sespursongles:

This whole football thing that’s going on (I’m not a sports person) got me thinking about a sentence from an article on porn I once read—“The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, the NFL and the NBA combined.” If men watched porn as a ‘live’ spectacle, in physical spaces rather than online, it would make the biggest sports events seem tiny.

I had a frustrating talk with a friend a while ago about the fact that her male best friend watches porn and she doesn’t really approve of it but just accepts it as some sort of tolerable character flaw. Now I’m wondering if some women’s attitude to men & their porn habits would be different if the monstrous growth of pornography over the past decades had happened out in the open rather than ‘virtually’. If instead of colonising every online space to the point where people commonly joke (’cause it’s funny!) that “the internet is for porn”, it had colonised physical spaces to the same extent. I mean beyond ‘Porn Lite’ in adverts and the media, I mean if instead of building massive porn websites requiring as much bandwidth as fucking Google (Mind Geek is in the Top 3 bandwidth-consuming companies in the world, with Google and Netflix), men had built gigantic porn arenas in every city, where millions of men (just Pornhub gets 64 million hits a day) including your brothers and fathers and best friends and boyfriends, regularly buy tickets & queue up in the streets to go watch, not on a screen but being inflicted on women before their eyes, the scenes of rape and abject female submission and degradation and undiluted woman-hatred they currently enjoy online.
You know that study saying 90% of scenes in bestselling porn contain physical aggression? What if men just dropped all pretences and held gigantic public shows, with women and young girls being brutalised in front of tens of thousands of men orgasming over it, rather than doing it “privately” (but openly, really, just online)? There’s not much difference in suffering for the women involved, the main difference is that doing it “virtually” rather than in a public physical space means people can somehow not see men as evil for creating and consuming this daily avalanche of pornography, and women can choose to turn a blind eye and be shockingly apathetic about their knowledge that their male friends / boyfriends probably fuel the demand for filmed rape. 

I don’t know, I feel numb with horror when I read statistics about the rape industry worldwide. @pneumode told me last month about the 8-year-old girl who was gang raped in India and how the video of her rape was immediately ranked No1 trending search on Indian porn sites. Men already like to gather together to rape or watch rape but try to translate this order of magnitude into an offline situation for a second—imagine tens of thousands of men gathering together in a giant stadium to eagerly watch an 8yo girl get raped. That article I mentioned said that the porn industry’s net worth is ~$97 billion. Every year, Hollywood releases ~600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit, while the porn industry makes 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit because men find porn to be much better entertainment. They just spend so much fucking money to watch women and girls be raped and degraded. There are women who claim to hate it and yet don’t seem to be as viscerally horrified by it, the magnitude of it, as they should be. I mean not enough to do ~drastic things like cut out of their life the men they suspect of watching porn. The thought of porn-watching happening as some kind of weekly Superbowl event in their city would probably feel much more horrifying to them, but why? I’m not interested in being friends with men, or with women who watch porn of course, but I’m also developing such repulsion towards women who know that the men they care about watch porn, and don’t seem to think it’s that big a deal, definitely not something they’d end a friendship / relationship over.