By: Geoffrey Yonil

Many people use the argument that if you get rid of porn then we’ll return to sexual repressiveness and henceforth end up in an age pre-Sexual Revolution when women were still relegated to domestic and maternal duties and men wore fedoras and smoked pipes in bathrobes. But either they don’t understand porn and the dynamic it introduces within society in regards to not only sexual relationships but any and all relationships, be them platonic or intimate, or they just don’t care and just like the fact that there’s something out there to easily jerk off to.

It doesn’t really matter what you believe, the fact of the matter is that an overwhelming majority of men and women that watch porn openly admit to seeing the actors and actresses being filmed as objects and the men as dominate over the women—which is even more paternalistic than pre-Sexual Revolution. The porn industry commodifies bodies, as in they repurpose the body into physical objects that can be bought and sold in economic quantities. At the very basis, this is what the adult entertainment industry depends on. And while there are quite a few films out there that are artful and well-done and treat sex and the human bodies performing sex with respect and dignity while also portraying liberation from the idea that sex is a bad thing, most of the films being watched are degrading, violent, and not even close to a liberation of the body that the Sexual Revolution portended to open.

A group of psychologists and sociologists at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst did a study of the most watched porn films in 2005, coming to the conclusion that 94.4% of the films depicted verbal aggressiveness, physical abuse, and violent penetration. The women are slapped, beaten, and nigh tortured all for the purpose of sexual gratification, engendering and conditioning into the viewer qualities of sex that are not even close to enlightened, but are perhaps even worse than the ones we had fifty plus years ago. And indeed, the proliferation of the amount of rapes and date rapes occurring in our country is astronomical compared to any time in history. But of course I’m not saying all men that watch porn will go out and commit some violent act against women; what I am indicating, and what the science behind my argument states, is that it is guaranteed that all men that  commit a violent act against a woman, be it domestic violence, rape, date rape, or just assault and battery, watched porn either right before they committed the act or had been conditioned to scenes of porn for an extended period of time.

Isn’t it perhaps time that we questioned the limits the porn industry should be allowed to go? Is it really constitutional and protected under the first amendment right of free speech? Of course this conversation keeps getting brought up in the Supreme Court, and they tend to side with the porn industry’s pit-bull lobbyists, the Free Speech Coalition—which deals almost exclusively with the adult entertainment industry, despite its confusingly broad title. Ben Franklin was famous for his quotes, one which states, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety,” an argument that the Free Speech Coalition loves using. But is pornography an essential liberty?

The short answer would be no and in fact pornography transgresses individual liberty on multiple levels. We can and did at one point have a Sexual Revolution, all without the aid of the adult entertainment industry. Like has been said, but will be reiterated for dramatic effect, the adult entertainment industry is most famous for commodifying the body, but it also merchandised the Sexual Revolution and the freedoms it entailed. It delineated women back a few hundred years to sexual objects, and while there are women in the industry that claim they feel empowered and are not being exploited because they are the ones getting paid, they are either stupid or cleverly manipulated pawns, because an overwhelming amount of the profits from porn films go to the distributor, all of which are men—you’ll be hard-pressed to find a female distributor. And so again, it becomes that whole ‘a woman makes about .75 cents to every dollar that a man makes’, but this time it’s more like women make a penny to every thousand dollars a man makes in the adult entertainment industry.

The Sexual Revolution meant a virtual renaissance of the body, both celebrating humanity’s functions as a sexual primate and its capabilities to think and respect others’ bodies as well. It wasn’t just a bunch of hippies stripping naked and fucking. Despite what people want to believe, it was a spiritual reawakening of what was once long forgotten. The Kama Sutra enjoyed a revitalized renewal of interest, and a bunch of essays, stories, films, songs, and the like tapped into the expression of this new-found-and-enjoyed form of human transcendence. And it truly was a period in which the Sexual Revolution existed divorced from pornography, and we even sustained our freedoms and liberties to express our sexuality without having to denigrate ourselves into symbolic money signs.

The porn industry doesn’t represent the expression of sexual freedom, but rather is capitalism once again ruining a perfectly normal and good thing into something disgusting. When the private market controls sex, it forces it into a value system, degrading the human body into exploited lumps of flesh that have no meaning. It’s fake. None of what happens in a porn film is acceptable human behavior in any of our social contracts, and while a majority of people can sustain without reenacting what they see in porn and can make the distinction between the reality and fiction, there is a growing population that has been conditioned by a disenfranchised and perverted sense of sexualization and are unable to divorce what they see in pornography to how they conduct themselves in normal relationships.