the traditional “cunt”, “bitch”, “slut” and “whore”, pornographers have recently introduced “meathole”, “cum dumpster” and many more terms of contempt.

There is no human misery that pornographers will not exploit. There is slavery themed pornography; there is Nazi themed pornography; there is pornography of anorexics and of maimed women. Much mainstream pornography is blatantly racist (e.g. the website Ghetto Gaggers, the video I Can’t Believe You Sucked a Negro, and the hateful cartoons that are a staple of Hustler magazine).

Pornography enforces misogynistic beauty standards, influencing women in and outside of the industry to submit to the surgical violence of breast implants and labiaplasty. Unnecessary cosmetic surgery sometimes results in death. Women appearing in pornography are almost always bereft of androgenic hair. Thus men are trained to see this as womens’ natural state and anything else as disgusting.

Despite efforts to characterize all those who voice opposition to pornography as prudes or members of the religious right, it is the pornography industry that thrives upon moral/sexual conservativism. Consider, for instance, the term “cum dumpster”. Why would a man equate his semen with garbage? Why would the object of any man’s sexual desire be a receptacle for garbage? The term shows the shame and disgust with which we are taught to regard sex and women (who are equated with sex). Pornographers eroticize that shame and disgust and capitalize upon it. “Filthy”, “dirty” and “nasty” are also favorite words of pornographers. Far from celebrating sex, pornography says that sex is disgusting. 

Although it is relentlessly marketed as sexual liberation, pornography is anything but. Pornography is oppression. To be really sexually liberated is to be free from a mandated sexuality that is based upon dominance, submission and consumption. 

PREVALENT PRO-PORNOGRAPHY ARGUMENTS AND THIS AUTHOR’S REBUTTALS:

The performers in pornography are consenting  adults acting of their own free will. They are paid for their work. It is their choice!

This is usually the first argument deployed by the pornography apologist, powerful because it invokes “choice”. In a consumer culture, “choice” is seen as paramount.

What must be considered here is what makes choice truly valuable. As meaningful work is not readily available to most people, the primary considerations when deciding to whom one shall sell one’s labor are often rate of pay and degree of indignity to be suffered. The fact that some people choose to appear in pornography is largely a testament to the failure, from a humanitarian perspective, of the wage system.

Some pornography (e.g. Crack Whore Confessions and Coeds Need Cash) focus upon the eroticized economic desperation of the women appearing therein. Her need and the consequent power of the pimp over her is supposed to be part of the kick.

A large number (often estimated at 60-90%) of women in the sex trade are victims of childhood sexual abuse. Former pornograhy performer Carol Smith in Not For Sale (ed. Stark and Whisnant):

When you suffer from childhood sexual abuse or were severely abused as a child, you usually repress those memories. You are unable to say, “I am doing this because I was abused as a child and this is all I know how to do. This is all I know how to feel.” … You either totally go a whole different direction and turn your life around and get as far away from that abuse as you can – or you re-live the experience, and a lot of these women are re-living what they know how to feel.

Some of the women in pornography are the victims of physical coercion and/or trafficking. They have no choice at all.

Certainly, there are women who were not abused and who are not economically disadvantaged beyond the fact that they arewomen in a male-supremacist culture. A few of them have chosen to work in pornography. Does their choice justify the existence of an industry that is, on the whole, abusive? Certainly not.

The consumers of pornography make the purely selfish choice to support rather than resist this industry. It is their choices, not those of the women in pornography, that should be vociferously attacked.

Pornography is just fantasy.

Fantasy is imaginative conceptualization; it happens in the head. Pornography happens in the material world and it happens to people.

Pornography is an outlet for men who aren’t having sex. Men need to blow off steam.

Even if we were to accept the validity of these bizarre electrical/hydraulic metaphors, pornography is not requisite to masturbation.

Pornography is an aspect of sexual liberation.

Why would anyone believe that people are more free by virtue of the fact that they are paying for something? Pornography is an industrial product and the purchase of a product never set anyone free. A truly sexually liberated society would be one in which people engaged only in sex that was mutually desired, enjoyed it without shame and never paid a cent for it. Anyone who believes that sitting in front of a screen masturbating to images of abject debasement is an exercise of freedom has a pathetic concept of freedom.

There’s no proof that pornography influences behaviour.

It would be silly to think that it didn’t. If television shows can influence fashion and advertisements can convince healthy women that they are overweight and impel men to buy “natural male enhancement” products, why would pornography not influence the way people behave toward one another sexually and otherwise? Why is it believed that pornography is the one kind of media that has no effect in society?

There’s exploitation in lots of other industries.

Exploitation in one place does not diminish or justify exploitation elsewhere. If we accept it to be true that appearing in pornography is no more degrading than working at McDonalds then we have an argument against fast food rather than for pornography. 

What about gay porn?

Most pornography is made for the heterosexual market by means of male dominance and reinforces male dominance over women. When other men are substituted for women due to the demand of a subset of consumers, exploitation is still present and dominance is still reinforced.

If you don’t like it, don’t watch it. There is no constitutional right not to be offended.

One can choose not to watch it, but will inevitably have to deal with it anyway as it has thoroughly permeated our culture. There are now pornographic and quasi-pornograhic images practically everywhere, being used to sell practically everything.

My argument, however, is about the harms of pornography, not anyone’s personal distaste. To characterize a feminist or humanist critique of pornography as a matter of someone being merely offended is either a failure of comprehension or a deliberate trivialization.

But pornography is where I go for new ideas. I learned all my sex moves from porn.

Then you are to be pitied. You have the same “moves” as all of the other men who recieved the same sexual indoctrination.

What about free speech? The First Amendment?

Pornography is free speech, but for whom? Not for the women who assume the dictated poses and utter the words of the pimps. Their mouths have been co-opted. Pornography is free speech only for the pornographers; and what do they say that is deemed so worth defending?

That women are whores, cum dumpsters and cock sockets.

In this world, people are imprisoned and killed for speaking out against murderous despots while over-entertained Westerners exalt the likes of Larry Flynt as fearless freedom fighters. Perhaps we should think a bit more carefully about what censorship really is.

I am not advocating the banning of pornography. That would be ineffectual in curbing demand and would probably result in even poorer “working” conditions for prostituted people. Nonetheless, I will point out that the First Amendment does not protect speech that also constitutes act. Libel and slander are not protected. A sign that reads “WHITES ONLY” is speech but, as it is an act of discrimination, not protected. Pornography is both discrimination and harm.

I like to think that the authors of the First Amendment, in including the free speech clause, had in mind such things as political dissent and not a man in a cowboy hat urinating down a teenager’s throat. Of course, they were slave owners, so who knows?

The 'C' Word

A male friend, who fairly frequently refers to people he hates as a 'c..t',  recently commented that he doesn't understand my problem with the 'c' word.  Heavy, protracted sigh.

My first reaction is to wonder why he doesn't understand why I, and other women would have an issue with it. Okay, deep breath: for a start - and I lament that this is not obvious to him and others - it's extravagantly misogynistic. The pretty much universally agreed-upon worst name you can call someone is a synonym for women's genitals. That part of a women's body that heterosexual men desire, yet conversely also apparently hate.

This man, who, in the throws of anger at someone, will use the 'c' word because, to him it is the worst insulting name he can dredge up from the dark swamp of abjectly hateful insults in his mind, in order to communicate the deep level of hatred he feels towards that person. The female genital area: the worst thing a person can be apparently.

He says to me, "...but 'c..t' is just a sound." Why would I have an issue with a sound? If it was just a sound, devoid of socially agreed upon meaning, and if all words are just innocent, innocuous, meaningless sounds, why not then call someone you hate a 'pillow' or a 'rock' or a 'chair'? The 'c' word provokes an involuntary response in the hearer - the semiotic connection to a woman's vulva, vagina and clitoris is received by the ears of the hearer simultaneously with the velocity and pejorative power of the word as the worst, lowest insult imaginable.

The 'c' word is one of the favoured sexual abusive terms, a porn 'actress' is directed to use towards herself. This is apparently arousing to men: to hear a woman - who is being violently penetrated for male 'entertainment' - moan and beg: 'please fuck me, I am a worthless 'c..t', 'slut', 'whore' etc.. and variations thereof.  So women are to be used and abused, raped and tortured because they are dirty, smelly, worthless 'c..ts'.  So it is synonymous with 'slut' and 'whore': two of the worst things you can call a woman. The lowest, most reviled thing a woman is considered to be, yet also most desired by men who are aroused by such words and connotations;  aroused by porn 'stars' verbally abusing themselves and  being verbally abused by men. A 'c..t is essentially a raped body part.: that which must ideally always be available for male use and abuse.

The use of the word as an insult - sexual and otherwise - acts to reinforce a dehumanisation of women by reducing them to mere body parts. The word reduces women to the one essential essence: our offence. There is a movement amongst feminists that seeks to reclaim the word not only as acceptable, but as an honorific, in much the same way that 'queer' has been re-appropriated by LGBT people and the word 'nigger' has been by some African-Americans. 

The 'c' word has a long history and there have been times when it was not considered derogatory. But, until another semiotic shift returns it to being inoffensive and to no longer being the worst hatred-grenade of a word  that could ever be hurled,  then it is a 'sound' that will continue to reinforce women as hateful, second-class bodies that are simultaneously desired and considered disgusting.

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                                                                 -Mountain Daughter

You Are Inherently Free: Awakening To the Fiction Of Self

You are free to be who you want to be. You do not have to follow the character description and script that has been written. The script that has been reinforced by family, friends, school, work, beliefs about who you are, preferences, aversions, learned neuroses, attitudes...every day in every way. Tear it up and throw it out. Release yourself from the bounds of a fixed and known 'self'. It's all a fiction.

The desire to define a self comes from fear. Fear of non-existence. If I say I am an artist, or a writer, a daughter, sister, lover, friend; these are all labels assigned that are readily accepted without question. We are not what we do or whatever socially constructed roles we fit into. It's all human-invented.  These are all what you are not. New-Age labels; being an Aquarius or a Libra, a number 5, a tiger or dragon in Chinese astrology - all are further descriptions of what you are not.

Escape isn't achieved through taking a spiritual path either. The so-called 'spiritual path' is a furphy. There is no path and there is no one to walk it. You are that which you seek. You are already enlightened. Of course enlightenment is another invented concept that does not exist. It's dualistic and based on the assumption that there is a someone to reach a something.

Where is this 'self', this 'I'? Try to point to him or her. Go on. Where is the finger aimed? Chest,  head? Then that's what's been pointed at: a chest or a head. Where does the 'I' reside? In the brain? The heart? The big toe? There is no little box inside the body that houses the 'I'. So there is a thought that says it's all 'me': the body, the brain.  How can that be? What is it that makes that particular body/brain organism a 'you', and this one here a 'me'? Where is the 'I' that is housed in each of these beings? Surely it must be the same 'I'? Just suppose it is for a moment, the same 'I'.  How could this be? What is it that is common in both humans? In all humans and all other species?

Consciousness. 

 This is prior to thought and emotion. The mind behind the mind. The objective essential awareness. This is the absolute. The non-dual existence that is consciousness. Objective seeing. It is all there is. Everything else has been assigned to each living human organism. Thoughts are not owned. The thought 'I' is just that: a thought. The 'I', the so-called 'personality', can not be located. 

So what does this mean? How does this effect your life?  If there is no self, then everything must be an invention right?  Constructed identify would indicate that all meaning is subjectively given. It is changeable and fluid. No fixed self, no fixed meaning. Academics would call this a post-modernist agenda. Yet this too is an invention.  Post-modernism is a form of literary criticism that posits all meaning as being polyvalent and fluid, so therefore there is no fixed meaning. It emerged from others: post-structuralism/deconstruction, structuralism/semiotics,  formalism etc etc...  The various ways of analysing a text - different movements of thought by people who set themselves up as experts and believe that what they posit as truth is the only truth. These are people who do not know who/what they are. Lost in the dream. Making sense of things employing literary strategies is a metaphor for the way we all try to make sense of the vagaries and vicissitudes of our lives, by deconstructing and inventing meaning for everything. 

There is no meaning. The universe is empty. The house is haunted. 

 It's not something people want to know about: this bottomless nothingness, the void, the empty hole where no one exists and nothing has any meaning. My advice would be to ignore everything I am saying. Just get on with your life. Save yourself from the inevitable fall if you pursue this. The panicked grasping onto the slippery sides of the dark hole down which the conceptualised ego falls.  To get to the place of truly seeing that you are essentially free and that the relative world is a well-constructed story in which you are merely a character, that has been written in to the movie of your life, in which you have the leading role, is an agonised letting go into meaningless nothingness. 

But really nothing changes - you still live your life. The only difference is you see that there is no separate 'you'.  You still love your spouse and children, still go to work and play. Still feel and think and do. All that is different is that seeing happens: seeing that it's all fiction and that meaning is made. It is felt it in your cells: this non-separation, this flow with all that exists.

When I paint a picture, there is no painter. There is hand-brush-paint-canvas-stroke-seeing-concentrating-touch-sight-movement : flow. That is all there is. Digging a garden there is no gardener. There are hands, shovel, breathing, feeling warmth of the sun, soil, weeds, sweat, aching muscles: sight, sound, touch, movement... 

Consciousness is what lies behind, underneath, above and beyond the invention of ego-self. It is the flow, the essential eternal (eternal meaning 'no time', not endless time), being-ness. It is felt at a cellular level - this engine of survival is merged with everything - no separateness - it is all one. 

You ARE essentially free. Yet the paradox is that there is no one to be free. The 'you' of which I speak is that which exists and always has existed, that which all members of all species share: consciousness. It is all you are and all you have always been. And always will be. 

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                                                                      - Mountain Daughter

Talking to No One About Nothing

In order to awaken, to be so-called 'enlightened', there are two questions that are useful to ask: What am I? and What am I not? To get to the answer of the former, it is necessary to unpack the answer to the latter. Who says? No one really... just thoughts gathering like clouds across a perfect, unchanging sky...

What you are not is everything you think you are. Everything aside from direct experience, is a story. 

So what is left? What is underneath or behind the story? What is it that sees, hears, tastes, feels sensation?  Without the editing, the back-story, the emotions linked to thoughts, thoughts linked to emotions, sadness about the 'past', anxiety about the 'future'.  

There is no one who can be enlightened because the husk is empty. The self is a deeply ensconced work of fiction that has been imposed since birth. All that we hold to be true is story. 'I' is just a thought.  Opinions about what is happening arise from the reinforced subjectivity of a false self - like a character in a play whose personality has been invented and whose lines have been written to fit that conceptualised persona.

Description of now 1:

Through the windows I can see muted sunlight and the blandness of a suburban street. I see my fingers tapping on the keyboard and hear a sanitised pop song coming from a radio in another room. Two of the annoying dogs in the house start barking. Their owner is in the bathroom readying herself to go out. A noxious chemical smell wafts through the house. My right knee aches from a past injury and I'm feeling hungry.

Description of now 2:

There is light.  There is a smell. There are movements, sensations and sounds.

Which of these descriptions is true?

For those who see, sustaining that seeing is the constant challenge of the ego self. Even 'ego' is a human-invented concept. Everything is. What gets us scurrying back into the illusion of self is when things go 'bad'. When everything is fine in our life, it is easier to sustain the seeing of no-self. Seeing that all there is is direct experience. That all there is is conscious awareness manifesting in bodies. Anything else is subjective posturing - thoughts being attached to a self. Opinions, feelings, fears, anxieties, aversions, desires, preferences: subjective positions that describe circumstances.

Thinking is a function of the organ known as the brain, just as filtering is a function of the kidneys. Thinking is necessary for the survival of the organism. There is no one to own the thoughts. They are just happening. There is no one reading this. Reading is happening. There is no one thinking 'what the heck is she talking about?' Questioning is happening. It is one of the mechanical tools the brain uses to navigate the world. The brain is an engine of survival. We are animals who seek to survive, just like all other animals. But unlike other species, humans complicate things with the idea of self and all the ownership and attendant drama that comes with that.

There's no escaping your subjectivity. All that can be done is that you see it for what it is. You'll still make meaning out of everything and see the world as it relates to you. The only difference is that you see that it is all invented; that who you have previously thought you are, is a construct. 

Words are clumsy and inept, and can only be directed towards the intellect. Seeing does not happen with the brain. It is beyond and behind intellectual understanding.  

Everyone is walking around in a state of somewhere else - believing the dramas of their life. Thinking about everything but what is happening right now.When the thoughts are seen for what they are; that they are not owned by anyone, what is also seen is what remains: and that is simply awareness.  That feeling when you wake in the morning, and for a second you don't know who you are and where you are or any of the circumstances of your life or what you will be doing today. That second of absence, absence of the story - when 'you' comes back, it's quite a hard fall back into 'reality'. So what remains during that second or two of absence?  The void, the emptiness of non-existence, death of the 'self' is felt as freedom by the returning 'ego'. It is in fact all we are, covered over as it is; all we are is that. Pure, conscious awareness. 

                                                                            ***
                                                                                                  -Mountain Daughter

The Triumph of the Pornographers by Lierre Keith

The triumph of the pornographers is a victory of power over justice, cruelty over empathy, and profits over human rights. I could make that statement about Walmart or McDonalds and progressives would eagerly agree. We all understand that Walmart destroys local economies, a relentless impoverishing of communities across the US that is now almost complete. It also depends on near-slave conditions for workers in China to produce the mountains of cheap crap that Walmart sells. And ultimately the endless growth model of capitalism is destroying the world. Nobody on the left claims that the cheap crap that Walmart produces equals freedom. Nobody defends Walmart by saying that the workers, American or Chinese, want to work there. Leftists understand that people do what they have to for survival, that any job is better than no job, and that minimum wage and no benefits are cause for a revolution, not a defense of those very conditions. Likewise McDonalds. No one defends what McDonalds does to animals, to the earth, to workers, to human health and human community by pointing out that the people standing over the boiling grease consented to sweat all day or that hog farmers voluntarily signed contracts that barely return a living. The issue does not turn on consent, but on the social impacts of injustice and hierarchy, on how corporations are essentially weapons of mass destruction. Focusing on the moment of individual choice will get us nowhere.

The problem is the material conditions that make going blind in a silicon chip factory in Taiwan the best option for some people. Those people are living beings. Leftists lay claim to human rights as our bedrock and our north star: we know that that Taiwanese woman is not different from us in any way that matters, and if going blind for pennies and no bathroom breaks was our best option, we would be in grim circumstances.

And the woman enduring two penises shoved up her anus? This is not an exaggeration or “focusing on the worst,” as feminists are often accused of doing. “Double-anal” is now standard fare in gonzo porn, the porn made possible by the Internet, the porn with no pretense of a plot, the porn that men overwhelmingly prefer. That woman, just like the woman assembling computers, is likely to suffer permanent physical damage. In fact, the average woman in gonzo porn can only last three months before her body gives out, so punishing are the required sex acts. Anyone with a conscience instead of a hard-on would know that just by looking. If you spend a few minutes looking at it — not masturbating to it, but actually looking at it — you may have to agree with Robert Jensen that pornography is “what the end of the world looks like”:

“By that I don’t mean that pornography is going to bring about the end of the world; I don’t have apocalyptic delusions. Nor do I mean that of all the social problems we face, pornography is the most threatening. Instead, I want to suggest that if we have the courage to look honestly at contemporary pornography, we get a glimpse — in a very visceral, powerful fashion — of the consequences of the oppressive systems in which we live. Pornography is what the end will look like if we don’t reverse the pathological course that we are on in this patriarchal, white-supremacist, predatory corporate-capitalist society… Imagine a world in which empathy, compassion, and solidarity — the things that make decent human society possible — are finally and completely overwhelmed by a self-centered, emotionally detached pleasure-seeking. Imagine those values playing out in a society structured by multiple hierarchies in which a domination/subordination dynamic shapes most relationships and interaction… [E]very year my sense of despair deepens over the direction in which pornography and our pornographic culture is heading. That despair is rooted not in the reality that lots of people can be cruel, or that some number of them knowingly take pleasure in that cruelty. Humans have always had to deal with that aspect of our psychology. But what happens when people can no longer see the cruelty, when the pleasure in cruelty has been so normalized that it is rendered invisible to so many? And what happens when for some considerable part of the male population of our society, that cruelty becomes a routine part of sexuality, defining the most intimate parts of our lives?”

All leftists need to do is connect the dots, the same way we do in every other instance of oppression. The material conditions that men as a class create (the word is patriarchy) mean that in the US battering is the most commonly committed violent crime: that’s men beating up women. Men rape one in three women and sexually abuse one in four girls before the age of 14. The number one perpetrator of childhood sexual abuse is called “Dad.” Andrea Dworkin, one of the bravest women of all time, understood that this was systematic, not personal. She saw that rape, battering, incest, prostitution, and reproductive exploitation all worked together to create a “barricade of sexual terrorism” inside which all women are forced to live. Our job as feminists and members of a culture of resistance is not to learn to eroticize those acts; our task is to bring that wall down.

In fact, the right and left together make a cozy little world that entombs women in conditions of subservience and violence. Critiquing male supremacist sexuality will bring charges of being a censor and a right-wing anti-fun prude. But seen from the perspective of women, the right and the left create a seamless hegemony.

Gail Dines writes, “When I critique McDonalds, no one calls me anti-food.” People understand that what is being critiqued is a set of unjust social relations — with economic, political, and ideological components — that create more of the same. McDonalds does not produce generic food. It manufactures an industrial capitalist product for profit. The pornographers are no different. The pornographers have built a $100 billion a year industry, selling not just sex as a commodity, which would be horrible enough for our collective humanity, but sexual cruelty. This is the deep heart of patriarchy, the place where leftists fear to tread: male supremacy takes acts of oppression and turns them into sex. Could there be a more powerful reward than orgasm?

And since it feels so visceral, such practices are defended (in the rare instance that a feminist is able to demand a defense) as “natural.” Even when wrapped in racism, many on the left refuse to see the oppression in pornography. Little Latina Sluts or Pimp My Black Teen provoke not outrage, but sexual pleasure for the men consuming such material. A sexuality based on eroticizing dehumanization, domination, and hierarchy will gravitate to other hierarchies, and find a wealth of material in racism. What it will never do is build an egalitarian world of care and respect, the world that the left claims to want.

On a global scale, the naked female body — too thin to bear live young and often too young as well — is for sale everywhere, as the defining image of the age, and as a brutal reality: women and girls are now the number one product for sale on the global black market. Indeed, there are entire countries balancing their budgets on the sale of women. Is slavery a human rights abuse or a sexual thrill? Of what use is a social change movement that can’t decide?

We need to stake our claim as the people who care about freedom, not the freedom to abuse, exploit, and dehumanize, but freedom from being demeaned and violated, and from a cultural celebration of that violation.

This is the moral bankruptcy of a culture built on violation and its underlying entitlement. It’s a slight variation on the Romantics, substituting sexual desire for emotion as the unmediated, natural, and privileged state. The sexual version is a direct inheritance of the Bohemians, who reveled in public displays of “transgression, excess, sexual outrage.” Much of this ethic can be traced back to the Marquis de Sade, torturer of women and children. Yet he has been claimed as inspiration and foundation by writers such as “Baudelaire, Flaubert, Swinburne, Lautréamont, Dostoevski, Cocteau, and Apollinaire” as well as Camus and Barthes. Wrote Camus, “Two centuries ahead of time… Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom.” Sade also presents an early formulation of Nietzsche’s will to power. His ethic ultimately provides “the erotic roots of fascism.”

Once more, it is time to choose. The warnings are out there, and it’s time to listen. College students have 40 per cent less empathy than they did twenty years ago. If the left wants to mount a true resistance, a resistance against the power that breaks hearts and bones, rivers and species, it will have to hear — and, finally, know — this one brave sentence from poet Adrienne Rich: “Without tenderness, we are in hell.”

Lierre Keith is a writer, radical feminist, and food activist. She is the author of two novels, as well as The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. She lives in Humboldt County, California.

This essay is excerpted from Chapter 4, “Culture of Resistance,” of Deep Green Resistance.

A Passionate Life

“You've got this life and while you've got it, you'd better kiss like you only have one moment, try to hold someone's hand like you will never get another chance to, look into people's eyes like they're the last you'll ever see, watch someone sleeping like there's no time left, jump if you feel like jumping, run if you feel like running, play music in your head when there is none, and eat cake like it's the only one left in the world!” 
C. JoyBell C.

The fictional character attached to 'me' that has been created since birth,  has always wished to live a life less ordinary. There has long been twisting, gasping and crying in the struggle to wrench free of the straitjacket of imposed subjectivity. She didn't know that she was already free and always had been. Now that seeing happens, by no-one looking at nothing, any meaning that this being once held to, has evaporated into the vast sky of naked, pure awareness. Like the bride stripped bare of her gown, the naked flesh merges with the other floating atoms in the dark, haunted room where there was once light playing on perceived loved objects that illustrated her story.  The text of that life is a palimpsest - offering moment to moment re-writes and erasures, in a game of 'Let's Play at Being Whomever We Want'. Like a child at Christmas who keeps quiet about knowing there is no Santa,  the presents are still accepted and enjoyed.  The gift of playing at life.

One of these gifts is passion. A life of passion is an embracing of possibility. It is a rejection of the ordinary, the mundane. I have no wish to sacrifice spontaneous passion on the altar of safety and the comfort of routine. Passion for the man I love, for what happens when paint is applied to a surface: the creation of something freshly born.  Passion for the natural world of trees and plants, earth and sky, birds, rivers and rocks. Passion is an urgent need to do whatever it is that moves you - whether it is planting a garden, writing a poem, running a marathon, or cooking a meal -  it is the juice of life. There is no doer, but much of excitement and joy can be happening. And yes, those feelings are still felt and value judgements are still made. Seeing the fiction of self does not mean that this being should live out her days in a darkened room with no one to love with ardour, nor creative pursuits to colour her world.

Passion in a relationship arises from appreciation, intense seeing of another,  and the desire to connect with their being-ness beyond the constraints and perceived limitations of 'personality.'  The domesticated human couple celebrating the inherent wild nature, circling each other with sparkling eyes. Kissing and touching as if it might be the last time. Immune to the invention called 'time', lost in the eternity of each enthusiastic moment.  Celebrating the connection between you; the sexual energy inspired by that person and the way you entwine as awake beings - united in the seeing in an un-seeing 
world.

 Seeing the truth about the meaninglessness of existence ideally should not be mutually exclusive with living a colourful life. Life is short and it is up to us to make it sweet. 

                                                                        
Floris Arntzenius - Passion, 1892

***

                     - Mountain Daughter

Pornography is What the End of the World Looks Like. By Chris Hedges.

BOSTON—“Fifty Shades of Grey,” the book and the movie, is a celebration of the sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of American culture and lies at the core of pornography and global capitalism. It glorifies our dehumanization of women. It champions a world devoid of compassion, empathy and love. It eroticizes hypermasculine power that carries out the abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture of women whose personalities have been removed, whose only desire is to debase themselves in the service of male lust. The film, like “American Sniper,” unquestioningly accepts a predatory world where the weak and the vulnerable are objects to exploit while the powerful are narcissistic and violent demigods. It blesses this capitalist hell as natural and good.
“Pornography,” Robert Jensen writes, “is what the end of the world looks like.”

We are blinded by self-destructive fantasy. An array of amusements and spectacles, including TV “reality” shows, huge sporting events, social media, porn (which earns at least twice what Hollywood movies generate), alluring luxury products, drugs, alcohol and magic Jesus, offers enticing exit doors from reality. We yearn to be rich, powerful and celebrities. And those we must trample to build our pathetic little empires are seen as deserving their fate. That nearly all of us will never attain these ambitions is emblematic of our collective self-delusion and the effectiveness of a culture awash in manipulation and lies.

Porn seeks to eroticize this sadism. In porn women are paid to repeat the mantra “I am a cunt. I am a bitch. I am a whore. I am a slut. Fuck me hard with your big cock.” They plead to be physically abused. Porn caters to degrading racist stereotypes. Black men are sexually potent beasts stalking white women. Black women have a raw, primitive lust. Latin women are sultry and hotblooded. Asian women are meek, sexually submissive geishas. In porn, human imperfections do not exist. The oversized silicone breasts, the pouting, gel-inflated lips, the bodies sculpted by plastic surgeons, the drug-induced erections that never subside and the shaved pubic regions—which cater to porn’s pedophilia—turn performers into pieces of plastic. Smell, sweat, breath, heartbeats and touch are erased along with tenderness. Women in porn are packaged commodities. They are pleasure dolls and sexual puppets. They are stripped of true emotions. Porn is not about sex, if one defines sex as a mutual act between two partners, but about masturbation, a solitary auto-arousal devoid of intimacy and love. The cult of the self—that is the essence of porn—lies at the core of corporate culture. Porn, like global capitalism, is where human beings are sent to die.

There are few people on the left who grasp the immense danger of allowing pornography to replace intimacy, sex and love. Much of the left believes that pornography is about free speech, as if it is unacceptable to financially exploit and physically abuse a woman in a sweatshop in China but acceptable to do so on the set of a porn film, as if torture is wrong in Abu Ghraib, where prisoners were sexually humiliated and abused as if they were on a porn set, but permissible on commercial porn sites.

A new wave of feminists, who have betrayed the iconic work of radicals such as Andrea Dworkin, defends porn as a form of sexual liberation and self-empowerment. These “feminists,” grounded in Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, are stunted products of neoliberalism and postmodernism. Feminism, for them, is no longer about the liberation of women who are oppressed; it is defined by a handful of women who are successful, powerful and wealthy—or, as in the case of “Fifty Shades of Grey,” able to snag a rich and powerful man. A woman wrote the “Fifty Shades” book, as well as the screenplay. A woman directed the film. A woman studio head bought the movie. This collusion by women is part of the internalization of oppression and sexual violence that have their roots in porn. Dworkin understood. She wrote that “the new pornography is a vast graveyard where the Left has gone to die. The Left cannot have its whores and its politics too.”

I met Gail Dines, one of the most important radicals in the country, in a small cafe in Boston on Tuesday. She is the author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality” and a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College. Dines, along with a handful of others including Jensen, fearlessly decry a culture that is as depraved as Caligula’s Rome.
“The porn industry has hijacked the sexuality of an entire culture and is laying waste to a whole generation of boys,” she warned. “And when you lay waste to a generation of boys, you lay waste to a generation of girls.”

“When you fight porn you fight global capitalism,” she said. “The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories. The media is implicated. It is financially in bed with these companies. Porn is part of this. Porn tells us we have nothing left as human beings—boundaries, integrity, desire, creativity and authenticity. Women are reduced to three orifices and two hands. Porn is woven into the corporate destruction of intimacy and connectedness, and this includes connectedness to the earth. If we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn. We would not be able to watch another human being tortured.”

“If you are going to give a tiny percent of the world the vast majority of the goodies, you better make sure you have a good ideological system in place that legitimizes why everyone else is suffering economically,” she said. “This is what porn does. Porn tells you that material inequality between women and men is not the result of an economic system. It is biologically based. And women, being whores and bitches and only good for sex, don’t deserve full equality. Porn is the ideological mouthpiece that legitimizes our material system of inequality. Porn is to patriarchy what the media is to capitalism.”

To keep the legions of easily bored male viewers aroused, porn makers produce videos that are increasingly violent and debasing. Extreme Associates, which specializes in graphic rape scenes, along with JM Productions, promotes the very real pain endured by women on its sets. JM Productions pioneered “aggressive throat fucking” or “face fucking” videos such as the “Gag Factor” series, in which women gag and often vomit. It ushered in “swirlies,” in which the male performer dunks the woman’s head into a toilet after sex and then flushes. The company promises, “Every whore gets the swirlies treatment. Fuck her, then flush her.” Repeated and violent anal penetration triggers anal prolapse, a condition in which the inner walls of a woman’s rectum collapse and protrude from her anus. This is called “rosebudding.” Some women, penetrated repeatedly by numerous men on porn shoots, often after taking handfuls of painkillers, require anal and vaginal reconstructive surgery. Female performers may suffer from sexually transmitted diseases and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And with porn mainstreamed—some porn video participants are treated like film celebrities by talk show hosts such as Oprah and Howard Stern—the behavior promoted by porn, including stripping, promiscuity, S&M and exhibitionism, has become chic. Porn also sets the standard for female beauty and female comportment. And this has had terrifying consequences for girls.

“Women are told in our society they have two choices,” Dines said. “They are either fuckable or invisible. To be fuckable means to conform to the porn culture, to look hot, be submissive and do what the man wants. That’s the only way you get visibility. You cannot ask adolescent girls, who are dying for visibility, to choose invisibility.”
None of this, Dines pointed out, was by accident. Porn grew out of the commodity culture, the need by corporate capitalists to sell products.

“In post-Second-World-War America you have the emergence of a middle class with a disposable income,” she said. “The only trouble is that this group was born to parents who had been through a depression and a war. They did not know how to spend. They only knew how to save. What [the capitalists] needed to jump-start the economy was to get people to spend money on stuff they did not need. For women they brought in the television soaps. One of the reasons the ranch house was developed was because [families] only had one television. The television was in the living room and women spent a lot of time in the kitchen. You had to devise a house where she could watch television from the kitchen. She was being taught.”

“But who was teaching the men how to spend money?” she went on. “It was Playboy [Magazine]. This was the brilliance of Hugh Hefner. He understood that you don’t just commodify sexuality, you sexualize commodities. The promise that Playboy held out was not the girls or the women, it was that if you buy at this level, if you consume at the level Playboy tells you to, then you will get the prize, which is the women. The step that was crucial to getting the prize was the consumption of commodities. He wrapped porn, which sexualized and commoditized women’s bodies, in an upper-middle-class blanket. He gave it a veneer of respectability.”

The VCR, the DVD and, later, the Internet allowed porn to be pumped into individual homes. The glossy, still images of Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler became tame, even quaint. America, and much of the rest of the world, became pornified. The income of the global porn industry is estimated at $96 billion, with the United States market worth about $13 billion. There are, Dines writes, “420 million Internet porn pages, 4.2 million porn Web sites, and 68 million search engine requests for porn daily.” [To see excerpts from Dines’ book, click here.]
Along with the rise of pornography there has been an explosion in sex-related violence, including domestic abuse, rape and gang rape. A rape is reported every 6.2 minutes in the United States, but the estimated total, taking into account unreported assaults, is perhaps five times higher, as Rebecca Solnit points out in her book “Men Explain Things to Me.”
“So many men murder their partners and former partners that we have well over a thousand homicides of that kind a year—meaning that every three years the death toll tops 9/11’s casualties, though no one declares a war on this particular kind of terror,” Solnit writes.
Porn, meanwhile, is ever more accessible. “With a mobile phone you can deliver porn to men who live in highly concentrated neighborhoods in Brazil and India,” Dines said. “If you have one laptop in the family, the man can’t sit in the middle of the room and jerk off to it. With a phone, porn becomes portable. The average kid gets his porn through the mobile phone.”

The old porn industry, which found its profits in movies, is dead. The points of production no longer generate profits. The distributors of porn make the money. And one distributor, MindGeek, a global IT company, dominates porn distribution. Free porn is used on the Internet as bait by MindGeek to lure viewers to pay-per-view porn sites. Most users are adolescent boys. It is, Dines said, “like handing out cigarettes outside of a middle school. You get them addicted.”
“Around the ages of 12 to 15 you are developing your sexual template,” she said. “You get [the boys] when they are beginning to construct their sexual identity. You get them for life. If you begin by jerking off to cruel, hardcore, violent porn then you are not going to want intimacy and connection. Studies are showing that boys are losing interest in sex with real women. They can’t sustain erections with real women. In porn there is no making love. It is about making hate. He despises her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If you bleed out the love you have to fill it with something to make it interesting. They fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty and hate. And that also gets boring. So you have to keep ratcheting it up. Men get off in porn from women being submissive. Who is more submissive than children? The inevitable route of all porn is child porn. And this is why organizations that fight child porn and do not fight adult porn are making a huge mistake.”

The abuse inherent in pornography goes unquestioned in large part by both men and women. Look at the movie ticket sales for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” which opened the day before Valentine’s Day and is expected to take in up to $90 million over the four-day weekend (which includes Presidents Day on Monday).

“Pornography has socialized a generation of men into watching sexual torture,” Dines said. “You are not born with that capacity. You have to be trained into it. Just like you train soldiers to kill. If you are going to carry out violence against a group you have to dehumanize them. It is an old method. Jews become kikes. Blacks become niggers. Women become cunts. And no one turns women into cunts better than porn.”

                                                               ***

The Effects of Porn on Relationships

Men who watch pornography do not respect women. Least of all; the real-life woman they are in a relationship with. And she cannot respect him. I personally would rather be alone than be with a porn watcher.

The multi-billion per year pornography industry's speciality is the demeaning dehumanising, degradation and abuse of human beings. It is not only that porn represents violence towards women, but its very existence is violence towards women. This capitalist  systematic oppression of women and girls, was created in our patriarchal society for men, by men. It is akin to wars. Wars are created for profit through abuse and death. The majority of 'users'  of porn are still by far, men.  Porn watching affects how boys and men view women and affects expectations of sexual contact.

Porn is not a realistic depiction of sex, yet many boys and men believe it is. This creates issues when it comes to being in a relationship.  Generally, men who watch porn are sexually selfish.  They favour replicating the male pleasure portrayed in porn videos that is derived from the violent, repetitive subjugation of women. Pleasure at a women's pain. When women reach the peak of arousal, close to orgasm, they tend to go quiet. Women in porn videos are moaning and groaning, acting aroused and men expect their real-life partners to do the same. The reality is that women and girls in porn are experiencing pain and are working hard at hiding it. Myth: women who do porn love sex. This is PR (propaganda) lies. Women are ACTING. None of it is real. The sex itself is painful and they are exposed to all kinds of abuses, by the pornographers and people on set. The women get through it by numbing themselves with drugs and/or alcohol, disconnecting themselves as much as possible from the whole ordeal. Most women in porn just do one or two videos and get out. There is a high turn-over rate. The experices is so painful, horrifying and humiliating, they never want to do it again.

 Men who watch porn favour sex without intimacy, without love - wanting their partners to behave like the women in porn videos.  Being used. Porn is not a true representation of sex. It is violence against women, using women's bodies for male pleasure. It is degrading and cruel. Pornography lies; it tells men that women are tools to be used, and men are inevitable predators. Middle-age men are mentally penetrating women who are young enough to be their grand-daughters.

If boys believe that online pornography provides a realistic view of sexual relationships, then this may lead to inappropriate expectations of girls and women. Girls too may feel pressured to live up to these unrealistic, and perhaps non-consensual, interpretations of sex. This is clearly not positive for developing future healthy relationships. Porn portrays the conquering and using of female bodies as the ideal display of masculinity. 

If your boyfriend or husband is looking at porn, he is looking at a vast number of naked women for his own sexual pleasure. How is that not cheating?  Instead of lusting after you, he's in the bathroom with his computer. If he is watching porn, it isn't fantasising, but rather the images have colonised his brain. This becomes addictive. Media affects behaviour and desires.  And he would rather be with these other women whilst masturbating instead of being with you. Or  he is watching these women in order to get aroused so he has an erection so he can have sex with you. This creates distance between two people who ideally would be aroused by their love and liking for one another and the desire to celebrate the relationship in a physically intimate way.  

The depiction of sex in porn videos does not exactly encourage men to be sexually creative and giving with their partner. Men who watch a lot of porn, tend to be more sexually selfish. They just want to replicate what they've been watching. If your male partner is on the computer while you are lying in bed alone, and he then comes into the bedroom in an advanced state of arousal, you pretty much know what he's been doing. He then gets into bed wanting sex. But it is not slow, long-lasting foreplay. His touch is hurried and brief. At the first hint of wetness, he penetrates you, while thinking about what he's just been watching. Or he wants you to give him a BJ, while he thinks about the women he was just watching and what was done to them. Jacqueline Gwynne's experience is that of most women who have been intimate with men who 'use' pornography:

"Women don't need to watch porn to masturbate. Why do men? Most men lack spontaneity and creativity in bed because of porn. It is completely unnecessary. I would have to say that pretty much all the men I have had sexual relationships are boring and useless in bed because of porn. They have no sense of fun or playfulness. They are obsessed with their own orgasm and are mechanical. God I wish I was a lesbian. No porn is good. If you respect women, don't watch porn."

Some of the best sex of my life has been with men who do not watch porn. They are giving, creative, loving, and aroused by arousing me.  A woman finds herself being extra giving to these men too: the most salient reason for this being that a woman is more open to, and enthusiastic about, someone she respects. These men really love 'foreplay' and want it to last for as long as possible. For them, sex is not all about servicing the penis - it's about playful, relaxed and extended play and connecting. These men ask how they can give pleasure. What makes them great lovers is not just their technique; creative and adventurous love-making skills. It is their ability to be emotionally present, intimate, loving and intensely passionate. There is a lot of direct eye contact - you know it is you they are making love to. One of these men told me he doesn't look at 'men's magazines' because they are "disrespectful of women".  Another one said he had used porn in the past, and it interfered with intimacy with his then partner.  Emily Weir comments; 

              "Took me a while to find him, but there are some great men out there. ) Part of me wishes I hadn't wasted so much time on the porn-using ones, if I could tell my younger self anything it'd be that. My history's been a mix of both and there's a big difference in how they act. Even just making eye contact, talking and asking what you like instead of just reciting porno lines as he does his thing."

Some men who watch a lot of porn end up having erectile dysfunction. They are accostomed to the immediate gratification that porn provides, so when it comes to the real thing, they can't get aroused. They are addicted to watching a variety of women and girls serve the penis in various ways - most of them demeaning and violent - and then have expectations of their partner to behave the same way. And because the reality of this one real-life woman who wants reciprocal sex, the man can't get aroused. It's a vicious circle if he thinks that watching porn will be a way to get an erection so he can make love to his partner.  

"Heterosexual Internet pornography has dramatically altered images of sexuality. Heterosexual US men are experiencing increasing difficulty performing sexually, from maintaining erections, to focusing on partners during sex, to having orgasms at all. Many men have grown so accustomed to the breakneck pace with which pornography offers hundreds of images that they can no longer maintain arousal or concentration during the comparatively slow interactive process of actual sex. Additionally, many viewers have unconsciously associated anonymity with arousal, resulting in a failure to either engage in or appreciate the intimacy that often accompanies real sex. Men in record numbers report being unable to complete sexual acts that involve another live person. A recent University of Kansas study found that 25 percent of college-age men said they'd faked orgasms with women because they could not have orgasms without pornography. " *

 I wish men didn't justify their 'use' of porn by saying ignorant things like, "it's harmless - just people doing what they enjoy".  Or, "it's fine because they get paid for it." So money makes it magically okay for these individual women to reduce their identities to the sexual uses and abuses of their bodies? Women choose to do porn for the money, because they are in a desperate situation and feel they have no other choice. But they end up spending most of what they earn on cosmetics, keeping themselves looking good, and on the drugs and alcohol required to get through a shoot. Many girls and women are coerced and threatened into it. Many porn videos are actually filmed rapes and it's not possible for a man watching, to know this. 

How is money fair compensation? How is that empowering? So-called 'liberal' feminists say it is. They say that women who do porn enjoy it. This is a fallacy: porn propaganda. The tiny percentage of prostituted women ( I hate the term 'porn stars' , as it's an attempt to glamorise ) who say they enjoy 'acting' in porn have self esteem issues, usually due to having a history of being sexually abused. Most of these women are damaged people who have problematical backgrounds. There is nothing empowering about prostituting yourself. That is akin to chickens getting to choose what size cage they will be confined to. 'Radical' feminists want to dismantle, not only the chicken shed, but the whole capitalist organisation that exists to profit from the slavery of chickens.  

The men who manufacture such justifications, are thinking with the wrong head. Watch it without the hard-on, without masturbating - just SEE it.  See the violence, the dehumanising, the commodification of women's bodies. Acts like 'face fucking', 'double-anal' are more now the norm. Think about the people who endure such degradation, pain and physical suffering, so you can have an orgasm.  Most women in porn only last a couple of years. They suffer from vaginal and anal prolapsing and have to undergo surgeries. If these women continue in porn, they take pain killers. What is it like to be aroused by such abuse? Male supremacist sexuality decreeing women's bodies  be used as commodities to be brutalised for male pleasure.

Porn is destructive, violent and exploitative.  It is hurtful to those women who are affected by a partner's use of it.  Women feel cheated on. The flow that exists between two people is damaged. As Ed Drain says;

             "You know how when you work really well with certain people, you can get this kind of team-flow going on? Well I think couples are like that. When someone cheats with porn they are stealing that good flow from their own couple. Part of what makes it worse is that it is soooo pathetic! It's like they are shouting to the world that they are such losers they could not even work it out with someone who probably wants to work it out, and they are so gutless they cant have an honest conversation with their partner." 

Women are loving and wanting to connect physically with their partner.  Adventurous, sexy and open, desiring him to desire her. Yet he would rather watch two dimensional images of other women, than have fun and intimacy with the person who loves him. 

Women feel cheated on, whether her man is getting aroused by the exploitation of women in videos, or has an addiction to regularly looking at soft-porn, e.g. 'eye candy' on the internet or in 'men's magazines'.  Images of naked or semi-naked women in sexual positions are designed to evoke a masturbatory response  They are not innocuous. Women in postures of sexual enticement and readiness reinforce the notion that women can be purchased. They have been reduced to two dimensional consumables that can be bought, used then disposed of.   Men argue that it isn't cheating because the women they are masturbating to are two dimensional. As Daisy Reeves writes: "They [men] need to create arbitrary distinctions to rationalise what they're doing. I asked my dude if he thought hiring a prostitute for the purpose of voyeuristic exploits would be cheating, he said he did. The arbitrary distinction is the venue, apparently."

 Sophia comments;  "I felt hurt, betrayed, disrespected. I was shocked that my husband at the time had such little understanding of the sexual exploitation that he was viewing, I was shocked that he thought this was ok, that he valued women so little.
I caught him many times. He didn't understand the harm he was doing, not just to me, not just to our relationship, but to women in general.
He still doesn't get it and he still doesn't know why he is divorced, as "he did so much for me and the marriage"....I am cast as the crazy ex.
And as to men claiming it makes them better lovers...ummm no, it doesn't."

Porn is the opposite of making love. It is hatred. It is exploitation of impoverished, vulnerable women and girls. By watching porn you are fuelling sex trafficking and sexual exploitation.

I was once told by a man that my skin is as smooth as a 'porn star's'. I know he meant it as a compliment, but I didn't feel like thanking him. He went on to tell me that 'if a 'porn star's' skin is not smooth, then a guy goes onto the next one.' Not only did that comment tell me he watches pornography, it told me he doesn't see porn as in any way exploitative, that I should be fine with him watching it, and that he holds women in porn up to be the epitome of all that is beautiful.  There is nothing beautiful about women being abused. 

Men who look at such images/videos and masturbate to them, do not respect women and women - myself included - cannot possibly respect them. Many women choose to forgo relationship with a man whom they know or suspect to be porn users. So men, is it worth losing the woman who loves you? I'll end with the words of a fellow critic of pornography, James Hunt, replying to a young man who was justifying his 'use' of porn: 

"It is not just a crusade of anti-porn, it's an inherent belief that women are not men's playthings to be used and discarded, as porn teaches young men like yourself. That porn is the absolute opposite of healthy sexuality, connection.
Some day you will find that woman whom you will fall in love with, and this porn that you say should just be ignored by her, will alter/destroy what sexual connection you as a man and that woman will desperately yearn for.
Read more, educate yourself on what porn does to women, to you, to relationships, to the world."
                                               ***

                                                       -Mountain Daughter

Most of the quotes in article, used with permission, from comments on posts in the Refuse to Date Men Who Watch Porn Facebook group.

 *(Capitalism and Loneliness: Why Pornography Is a Multibillion-Dollar Industry. by Tess Fraad Wolff and Haarriet Fraad, Truthout / Op-Ed. 2011 http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/5791:capitalism-and-loneliness-why-pornography-is-a-multibilliondollar-industry ) 

Useful Links:


Fight the New Drug: Is Watching Porn the Same As Cheating On Your Significant Other?


http://fightthenewdrug.org/is-watching-porn-cheating-on-your-partner/


http://mattfradd.com/5-myths-about-porn/ 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU 

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/pornography_is_what_the_end_of_the_world_looks_like_20150215

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-arterburn/sexually-incompetent-men-_b_4086075.html?

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2016/07/26/the-triumph-of-the-pornographers/

https://medium.com/@emmalindsay/porn-makes-men-terrible-in-bed-6e4df5f73200#.c4ip35qfl

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2014/04/04/feminism-is-the-new-misogyny-on-belle-knox-feminism-and-the-new-backlash/ 

http://www.wsj.com/articles/take-the-pledge-no-more-indulging-porn-1472684658

http://www.feministcurrent.com/2015/12/14/shit-liberal-feminists-say-choice/

http://yourbrainonporn.com

http://fightthenewdrug.org/the-porn-industrys-dark-secrets/

https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/former-porn-star-porn-was-the-worst-darkest-thing-ive-ever-been-involved-in