What do you think of porn?
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Today is international women’s day, and feminists deserve a large part of the credit for getting some semblance of equality for women and attention to their voice and needs. Kudos to them for building themselves into a necessary and formidable political force. However, no political force, no matter how necessary, deserves to go unexamined by a responsible society. Hence, with all due respect, I would like to use this very opinionated forum to bring up a topic that has been bothering the feminists (among others) for a long time.
Estimates of the size of the porn industry vary widely. But really, does size matter? The mere existence of the porn industry, or any form of porn for that matter, is evidence of social malaise to some. Different folks attribute different diagnoses to the phenomenon — from moral depravity to gender exploitation.
Of course, I have my own opinions on this. But I’d like to get your collective opinions instead. I’ll gather the interesting comments from down below and thread them into a coherent conversation on this main space. Any and all comments are welcome, anonymously posted or otherwise. You can feel as free to offer an opinion as a studied thesis (of course, the thesis carries more weight with me 
).
I know that the registered bloggers on this site are mostly male. I’m hoping the lurking ladies will make up for any gender imbalance in perspective.
Here is an incomplete list to get you started:
- Is porn an “evil” in and of itself? Even if it isn’t, does it lead to evil? (See papi’s comment for a more precise definition of evil)
- Does porn necessarily imply exploitation?
- What about amateur porn? (consider Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, exploited?)
- What about secondary effects of porn? (i.e. even if the amateur porn producers aren’t exploited, does having porn cause society to sexualize and objectify other people)
- Is it desirable to ban pornography?
- What about freedom of expression?
- What is the line between what is banned, and what is not? Who decides? (Justice Stewart’s ridiculous cop-out : “I know it when I see it”, is not an acceptable answer)
- Is it even possible to ban pornography? What would the side-effects be?
- Child pornography is bad, right? If all porn is bad, then you can skip this question.
- What about child porn that doesn’t involve children in its production.
- Same question for animal porn. If that’s bad on the grounds of “non-consent from participants”, then how does this compare to other uses of animals’ bodies (which animal consents to be eaten?).
- What about keeping porn away from children?
Type away.
As is usual with manish’s posts, once you start thinking about it, it is such a labyrinth that you don’t know whether you’re coming or going. First of all, we need to frame the question appropriately. To determine whether something is evil, we need to first agree on what evil is. This in itself is a question that has occupied the entire lifetimes of philosophers far better endowed (intellectually, I mean) than us to answer it. Most definitions of evil talk about an evil act as being something immoral, which leads us to another labyrinth. To keep things simple, I propose the following. An act is evil if it:
Of course, the alert reader (and who on rantlust is not) would realize I tried to slip that last one in. This is the bone of contention - the question of morality, the larger good, etc. If one believes in absolute anarchy or in Nietzsche’s superman, then #3 does not make sense. But if one believes the social organism to be man’s natural state of being, then one also needs to believe that preserving the body social is a good - and conversely that damaging it is evil; the ultimate evil, in fact. If we can agree on those, then we can debate whether porn (or anything, for that matter) is evil. Of course, I expect that the “damage to society” will produce some back and forth, but at least we will be arguing within some agreed parameters.
Good exposition, papi. Linked to in the main post.