🐱 Interesting clickbait, op-eds, fluff pieces and other smaller stories
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🚨 Networking issue that cannot be addressed until later today.
CatParty
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2015
We wuz authaz n shiet
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2018
- Joined
- Nov 8, 2017
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2018
Like there are good writers and good texts even from Africa. Things Fall Apart is a good example.
What are these people actually trying to accomplish by doing this?
What are these people actually trying to accomplish by doing this?
Snow Fox
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 10, 2019
"Look at how woke I am for throwing away thousands of books made by filthy white people!"
It's just attention whoring and general faggotry. If I lived in the area I'd go grab all those books.
Building up a library is fucking expensive.
- Joined
- Feb 28, 2019
Donating or recycling would allow people to read them. They specifically think that books written by the evil ones, those of the wrong gender (male), the wrong race ("white"), should not be read by anyone.
Cultural Marxism in a nutshell. These people are indoctrinating your children and have been for the past 20+ years, and it's going to get a whole lot worse before people are pissed off enough to purge them.
- Joined
- May 2, 2017
A camel sat on a woman at a Louisiana truck stop, so she bit its testicles, cops say
So, a woman walks into a camel enclosure...
It sounds like a joke, but this story out of Louisiana is anything but.
A Florida truck driver and her husband stopped at Tiger Truck Stop — a truck stop known for exhibiting exotic animals — in Grosse Tete, where they let their deaf dog out of the truck for a rest break, The Advocate reported. But the dog ran off.
The woman chased the dog, following it into a barbed wire pen belonging to Caspar, a camel who lives at the truck stop, WAFB reported.
Police say the dog was chasing treats the woman’s husband had thrown into Caspar’s pen, The Advocate reported.
The woman tried to catch the dog, likely disrupting Caspar, who plopped right down on top of the woman “nearly crushing her,” WBRZ reported.
Camels can weight up to 1,100 pounds, according to the San Diego Zoo.
So how did she escape? She bit the camel’s testicles, WBRZ reported.
“I bit his balls to get him off of me, I bit his testicles to get him off of me,” she told police, according to The Advocate.
She was taken to an area hospital, but her condition is unknown, WAFB reported. No serious injuries to the camel were reported.
Caspar the Camel has lived at the truck stop since last summer when the truck stop’s previous and eponymous pet, Tony the tiger, was put down following kidney failure and other health issues, WAFB reported. Previously, Tiger Truck Stop owner Michael Sandlin said he hoped to bring in more animals to build a children’s petting zoo.
“The camel has never been aggressive, the camel has never gotten out, never caused any issues.” Deputy Louis Hamilton Jr. said, according to The Advocate. “In fact, the husband and wife stated before that we’ve been here before and we’ve never had any problems.”
The couple was cited for trespassing and violating area leash laws, the news outlet reported.
It sounds like a joke, but this story out of Louisiana is anything but.
A Florida truck driver and her husband stopped at Tiger Truck Stop — a truck stop known for exhibiting exotic animals — in Grosse Tete, where they let their deaf dog out of the truck for a rest break, The Advocate reported. But the dog ran off.
The woman chased the dog, following it into a barbed wire pen belonging to Caspar, a camel who lives at the truck stop, WAFB reported.
Police say the dog was chasing treats the woman’s husband had thrown into Caspar’s pen, The Advocate reported.
The woman tried to catch the dog, likely disrupting Caspar, who plopped right down on top of the woman “nearly crushing her,” WBRZ reported.
Camels can weight up to 1,100 pounds, according to the San Diego Zoo.
So how did she escape? She bit the camel’s testicles, WBRZ reported.
“I bit his balls to get him off of me, I bit his testicles to get him off of me,” she told police, according to The Advocate.
She was taken to an area hospital, but her condition is unknown, WAFB reported. No serious injuries to the camel were reported.
Caspar the Camel has lived at the truck stop since last summer when the truck stop’s previous and eponymous pet, Tony the tiger, was put down following kidney failure and other health issues, WAFB reported. Previously, Tiger Truck Stop owner Michael Sandlin said he hoped to bring in more animals to build a children’s petting zoo.
“The camel has never been aggressive, the camel has never gotten out, never caused any issues.” Deputy Louis Hamilton Jr. said, according to The Advocate. “In fact, the husband and wife stated before that we’ve been here before and we’ve never had any problems.”
The couple was cited for trespassing and violating area leash laws, the news outlet reported.
Spicy Tacos
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2019
View attachment 945957
"[UPDATE: Barnett has apparently removed the tweet, which featured a photo of trash bins filled with books. This also means the Paul Gorski tweet to which she responded has been removed. Gorski, a Social Justice Warrior pedagogue appears to have deleted his Twitter account. His tweet saying that the literary canon “is white supremacy” prompted the affirmative tweet from Barnett. — RD] "
"This woman is the head of “English Language Arts” for the public schools in Washington Township, NJ. That’s right: the head of the English department for public schools in this town celebrates throwing books into the Dumpster. She’s a self-described “servant leader,” and apparently a Christian. Who throws unwoke books into the Dumpster so all the geniuses in her school (and they’re all geniuses) won’t be tainted by what’s in the pages"
Trashing Unwoke Books | The American Conservative
An English teacher celebrates filling bins with oldthink tomeswww.theamericanconservative.com
She teaches at Washington Township Public School District
The Oxbow Incident is in the pile. It’s a cautionary tale about mob justice. The townsfolk even kill/lynch a “Mexican” because they are certain he is guilty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ox-Bow_Incident
Mister Qwerty
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2018
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
View attachment 945957
"[UPDATE: Barnett has apparently removed the tweet, which featured a photo of trash bins filled with books. This also means the Paul Gorski tweet to which she responded has been removed. Gorski, a Social Justice Warrior pedagogue appears to have deleted his Twitter account. His tweet saying that the literary canon “is white supremacy” prompted the affirmative tweet from Barnett. — RD] "
"This woman is the head of “English Language Arts” for the public schools in Washington Township, NJ. That’s right: the head of the English department for public schools in this town celebrates throwing books into the Dumpster. She’s a self-described “servant leader,” and apparently a Christian. Who throws unwoke books into the Dumpster so all the geniuses in her school (and they’re all geniuses) won’t be tainted by what’s in the pages"
Trashing Unwoke Books | The American Conservative
An English teacher celebrates filling bins with oldthink tomes
She teaches at Washington Township Public School District
Clearly, she's ecologically unsound and these books are now going to fill up landfills. She should have disposed of this absolute garbage the way her historical predecessors would have.
- Joined
- Sep 12, 2019
Ok, now we're going to make all Jewish people wear yellow stars and live in special neighborhoods. This is to prevent nazis, after all, what would they do if there aren't any Jews to blame?
We're working on a more final solution to the Nazi problem.
Love,
The Modern Democrats
We're working on a more final solution to the Nazi problem.
Love,
The Modern Democrats
- Joined
- Jul 26, 2017
I don't see what the issue is here. I thought Islam was the most feminist of religions.
murgatroid
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2018
Terrence Howard is apparently insane... I've met people like this in person and when they start talking like this it's hard to force myself to politely agree with what they're saying and not be a condescending asshole to them.
Never liked the guy. Isn't he a wife-beater or something?
Never liked the guy. Isn't he a wife-beater or something?
- Joined
- Mar 10, 2019
...What? I mean...what? Is he having a psychotic breakdown or did I miss something?
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2018
Dankula released a video about the BBC 'Dankumentary' about him, which is pretty good.
He pointed out that the comedian who yelled at him in the documentary had appeared before on TV, on a game show where he showed himself to not be as nice as a person as he claimed to be. Naturally, the BBC used this clip to copyright strike his video, so you need to go to Bitchute to see the unedited version,
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ceeKZ5kNj_I/
He pointed out that the comedian who yelled at him in the documentary had appeared before on TV, on a game show where he showed himself to not be as nice as a person as he claimed to be. Naturally, the BBC used this clip to copyright strike his video, so you need to go to Bitchute to see the unedited version,
https://www.bitchute.com/video/ceeKZ5kNj_I/
- Joined
- Jan 14, 2018
Didn't see anywhere else this would fit.
You won"t hear words like this today, but Obama actually had it right back in 2008 when he said this:
“If we are honest with ourselves,” Obama told his audience in a South Side church, Americans will admit that too many fathers are “missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison,”
A Platform of Urban Decline
Democratic presidential candidates believe America is racist, yet they ignore the evidence on crime and ensure that racial disparities persist.
Heather Mac Donald
September 23, 2019
Democratic accusations that America is endemically racist are becoming ever more frequent and strident. At the last presidential debate, Pete Buttigieg announced that “systemic racism” will “be with us” regardless of who wins the presidency; Beto O’Rourke claimed that racism in America is “foundational” and that people of color were under “mortal threat” from the “white supremacist in the White House”; Julián Castro denounced the growing threat of “white supremacy”; and Cory Booker called for “attacking systemic racism,” especially in the “racially biased” criminal-justice system.
At the same time, the allowable explanations for racial disparities have shrunk to one: that self-same racism. During this month’s debate, Joe Biden tried to suggest that some poor parents could benefit from instruction regarding optimal child-rearing practices: “We [should] bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do,” he said. Biden was invoking one of the Obama administration’s key anti-poverty initiatives. Home-visiting programs pair nurses and other social service workers with pregnant women and new mothers to teach them parenting skills. Progressive activists have demanded and won hundreds of millions of federal dollars for such programs, yet pundits have denounced Biden’s “horrifyingly racist answer,” in the words of The Intercept, and called for him to pull out of the presidential primary because of it. Buttigieg sniffed that Biden’s statement was “well-intentioned” but “bad,” since it ignored the fact that “racial inequity” in this country was “put into place on purpose.”
In today’s political climate, Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech in Chicago would be deemed an unforgivable outburst of white supremacy. “If we are honest with ourselves,” Obama told his audience in a South Side church, Americans will admit that too many fathers are “missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” In the current frenzy of intersectional rhetoric, any such reference to personal responsibility brands the speaker as irredeemably bigoted.
Yet key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. That may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
You would never know such facts from the media or from Democratic talking points. This summer, three shockingly violent mob attacks on white victims in downtown Minneapolis were captured by surveillance video. On August 3, in broad daylight, a dozen black assailants, some as young as 15, tried to take a man’s cellphone, viciously beating and kicking him as he lay on the ground. They jumped on his torso like a trampoline, stripped his shoes and pants off as they riffled through his pockets, smashed a planter pot on his head, and rode a bike over his prostrate body. On August 17, another large group kicked and punched their victim until he was unconscious, stealing his phone, wallet, keys, and cash. In July, two men were set upon in similar fashion. Such attacks have risen more than 50 percent in downtown Minneapolis this year.
The Minneapolis media have paid fleeting attention to these videos; the mainstream national media, almost none (CNN blamed the attacks on police understaffing and ignored the evident racial hatred that was the most salient aspect of the attacks). This year’s installments of the usual flash mob rampages on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor have also been ignored. If the race of perpetrators and victims in any of these incidents were reversed, there would be a universal uproar, with public figures across the board denouncing “white supremacist” violence and calling for a national reckoning regarding white racism. But because the violence does not fit the standard narrative about American race relations, it is kept carefully off stage.
In 2008, Barack Obama was able to connect such lawlessness to family breakdown. “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison,” he pointed out in his Chicago speech. Today’s taboo on acknowledging the behavioral roots of criminal-justice system involvement, multi-generational poverty, and the academic-achievement gap is not a civil rights advance. To the contrary, it will ensure that racial disparities persist, where they can be milked by opportunistic politicians and activists seeking to parade their own alleged racial sensitivity and to deflect attention away from the cultural changes that must occur for full racial parity to be realized.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestselling books The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture and The War on Cops.
https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime
You won"t hear words like this today, but Obama actually had it right back in 2008 when he said this:
“If we are honest with ourselves,” Obama told his audience in a South Side church, Americans will admit that too many fathers are “missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison,”
A Platform of Urban Decline
Democratic presidential candidates believe America is racist, yet they ignore the evidence on crime and ensure that racial disparities persist.
Heather Mac Donald
September 23, 2019
Democratic accusations that America is endemically racist are becoming ever more frequent and strident. At the last presidential debate, Pete Buttigieg announced that “systemic racism” will “be with us” regardless of who wins the presidency; Beto O’Rourke claimed that racism in America is “foundational” and that people of color were under “mortal threat” from the “white supremacist in the White House”; Julián Castro denounced the growing threat of “white supremacy”; and Cory Booker called for “attacking systemic racism,” especially in the “racially biased” criminal-justice system.
At the same time, the allowable explanations for racial disparities have shrunk to one: that self-same racism. During this month’s debate, Joe Biden tried to suggest that some poor parents could benefit from instruction regarding optimal child-rearing practices: “We [should] bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want — they don’t know quite what to do,” he said. Biden was invoking one of the Obama administration’s key anti-poverty initiatives. Home-visiting programs pair nurses and other social service workers with pregnant women and new mothers to teach them parenting skills. Progressive activists have demanded and won hundreds of millions of federal dollars for such programs, yet pundits have denounced Biden’s “horrifyingly racist answer,” in the words of The Intercept, and called for him to pull out of the presidential primary because of it. Buttigieg sniffed that Biden’s statement was “well-intentioned” but “bad,” since it ignored the fact that “racial inequity” in this country was “put into place on purpose.”
In today’s political climate, Barack Obama’s 2008 Father’s Day speech in Chicago would be deemed an unforgivable outburst of white supremacy. “If we are honest with ourselves,” Obama told his audience in a South Side church, Americans will admit that too many fathers are “missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.” In the current frenzy of intersectional rhetoric, any such reference to personal responsibility brands the speaker as irredeemably bigoted.
Yet key parts of the intersectional narrative are not born out by data. It is now a standard trope, implanted in freshmen summer reading lists through the works of Ta-Nehesi Coates and others, that whites pose a severe, if not mortal, threat to blacks. That may have once been true, but it is no longer so today. Just this month, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its 2018 survey of criminal victimization. According to the study, there were 593,598 interracial violent victimizations (excluding homicide) between blacks and whites last year, including white-on-black and black-on-white attacks. Blacks committed 537,204 of those interracial felonies, or 90 percent, and whites committed 56,394 of them, or less than 10 percent. That ratio is becoming more skewed, despite the Democratic claim of Trump-inspired white violence. In 2012-13, blacks committed 85 percent of all interracial victimizations between blacks and whites; whites committed 15 percent. From 2015 to 2018, the total number of white victims and the incidence of white victimization have grown as well.
Blacks are also overrepresented among perpetrators of hate crimes—by 50 percent—according to the most recent Justice Department data from 2017; whites are underrepresented by 24 percent. This is particularly true for anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate crimes.
You would never know such facts from the media or from Democratic talking points. This summer, three shockingly violent mob attacks on white victims in downtown Minneapolis were captured by surveillance video. On August 3, in broad daylight, a dozen black assailants, some as young as 15, tried to take a man’s cellphone, viciously beating and kicking him as he lay on the ground. They jumped on his torso like a trampoline, stripped his shoes and pants off as they riffled through his pockets, smashed a planter pot on his head, and rode a bike over his prostrate body. On August 17, another large group kicked and punched their victim until he was unconscious, stealing his phone, wallet, keys, and cash. In July, two men were set upon in similar fashion. Such attacks have risen more than 50 percent in downtown Minneapolis this year.
The Minneapolis media have paid fleeting attention to these videos; the mainstream national media, almost none (CNN blamed the attacks on police understaffing and ignored the evident racial hatred that was the most salient aspect of the attacks). This year’s installments of the usual flash mob rampages on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile and in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor have also been ignored. If the race of perpetrators and victims in any of these incidents were reversed, there would be a universal uproar, with public figures across the board denouncing “white supremacist” violence and calling for a national reckoning regarding white racism. But because the violence does not fit the standard narrative about American race relations, it is kept carefully off stage.
In 2008, Barack Obama was able to connect such lawlessness to family breakdown. “Children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end up in prison,” he pointed out in his Chicago speech. Today’s taboo on acknowledging the behavioral roots of criminal-justice system involvement, multi-generational poverty, and the academic-achievement gap is not a civil rights advance. To the contrary, it will ensure that racial disparities persist, where they can be milked by opportunistic politicians and activists seeking to parade their own alleged racial sensitivity and to deflect attention away from the cultural changes that must occur for full racial parity to be realized.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestselling books The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture and The War on Cops.
https://www.city-journal.org/democratic-candidates-racism-crime
- Joined
- Jul 23, 2019
- Joined
- Sep 20, 2019
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2016
The formatting of the copy/paste sucks, sorry in advance.
Edit for truth:
It’s Time to Stop Dating Men Who Use Porn - M. K. Fain - Medium
archived 24 Sep 2019 22:28:33 UTC
archive.fo
Edit for truth:
It’s Time to Stop Dating Men Who Use Porn
Yeah, I said it.
Two years ago when I asked my boyfriend to stop using porn, I was afraid. I didn’t want to break up, but in the 15 months since we had met, this became a deal-breaker for me.
I was scared he would take it personally — consider it an attack on himself, rather than a condemnation of the entire industry.
I was scared he would think less of me — think I was too prudish, judgmental, or controlling. After all, it's not like he had a particularly bad porn habit. What gave me the right to tell him what to do with his time?
I was scared he would get angry — as men do.
He didn’t agree with me at first. He had a lot of questions and wanted to talk through each point in detail, over and over again for weeks, ad nauseam.
Eventually, after mulling over the facts, he agreed.
Two years later, our relationship, sex life, and love and respect for each other has never been stronger. I can’t imagine ever dating a man who uses porn again.
Irealize in a culture that constantly tells us that porn is healthy, normal, empowering, and can improve your sex life that this is a controversial opinion. In fact, my partner is the only man our age I know who does not use porn. Every other man, and most of the women, in our progressive group of friends uses porn — gay, straight, and everything in between. Research suggests that nearly all men in their 20s use porn, on average beginning at 13 years old.
Even feminists have sold out to the lobbying of the massive porn industry. Now, a woman who refuses to use porn or takes a stand against the sex trade is considered a prude, or worse, a “SWERF” (sex-worker exclusionary radical feminist).
Yet, neither of these things are true. Women who want to enjoy healthy sexuality and relationships unmarred by one of the largest industries on the planet are not prudes, and those who stand up against the abuses of the sex industry are not “exclusionary”.
Rather, every individual has the right to healthy and loving relationships, sexual dignity, and to live free from objectification— all of which the porn industry is eroding for nothing more than profit.
Porn Ruins Healthy Relationships
Fight the New Drug, a non-religious, non-partisan organization which is taking on the porn industry, has been collecting and analyzing research on the impacts of porn on sexuality and relationships:
Despite the mainstream push to normalize porn use, most women actually do not consider porn use appropriate inside a committed relationship. The research suggests that women have good reason to take this stance.
Porn use in relationships also often involves secrecy and betrayal, with women reporting traumatic responses to discovering their romantic partner’s porn use. Even if partners are open about their porn use in the relationship, the consumers of porn report less satisfaction with their partner as their brains become rewired to respond sexually only to porn. Consumers of porn are also more likely to cheat on their partners.
Why does porn have such a strong effect on the psychology of those who view it?
The answer is simple: porn is addictive.
Porn hacks the brain’s dopamine system and tricks the male consumer into feeling like they are accomplishing their evolutionary goal: to spread their seed and multiply the chances of their genes surviving.
In his talk, “The Great Porn Experiment”, Gary Wilson explains how the Coolidge effect drives porn use. The Coolidge effect is a biological phenomenon seen in many animals where males “exhibit renewed sexual interest whenever a new female is introduced to have sex with, even after cessation of sex with prior but still available sexual partners.”
The Coolidge Effect, from Wilson’s TedxGlasglow talk
Porn hacks the male evolutionary desire to fertilize as many different females as possible. Eventually, though, simply being exposed to new females isn’t enough, and men are forced to watch increasingly violent and obscene content to receive the same effect — much like how drug users have to take bigger and bigger hits to receive the same high.
This escalating behavior explains why as men use more and more porn, their tastes become more and more extreme.
Eventually, these attitudes seep out into their real-world relationships. A 2015 meta-analysis of 22 studies from seven different countries demonstrated that porn consumption is linked to both verbal and sexual aggression.
Men, themselves, are starting to realize that they’ve been duped by porn. Entire communities of men, like r/nofap, are rising up to encourage each other to break their porn habits and reclaim their sexuality.
Porn Trains Men to Objectify Women
There’s no evidence that men are born misogynistic. The claim that “boys will be boys” both lets men off the hook for their behavior and does them the disservice of implying that men are simply slaves to their base instincts and could never be better.
If we want to create a world with equality for the sexes, confronting the societal means of training boys and men in misogyny is a vital step. By supporting male porn use, we are doing the exact opposite.
The evidence that porn leads to misogynistic belief systems is overwhelming:
It’s not surprising that men are absorbing these attitudes from porn. A 2010 analysis found that 88.2% of all porn scenes contained physical aggression such as gagging or slapping, and 48.7% of porn scenes contained verbal aggression such as name-calling. The violence was overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women, and the women most often responded with pleasure to the violence.
- A 2011 study found that among college fraternity men, porn consumption led to less willingness to intervene if they saw a woman being sexually assaulted, increased behavioral intent to rape, and increased belief of rape myths (such as “When girls go to parties wearing slutty clothes, they are asking for trouble.”)
- Boys who are exposed to porn young are more likely to want power over women, support male dominance, and agree with statements like, “things tend to be better when men are in charge”.
- Both men and women who view porn are less likely to support affirmative action programs for women in the workplace.
- A 2013 Danish study found that increased past porn consumption was linked with less egalitarian attitudes towards women, specifically in hostile sexism. This pattern was true even for non-violent pornography.
- Porn is deeply linked with sex crimes, being found at the crime scene of 80% of violent sex crimes, or in the homes of the perpetrator. The Michigan State Police Department found that pornography is used or imitated in 41% of the sex crimes they have investigated. A 2015 study found a strong correlation between increasing Internet availability in India and rates of the rape of minor girls and other forms of sexual violence.
This narrative is dangerous and perpetuates rape culture through myths such as “girls want to be abused” and “sluts deserve it” — both of which could be titles of porn videos themselves.
Porn also gives men and women unrealistic ideas about how women should look and act during sex.
Gail Dines, anti-porn activist and academic, reports the impact that a pornified culture is having on young women:
Women who don’t watch porn themselves, or are only light users, often don’t realize how extreme the content their partners are watching actually is. While Playboy Centerfolds used to be the height of pornography, “gonzo” porn has taken its place — depicting extremely violent and hateful representations of sexuality. Dines writes:
As the porn industry ramps up the violent acts it portrays to keep men addicted, women are the inevitable victims. A rise in non-consensual choking, for example, has been linked to the rise of “breath play” porn.
The Porn Industry Abuses Women
Even if there were no real consequences on the consumers of porn and their partners, there is still one major reason to abstain from participating in the industry — the victims of porn themselves.
While the porn industry has lobbied and engaged in a massive campaign to make participation in porn seem like an empowering (or even feminist) act, the truth of the industry is constantly seeping out.
The porn industry, which some estimate may be worth up to $97 billion annually (more realistic estimates are at $6- $15 billion), works hand-in-hand with sex trafficking — and viewers have no way of knowing which “actors” have been trafficked or not. The Rescue Freedom Project reports that 49% of trafficking victims have pornography made of them while they are being sold for sex. Porn also helps funnel young people into sex trafficking:
Young girls, including teenagers, are also coerced or tricked into participating in porn through a variety of means — even if not physically forced.
Even when women “choose” to participate in porn to make money, the sex still can not be seen as fully consensual, especially for those who are the most financially insecure and vulnerable. A modern understanding of sexual consent recognizes that that sex that is coerced is not truly free. In our current capitalist system, money is inherently coercive — so sex that is conducted purely for survival is non-consensual.
The brutal reality of the porn industry is constantly being exposed, especially by former victims, yet mainstream narratives are driven by the propaganda put out by porn stars who are still on industry payroll. Listening to sex workers means listening even when we don’t want to hear what they have to say — including those who have escaped the industry.
As Jonah Mix put it: “Pornography Doesn’t Cause Sexual Violence. Pornography IS Sexual Violence.”
Itshouldn’t have to be on women to demand men stop using porn. Male allies to feminists need to start holding other men accountable for their actions that perpetuate patriarchy — and more and more men are doing just that, speaking to each other about why it’s time to ditch porn.
Yet, as those who are most affected by male porn use, women should feel comfortable asking the men in their lives to stop using porn. Porn harms the relationship, is likely to increase misogyny, and perpetuates violence against women and girls — asking your boyfriend to stop using it is not an unreasonable demand. Rather, it is a show of faith in your relationship and your partner’s commitment to equality.
If he refuses, even after being presented with the facts and having time to research for himself, at least you’ve learned something about his priorities and values.