A sexology professor in Denmark has made the entirely sensible suggestion that pornography needs to be discussed with teenagers in sex ed classes. Vice has reported on it and included some great remarks from Pandora Blake supporting the concept.
The article covers the main points so I won’t discuss it further here. What I do want to do is draw your attention to this quote from Gail Dines, about halfway down the article:
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Dr. Gail Dines, a professor in the sociology of media who runs the international campaign group Stop Porn Culture, told VICE News that while discussing porn in classrooms was an excellent idea, actually showing it could further the damage that it does to young people’s nascent sexuality.
“We really do not want to be showing young people more porn at that age,” she said. “Aside from the fact that it would be illegal, as they are under 18, what we need to do is give boys an understanding of how porn actually works, which we can’t do if they’re aroused. We need to strip boys and men of their erections in order to have rational conversations about porn, the lives of the women in it, how it affects them, and their sexuality.”
Look out fellas, Gail is out to strip you of your hardons. Because if you’re erect, you can’t think, apparently.
I just wanted to draw attention to this statement because I think it’s indicative of what’s wrong with so much anti-porn feminism. You’ve got a broad sweeping assumption about men’s sexuality (animalistic, unthinking) and then you add a generalisation that “porn” is only one thing – mainstream male-gaze porn featuring women as the main focus. Gay porn doesn’t exist, apparently. Also, women don’t watch porn and they certainly never get aroused by it. Mix in a lovely assumption about the sex workers who are in porn (all degraded and exploited) and sprinkle with a general unstated premise that porn is inherently harmful and will automatically affect the male sexuality, presumably in a negative way.
The idea that you can’t think when you’re aroused has a certain 1950s feel to it. It smacks of the kind of anti-masturbation hysteria that underlies so much government censorship of adult material: adults must not be allowed to masturbate or feel aroused, particularly in public, because it will be the downfall of society.
I would like to point out that it’s perfectly possible for people to look at porn and discuss it without becoming aroused. It happens at conferences and universities and apparently is standard when your average classification board/censorship body sit down to make notes about whether an adult film is “obscene” or not.
It’s also perfectly possible to be aroused and STILL ponder the politics, emotions, plot, cinematography and ultimate meanings of pornography. I’ve happily done it in a room of hundreds of people at the Berlin Porn Film Festival and at the Feminist Porn Conference, among other places. I would argue that understanding that your body can be aroused while your mind remains critical of what it’s seeing is an important skill to have. It’s a sign of maturity and something we should be teaching to teens.
Of course, watching porn at school with your fellow teenagers would still be a dreadfully embarrassing experience, as Pandora points out, thanks to our sex-negative society. If it does happen, I’d say a fairly tame and censored approach would be best. What is important, though, is that the flawed assumptions that Gail Dines makes about gender, sexuality and porn don’t end up in the curriculum.