Broendel’s subtle wording throughout the entire article displays a grotesque arrogance toward viewers of pornography as if they are simple-minded mites scrabbling incoherently about in the overwhelming rabble of ‘female exploitation’.

What a fucking self-absorbed, ego-inflated, brain-shrunken termagant.

Labeling a work as “pornography” allows the work to be marginalize, socially and economically. Accepting or even celebrating this label means running a business that accepts the realities of this marginalization: poor access to markets, legally marginalized distribution, preposterously low wholesale price points, second-class citizen treatment in the media, government censorship, etc. (Producers and publishers who wish to participate in the market broadly label their work as erotica see for example, the book covers in the side bar our or own self-created label “erotic documentary.)

Once the argument over content stops, and the question of “pornography” is parsed from a legal and economic point of view, investigations like Katherine Broendel’s can be seen for what they are, an attempt to further justify the legal, social, and most of all, economic marginalization of sexual expression. She creates an ill defined and ultimately false class “pornography” and then layers on top of that dubious assertions about the effect of viewing material drawn from within this class. If her assertions gain currency, then the label “pornography” can be used to marginal whatever work to which it can be successfully attached.

It was Nadine Strossen, I believe, who said the solution to bad pornography is good pornography, but her solution is offered in ignorance of the realities of film production and most especially the production sexually explicit images.

The solution is not “good pornography”. The solution is to make erotic work of sufficient quality that it can stand along side non-erotic productions without embarrassment; and having made that work, to fight for fair and equal treatment in markets and the media: to fight for wholesale price point, to fight for shelf space, to fight against censorship, to fight to be treated with respect when the subject of coverage in mainstream media outlets.

Erotic work that can stand side by side with non-erotic work without embarrassment to producer or audience, that can command the same wholesale price point as non-erotic work, that will not tolerate second-class treatment by the media or legal system is definitionally not pornography.

I’m not questioning that violent media and imagery cause increases in violence–this is actually accepted as a fact by most respected psychological associations. As the article says, however, when “debriefed” after viewing presumably-violent pornography, their feelings of “aggression to women” decrease.

I have to wonder what the nature of this debriefing is, or what contextualization this applies to the sexual material involved. Are the response feelings from porn accurately described as “aggression,” particularly in the case of male viewers? Isn’t the whole concept of BDSM as a lifestyle an aspect of debriefing or deprogramming such experiences?

My impression of anti-porn feminism is that it’s still very tightly tied to the upper- and upper-middle class feminist experience that’s more focused on what they find personally offensive and could care less about the problems of sexuality and violence on poor women who don’t have the access or funds to participate in movement feminism.

As the previous commenter pointed out, your site presents and directs people to good porn that embraces a broad perspective on human sexuality, and that’s all the more proof that people who attempt to demonize all pornography simply don’t know what they’re talking about.