When I was about eight, one of my neighborhood friends typed “sex.com” into Internet Explorer. We were at my house, and true to my nature, I knew it was the wrong thing and therefore wasn’t even remotely interested. That was my first exposure to pornography. All three seconds of it, before I got mad and turned the screen off.
My reaction to porn hasn’t changed. Admittedly, as I’ve grown older I’ve become more curious; a curiosity killed as quickly as the cat, when I realized it was other larger-breasted women having what looked like rather uncomfortable sex…And boys liked this.
Porn makes me mad. Uncontrollably and inexplicably mad. I’ve had many heated debates on the topic, and for whatever reason you cannot convince me otherwise. I will be the first to say it originally started off as pure jealously; other people were getting attention. Not really the kind of attention that I wanted, but attention none the same. Boys giving computers attention hits a bit of a nerve for me.
Then, the anger grew. It took me a while to figure out why, but I watched some fabulous documentaries on porn stars having to integrate back into the regular community and about how our standards of beauty can be moulded within thirty seconds and I figured out why. Porn isn’t fair to women, for a number of reasons.
The typical weak defense is “well, boys will be boys,” to which I say: If you are defending something with the idiom that ‘boys will be boys,’ it is probably outdated and chauvinistic. It also highlights gross gender inequality on the topic. Let’s be brutally honest here: they don’t make porn for straight women. Girls can like to watch porn; I will not generalize and say none do, because the statistics read otherwise. I can’t imagine that a majority of the female population enjoy watching mainstream pornography. I mean, have you ever heard of a porn film with the camera angled on the man for the majority of the time? No. Because it’s a ridiculous industry that objectifies women, and women only, and even worse, doesn’t give (straight) women the equal opportunity to enjoy watching porn themselves. WHERE ARE THE MEN’S SEX FACES, INTERNET?
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A swift Google search will find ‘female friendly’ porn as a category to most popular ‘adult entertainment’ websites. Currently on popular porn website, Pornhub, the category ‘For Women’ has approximately 1500 videos. It is one of sixty-one categories, some of which have 10,000+ videos.
Now for some fun, very dumbed down, very basic and generalized maths. Say that all of the categories had an equal amount of videos. ‘Female friendly’ porn would make up about 1.4% of the content of this website. But, there isn’t an equal amount of videos per category, which means that the ‘For Women’ category is realistically less than one percent.
More statistics: twelve percent of all websites are pornographic (Daily Infographic, 2013). This means that just shy of twelve percent, of the entire internet, is pornography that isn’t classed as female friendly. I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of pissed. And I don’t know what I am most angry about; the fact that a large chunk of the internet is vilifying and objectifying women, or that half of the world is missing out on the action. Heck, I don’t even like porn. But some women do, and if men can categorize videos based on the size of a women’s tits or how well she sucks dick, then we damn well better have the same opportunity to strip down an entire gender to their bedroom performance.
In 1994, Lisa Palac wrote that the “Internet will be to women in the ‘90s what the vibrator was to women in the ‘70s”. Well wouldn’t she be disappointed that twenty years later it’s just videos of 18 year olds getting their tits out in bars and women getting sperm in their hair.
Sources
Daily Infographic, 2013. “The Stats on Internet Pornography”. http://dailyinfographic.com/the-stats-on-internet-pornography-infographic
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
