Why Gail Dines Is About As Leftist As The Tea Party

[proverbialwisdom]

3. Authoritarian left or right? Rhetorical question only.

http://gaildines.com/category/blog/

Should We Worry Whether Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality?
By Sonali Kolhatkar, Uprising Radio
Posted on September 11, 2010, Printed on September 11, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/148142/

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Sonali Kolhatkar: I have to say it was very difficult to read your book, and I had to skip parts where you describe mainstream pornography. This is not your father’s Playboy or Penthouse magazines and videos. What we’re seeing in porn today, and mainstream porn, is completely bizarre. I mean, how do you handle it in your research?

Gail Dines: Well, what’s interesting is that I, like the viewers, get desensitized over time. I mean, obviously I couldn’t have the visceral reaction I had in the beginning to it. But I put those descriptions in because often people say to me, you know, why are you getting so upset by images of naked women? And what I want people to understand is that pornography now looks nothing like it did 10, 15 years ago — that it is now brutal and cruel and is absolutely based on the degradation of women. So this is why I walk people through the porn industry. Also, often anti-porn feminists are accused of picking the worst of the pornography. What I wanted to do was go into the mainstream pornography that the average 11-year-old would get once he put “porn” into Google.

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SK: Because of the Internet.

GD: Absolutely. The Internet changed the industry. It made it accessible, and it made it affordable. So remember, when the average age of first viewing pornography is 11, when the 11-year-old boy puts “porn” into Google, he’s not looking at your father’s Playboy, he’s looking at a world of cruelty, and a world of brutality. So what I ask in the book is, “What are the long-term effects of bringing up boys on violent images when you think about pornography as being the main form of sex education in our society?”

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Even the industry said that many women have a hard time being in the industry for more than three months. Why? Because of the brutalization of the body.

SK: Three months?

GD: That’s what the article says in Adult Video News. Also, I’ve interviewed somebody who worked with AIM, the health care organization that takes care of the health of porn performers, and he was telling me just what happens to the bodies of these women...