Does Porn Degrade Women?

[Warren DeMontague]

327. And I agree too.

But there's pretty strict laws around things like age of consent. I can remember what happened with Tracy Lords in the 80s. There is a massive difference between anything involving anyone underage, and not- which is, of course, as it should be.

Rightly, enforcement already focuses on the illegal stuff. But the conversation around legal, consenting adult material nevertheless is continually hijacked with appeals about the other already illegal material, sort of how pot prohibitionists bring up heroin. Yes, it's bad, but- it's a separate subject.

I'd also say that there's a tremendous amount of, like you say, formulaic or blunt or crass or simply badly done adult material out there, but to my mind the answer to bad art is to encourage the creation of better stuff. It is telling, of course, that the folks on the anti-porn bandwagon (Gail Dines being cited most frequently, in this thread) often complain about what is wrong with "porn" (taking, of course, the most egregious examples findable and extrapolating it to all) yet they never come up with what their definition of an acceptable alternative would be. If the problem isn't simply graphic visual depictions of sex but all this other stuff, what kind of graphic visual depiction of sex would be okay?

There is no answer, there is never an answer, because it is the graphic visual depiction of consenting adult sex itself that is the problem, to this mindset.