Gail Dines: Living in a porn culture
Living in a porn culture
New Left Project, Alex Doherty, 4.15.,2010
(Warning graphic descriptions and language)
Gail Dines teaches sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston. She is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture. She spoke to NLP’s Alex Doherty on her new book “PornLand: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.”
Today there is almost no soft-core porn on the internet, because most of it has migrated into pop culture. What we are left with is a porn industry that is now so hardcore that even some of the big-name porn producers and directors are amazed at how far they can go . . .
The question I pose in Pornland is, what does it mean to grow up in a society where the average age of first viewing porn is 11 for boys, and where girls are being inundated with images of themselves as wannabe porn stars? How does a boy develop his sexual identity when porn is often his first introduction into sex? What does it mean for a girl or young woman to see herself as a desired object rather than a desiring subject? What do heterosexual relationships look like when sexual identity is constructed within this porn culture? These are not questions that can be answered by experiments, but rather belong more in the field of critical cultural studies, which takes as its starting point that we are cultural beings who develop our taken-for-granted ideas about the world out of the dominant (that is, hegemonic) ideologies that swirl around the culture. To think that men and women can walk away from the images they consume makes no sense in light of what we know about how images shape our sense of reality.
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