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.