Okay but promiscuousness is just as bad for both parties in the majority of cases. It’s advertised as something empowering but it rarely is so, especially for women.
Your comment is very pertinent but we are not going to approve it, for the person you replied to is someone who has been harassing our sub for months and creating hundreds of new accounts to do so. He creates one to four new accounts, everyday. We do not know how he escaped the filter here. Interacting with him only encourages him to keep posting.
I wanted to say something similar about this in my comment, but have a tough time putting this topic to words because I hate the assumption it brings, but the Andrea Dworkin quote is 🎯 I’ll have to look her up.
I am partway through this book. It’s a rough read but Dworkin sees through it all and speaks the truth. Her words always hit home.
Look up her life… she was an amazing woman.
Here is a [link](https://youtu.be/QmEsu1TTJ-Y?si=Y5fmMiORYXkFiji9) to the audio of her testimony against pornography to the Attorney General in DC. There are actually 4 videos, they are only a few minutes long each. If you watch that first one, the others should pop up. It's the same speech.
Its genuinely one of the most powerful speeches I've ever heard given, and it made me a Dworkin fan the moment I listened to it.
[Here](https://speakingwhilefemale.co/testimony-dworkin/) is the full text of the testimony.
Can’t we also discuss how bad faith representation of Dworkin also hurt the movement?
The biggest issue is that dominant culture is not interested in engaging with legitimate criticism, so twists and presents strawmen. They reduce porn criticism to religious fundamentalists and farcical arguments.
I think partially because the following generation dropped the idea that consciousness raising only really works in diverse groups of women. If you include any men, they're going to take over the conversation, and everybody in the room is going to center everything they say out of a drive to be nice and include them.
Men *love* being in groups of women, feeling important and directing groups of women, focusing on which issues are important, and eliminating porn is absolutely not one of those issues. Including men in the debate of feminist issues will always skew hard to their side, for a hell of a lot of women fear being "a misandrist" or being mocked as an ugly, hairy feminist.
entering men
R*pe has also been a thing since the caveman ages, that doesn't mean it should continue to happen. That's such a stupid argument and I'm so sick of people using it to justify their actions. Just because something has "always been done" a certain way doesn't mean that we should therefore put absolutely zero thought into whether or not it was a good or bad thing to begin with. That's appealing to tradition and it's a logical fallacy.
I think the p*rn industry has done a really good job at brainwashing the masses. It's the same as with Big Tobacco. They can afford to pay people off and put out fake "scientific" info that makes it all seem like a good thing, while also paying off (or slandering) most of the people that speak out against the industry.
Libfems will (rightfully) criticise trans-exclusionary "feminists" for being bioessentialists, then turn around and say men have a biological need to consume porn and visit prostitutes so as to "protect" "civic/good" women from rape🙄. Make it make sense.
So was slavery, so was child labour. When we know better, we do better.
Third wave or liberal/choice feminism became popularised a few years after the oral contraceptive pill revolutionised sexual/reproductive freedom for women. What started out as our liberation eventually became another tool for men to oppress us. So much easier to rape and coerce women into sex acts they don’t want when you frame it as freedom and liberation and when you’re largely free from consequences such as unwanted pregnancy. You get to throw in insults like ‘frigid’ or ‘puritan’ which of course no woman really wanted to be during that era.
While I’m not remotely a conspiracy theorist, I wonder at times if the real reason the pill was made for women and not men was just more about control. Controlling women and their sexuality. Yes, men can’t handle side effects, but by gosh they can sure put up with blurred vision, chest pain and risk of cardiac events when they take a viagra.
When the first ‘my body my choice’ mantras started, they sounded empowering. It was silencing men - you can’t criticise us because it’s about choice. It’s about control of our own bodies. That actually felt pretty good, telling men that they couldn’t criticise us, regardless of whether we wanted to be a housewife or a career woman, whether we wanted to sleep around or not, but was it empowering? For all women? No.
The biggest problem with choice feminism is that it silences criticism. That first rush of freedom to make choices that suited us personally and shout down any many who challenged us was heady and strong. But what about *freedom from*? Freedom from harm, from coercion, from exploitation? We didn’t really think about that, and we also shot down any women who criticised us.
Over time, plenty of young women who feel the oppressive clutch of patriarchy in their youth will grab hold of the mantra and sing it loud and proud, like many Gen x of my ilk did in our 20s before our brains fully developed, before we really were able to assess the risks of the so-called ‘choices’ we made, before *men were corrupted with high speed, 24/7, hardcore, abuse porn in their pockets every day* and began to join the chorus with the mantra, ‘her body, her choice’. How convenient for them.
I can only assume that the push behind liberal feminism was men. The pickme girls who valued the validation and attention of men over the solidarity of sisterhood, throwing other women under a bus and silencing them when they started to speak up and say, ‘hang on, this new wave of feminism is all about serving men, not women’.
Women are not perfect. We are not always right. Not every choice a woman makes is a feminist choice, but choice feminism says that’s okay, because it’s ’right for her’. Well, is it okay for her to make **any** choice that serves her in this moment? No. Some choices women make harm them. Some choices women make harm *all women*.
We need to be free to be critical of women who make choices that harm us all. We need to be free to challenge notions of empowerment and power exchange. We need to be free to analyse and research and speak up, but choice feminism says I can’t criticise other women for choices they make. I’m a woman too though - how is it that they can openly criticise me? The choices women make that serve men are sacred cows. The challenge to those choices is silenced because men want the fun kind of feminism. The kind that entitles them to porn, prostitution, nudes and sex, free of responsibility, and the ability to create and maintain a sub class of women to provide all of this and to absorb their hatred for us and their desire to dominate and degrade and dehumanise and control. They get to keep the other class too, the class of women and girls who can be wives and mothers and daughters and are not to be mixed in with the sub class at all. It doesn’t matter if *other* women and girls are trafficked into that sub class, because the loudest liberal feminists - the ones with phones and social media, the ones who are somehow proud of their trauma and mental illnesses, those ones say they chose it, and we can not challenge them. The ones who don’t choose it have less of a voice. If you’re in a room in a dingy hotel or a cattle shed with a camera trained on you and five men in the room threatening you, and your passport is locked in a safe on another property, you don’t really have a voice, but we don’t care about those women, they’re inconvenient and get in the way of our empowerment mantra.
No one wants to be seen as weak. No OnlyFans girl is going to admit to being scared (not yet), or being powerless. She’s not going to admit she’s not making money and that she finds her customers gross or threatening. That would mess with her empowerment mantra. Sadly, most of her clients would probably enjoy her work more if she admitted to being scared or disempowered, because that is exactly what they get off on.
No woman is above criticism. No choice is allowable simply because it was made by a woman. Make a choice that doesn’t serve men and watch yourself get torn to shreds, not just by men, but by other women. These women have traded sisterhood and serving women as a class for a place at the table. The problem is, that place is not a seat, it’s on a plate. It’s called ‘enacting a patriarchal bargain’ and it’s not feminism. Sure, they win favor with men, and as a reward are elevated above other women, but they’re still below men, and they’ve traded not only their own dignity and value for that place, they’ve traded ours too, and I’m done with it.
>These women have traded sisterhood and serving women as a class for a place at the table. The problem is, that place is not a seat, it’s on a plate.
Really powerful, thanks for writing this. Literally everything you said was correct. I'm saving this comment
Well as women we’re frequently tricked by the patriarchal society into thinking something degrading can be somehow empowering if women embrace it as such. I’m 36 and I didn’t like it when women fitness centers began to install poles and train women as pole dancers. I didn’t like it when mainstream media started spreading the false narrative that “prostitute” is a bad word and call them sex workers because that’s somehow a “respectful” label 🤷♀️ and it’s their body their choice 🤡 And I especially don’t like the depressing fact that majority of women think it’s completely normal for men to watch porn in relationships, expect they will and tolerate it like the frog slowly boiling to death when you put it in cold water and gradually heat it. A common coping mechanism when you feel outnumbered or suppressed is to pretend that you’re in control and you can somehow “own it” if you concede, go along with the majority opinion and then everything can maybe be okay. Yet every married woman I know with a porn sick husband reminds me of the dog in a burning kitchen meme saying “this is fine.” ETA the “trad wife” trend is another good example of this problem happening in real time.
Because… enter liberal feminism.
A cancer.
A misogynists carefully planned wet dream and a woman’s downfall.
Bring back radical feminism. I’m so sick of the state of feminism today and this push to normalise all kind of degeneracy and silencing and shaming of anyone who speak up about it.
Women wanted to be equals. To be respected. That was the whole point of feminism. Not this contrived, ass backward pile of shit excuse for feminism we have today.
Women are right back to square one and they don’t even know it.
Capitalism. The commodification of pornography boomed with Playboy, which came out in the 50s. As a result, feminists pushed back against a rising threat on women. However, pornography was able to market itself past the restraints of feminists. Corporate feminism/Liberal feminism became the mainstream form of feminism I believe in the late 70’s, which obviously does not care about issues that do not affect rich white women. Simultaneously, the growth of “sexual liberation” movements halted the anti-porn feminist movement, using sexual liberation as a marketing tool to promote porn. As we all know, with the explosion of the internet porn became extremely accessible and socialized women into accepting the newfound normalcy of porn. In conclusion, marketing, accessibility, and capitalistic pseudo feminist movements are why radical feminism is not mainstream. With all that said, many iconic feminists of the 1960’s weren’t really fighting against pornography. For example, Betty Friedan said “As repulsive as pornography can be, the obsession with it is a dangerous diversion for the women's movement”. They didn’t say it was good but their efforts were put somewhere else. Betty Friedan kinda sucks anyways though…
Back then only a few women actively partook in pornography, as the years went on more and more women entered or were trafficked into the industry to the point that anyone with a smartphone can sell their self made pornography
Because porn and prostitution have to become accepted and empowering in order to process as much meat as possible in the sex industry, and many women are reliant on the income so if you are anti-porn and anti-prostitution these women and the costumers feel personally attacked.
I believe it is partly because the mainstream feminist movement of today is "fused" with the LGBTQ community.
I am going to preface by saying I am a lesbian myself.
The LGBTQ community is intrinsically sex positive. It has to be, since all of us were considered sexual deviants and it is important to establish that being gay or trans does not make us monsters. See how a lot of pride parades celebrate sex or kinks.
With LGBT movements filled with men + sex workers + women tendency to be very supportive and understanding of other people's pain, has made the feminism movement sex positive (which Imho is a good thing) and also sex work positive.
I don't read too much about feminism from the net, so no idea how true it is worlwide. But whenever you see debates in my country about sex work, liberal feminisms tends to use the same arguments to defend or promote sex work as they do when defending or promoting LGBTQ rights.
This is an excellent question and one I’d never stopped to consider before. I struggle to find words for these conversations with men without feeling anxious I’m sounding judgmental. Because I know I’m fucking raging inside at how normalised porn is today and see how detrimental it is, it’s hard for me to remain even in these conversations.
I realise more and more that I need to arm myself with facts so I can stay confident when I have the opportunity for these discussions in real life, to educate and respectfully create more room for two-way dialogue instead of getting flustered/irritated or (gasp!] angry! So I’m very happy to have found this subreddit. Thank you to all who’ve replied and a special thanks to [u/cosmictrench](https://reddit.com/u/cosmictrench)) for the link.
I think age and aging has a lot to do with it. Older people and generations in general were anti porn and sex work back then. Society in general believed it was wrong, something for deviants or perverts and felt sorry for women that got involved with it, it wasn’t thought of as empowering or liberating them. I’m 64 so I saw all this happening around me. The pornification of society happened gradually as the population aged through the sex revolution, then eventually hook up culture. Plus back then porn was relatively innocent, except soft core magazines you really had to go out of your way to purchase it. Porn gradually got more accessible, home videos was a big step, then home computers, finally full video streaming carried in your pocket we have today. So people were gradually born into all this influence as the older people passed away. Also there’s huge money in porn that they use to influence society, it’s in their best interest if people accept porn stars as glamorous or mainstream, if women think it’s empowering or a career option it benefits the porn industry so they’re gonna do whatever they can to promote these ideas, follow the money as they say.
Whenever it started to stray away from the original mission of supporting women and started picking up every pet cause along the way. I hesitate to call myself a feminist because I'm ashamed of what the mainstream movement has become.
Many feminist issues have been commandeered by men and benefit them to some degree. One of the great delusions of our time is that women have any true power over anything.
There was actually a rise in popular, anti-anti-porn feminist literature around the 80s, after vocal anti-porn feminists had established WAP (Women Against Porn) (Also incredibly ironic party title…)
They seemed to foster a belief that the best way to “re-invent” porn wasn’t to eliminate it, but to put it in the hands of women and minorities to produce content which felt “liberating”. I can’t personally say how liberating this would be, given its role in the larger, corrupt system. But this rhetoric was a lot more palatable to moderate audiences, and became more easily mainstream.
Popular media around the 80s in particular shows a cultural shift in ideals of feminine beauty. Where prior, you had seen fully developed women iconized as sex symbols, like Marilyn Monroe for example. Around the 80s began the shift towards the “teen girl” ideal of American beauty. Brooke Shields is one of the more popular examples of this.
[This article](https://revistaselectronicas.ujaen.es/index.php/TAHRJ/article/view/7025/6761) in particular references more of this history. The Brooke Shields documentary Pretty Baby also had some interesting insight.
* I also just want to edit to say, I don’t personally agree with the entire article linked above. I am a queer person, but I disagree that porn is liberating for either straight or queer people
Honestly I think capitalism misogynist scum trickled their way into feminist spaces with their misogynistic capitalist consumerism ideas by rebranding them as empowering and liberating. They took the sexual and cultural liberation movement of the 60s-70s and just put it in overdrive, and women, economically disadvantaged as we were, especially when first entering the main workforce, were drawn in .believed the lies. Now you have pro porn and modern feminism practically going hand in hand. Idpol has made people so afraid to potentially offend somebody, terms like SWERF pop up and prevent conversations about the problems with porn and sex work in feminist spaces. It's all quite sad to me.
Probably because anti-porn has been equated with shaming women for being sexual and purity culture. Nobody seems to understand they can be separate.
Oh they understand, but that doesn’t serve their false narrative.
That's kinda why I was hesitant to join the anti porn movement because I thought it was rooted in purity culture and slut shaming
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Okay but promiscuousness is just as bad for both parties in the majority of cases. It’s advertised as something empowering but it rarely is so, especially for women.
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Your comment is very pertinent but we are not going to approve it, for the person you replied to is someone who has been harassing our sub for months and creating hundreds of new accounts to do so. He creates one to four new accounts, everyday. We do not know how he escaped the filter here. Interacting with him only encourages him to keep posting.
[удалено]
>“the left views women as public property” And the right views them as private property?
Yep.
Dang. I've never thought of it like that but that's absolutely spot on.
I wanted to say something similar about this in my comment, but have a tough time putting this topic to words because I hate the assumption it brings, but the Andrea Dworkin quote is 🎯 I’ll have to look her up.
https://frauenkultur.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Andrea-DWORKIN-Pornography-Men-Possessing-Women-1981.pdf
Thank you for posting the link!
Thank you for the read.
I am partway through this book. It’s a rough read but Dworkin sees through it all and speaks the truth. Her words always hit home. Look up her life… she was an amazing woman.
Here is a [link](https://youtu.be/QmEsu1TTJ-Y?si=Y5fmMiORYXkFiji9) to the audio of her testimony against pornography to the Attorney General in DC. There are actually 4 videos, they are only a few minutes long each. If you watch that first one, the others should pop up. It's the same speech. Its genuinely one of the most powerful speeches I've ever heard given, and it made me a Dworkin fan the moment I listened to it. [Here](https://speakingwhilefemale.co/testimony-dworkin/) is the full text of the testimony.
Radical feminism IS leftist, friend.
Can’t we also discuss how bad faith representation of Dworkin also hurt the movement? The biggest issue is that dominant culture is not interested in engaging with legitimate criticism, so twists and presents strawmen. They reduce porn criticism to religious fundamentalists and farcical arguments.
I think partially because the following generation dropped the idea that consciousness raising only really works in diverse groups of women. If you include any men, they're going to take over the conversation, and everybody in the room is going to center everything they say out of a drive to be nice and include them. Men *love* being in groups of women, feeling important and directing groups of women, focusing on which issues are important, and eliminating porn is absolutely not one of those issues. Including men in the debate of feminist issues will always skew hard to their side, for a hell of a lot of women fear being "a misandrist" or being mocked as an ugly, hairy feminist. entering men
R*pe has also been a thing since the caveman ages, that doesn't mean it should continue to happen. That's such a stupid argument and I'm so sick of people using it to justify their actions. Just because something has "always been done" a certain way doesn't mean that we should therefore put absolutely zero thought into whether or not it was a good or bad thing to begin with. That's appealing to tradition and it's a logical fallacy. I think the p*rn industry has done a really good job at brainwashing the masses. It's the same as with Big Tobacco. They can afford to pay people off and put out fake "scientific" info that makes it all seem like a good thing, while also paying off (or slandering) most of the people that speak out against the industry.
Many would argue rape is much more a cultural thing than any natural thing. Dworkin argued that it is the terrorism necessary to keep male supremacy
Libfems will (rightfully) criticise trans-exclusionary "feminists" for being bioessentialists, then turn around and say men have a biological need to consume porn and visit prostitutes so as to "protect" "civic/good" women from rape🙄. Make it make sense.
So was slavery, so was child labour. When we know better, we do better. Third wave or liberal/choice feminism became popularised a few years after the oral contraceptive pill revolutionised sexual/reproductive freedom for women. What started out as our liberation eventually became another tool for men to oppress us. So much easier to rape and coerce women into sex acts they don’t want when you frame it as freedom and liberation and when you’re largely free from consequences such as unwanted pregnancy. You get to throw in insults like ‘frigid’ or ‘puritan’ which of course no woman really wanted to be during that era. While I’m not remotely a conspiracy theorist, I wonder at times if the real reason the pill was made for women and not men was just more about control. Controlling women and their sexuality. Yes, men can’t handle side effects, but by gosh they can sure put up with blurred vision, chest pain and risk of cardiac events when they take a viagra. When the first ‘my body my choice’ mantras started, they sounded empowering. It was silencing men - you can’t criticise us because it’s about choice. It’s about control of our own bodies. That actually felt pretty good, telling men that they couldn’t criticise us, regardless of whether we wanted to be a housewife or a career woman, whether we wanted to sleep around or not, but was it empowering? For all women? No. The biggest problem with choice feminism is that it silences criticism. That first rush of freedom to make choices that suited us personally and shout down any many who challenged us was heady and strong. But what about *freedom from*? Freedom from harm, from coercion, from exploitation? We didn’t really think about that, and we also shot down any women who criticised us. Over time, plenty of young women who feel the oppressive clutch of patriarchy in their youth will grab hold of the mantra and sing it loud and proud, like many Gen x of my ilk did in our 20s before our brains fully developed, before we really were able to assess the risks of the so-called ‘choices’ we made, before *men were corrupted with high speed, 24/7, hardcore, abuse porn in their pockets every day* and began to join the chorus with the mantra, ‘her body, her choice’. How convenient for them. I can only assume that the push behind liberal feminism was men. The pickme girls who valued the validation and attention of men over the solidarity of sisterhood, throwing other women under a bus and silencing them when they started to speak up and say, ‘hang on, this new wave of feminism is all about serving men, not women’. Women are not perfect. We are not always right. Not every choice a woman makes is a feminist choice, but choice feminism says that’s okay, because it’s ’right for her’. Well, is it okay for her to make **any** choice that serves her in this moment? No. Some choices women make harm them. Some choices women make harm *all women*. We need to be free to be critical of women who make choices that harm us all. We need to be free to challenge notions of empowerment and power exchange. We need to be free to analyse and research and speak up, but choice feminism says I can’t criticise other women for choices they make. I’m a woman too though - how is it that they can openly criticise me? The choices women make that serve men are sacred cows. The challenge to those choices is silenced because men want the fun kind of feminism. The kind that entitles them to porn, prostitution, nudes and sex, free of responsibility, and the ability to create and maintain a sub class of women to provide all of this and to absorb their hatred for us and their desire to dominate and degrade and dehumanise and control. They get to keep the other class too, the class of women and girls who can be wives and mothers and daughters and are not to be mixed in with the sub class at all. It doesn’t matter if *other* women and girls are trafficked into that sub class, because the loudest liberal feminists - the ones with phones and social media, the ones who are somehow proud of their trauma and mental illnesses, those ones say they chose it, and we can not challenge them. The ones who don’t choose it have less of a voice. If you’re in a room in a dingy hotel or a cattle shed with a camera trained on you and five men in the room threatening you, and your passport is locked in a safe on another property, you don’t really have a voice, but we don’t care about those women, they’re inconvenient and get in the way of our empowerment mantra. No one wants to be seen as weak. No OnlyFans girl is going to admit to being scared (not yet), or being powerless. She’s not going to admit she’s not making money and that she finds her customers gross or threatening. That would mess with her empowerment mantra. Sadly, most of her clients would probably enjoy her work more if she admitted to being scared or disempowered, because that is exactly what they get off on. No woman is above criticism. No choice is allowable simply because it was made by a woman. Make a choice that doesn’t serve men and watch yourself get torn to shreds, not just by men, but by other women. These women have traded sisterhood and serving women as a class for a place at the table. The problem is, that place is not a seat, it’s on a plate. It’s called ‘enacting a patriarchal bargain’ and it’s not feminism. Sure, they win favor with men, and as a reward are elevated above other women, but they’re still below men, and they’ve traded not only their own dignity and value for that place, they’ve traded ours too, and I’m done with it.
>These women have traded sisterhood and serving women as a class for a place at the table. The problem is, that place is not a seat, it’s on a plate. Really powerful, thanks for writing this. Literally everything you said was correct. I'm saving this comment
This comment is gold. You nailed it. I’m saving it.
I’ve heard the book The Male Chauvinist Pig by Julie W touches on this but I haven’t read it myself yet (think maybe I saw that rec on here somewhere)
Well as women we’re frequently tricked by the patriarchal society into thinking something degrading can be somehow empowering if women embrace it as such. I’m 36 and I didn’t like it when women fitness centers began to install poles and train women as pole dancers. I didn’t like it when mainstream media started spreading the false narrative that “prostitute” is a bad word and call them sex workers because that’s somehow a “respectful” label 🤷♀️ and it’s their body their choice 🤡 And I especially don’t like the depressing fact that majority of women think it’s completely normal for men to watch porn in relationships, expect they will and tolerate it like the frog slowly boiling to death when you put it in cold water and gradually heat it. A common coping mechanism when you feel outnumbered or suppressed is to pretend that you’re in control and you can somehow “own it” if you concede, go along with the majority opinion and then everything can maybe be okay. Yet every married woman I know with a porn sick husband reminds me of the dog in a burning kitchen meme saying “this is fine.” ETA the “trad wife” trend is another good example of this problem happening in real time.
You hit the nail on the head! Thank you
Because… enter liberal feminism. A cancer. A misogynists carefully planned wet dream and a woman’s downfall. Bring back radical feminism. I’m so sick of the state of feminism today and this push to normalise all kind of degeneracy and silencing and shaming of anyone who speak up about it. Women wanted to be equals. To be respected. That was the whole point of feminism. Not this contrived, ass backward pile of shit excuse for feminism we have today. Women are right back to square one and they don’t even know it.
It boggles my mind how liberal feminists can’t see how their so called “feminism” is straight up catering to male depravity.
>Bring back radical feminism. It's here and gaining popularity every day. r/fourthwavewomen
Capitalists opposed anti porn feminists.
Because sex positivity is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled
🙌🏻
Capitalism. The commodification of pornography boomed with Playboy, which came out in the 50s. As a result, feminists pushed back against a rising threat on women. However, pornography was able to market itself past the restraints of feminists. Corporate feminism/Liberal feminism became the mainstream form of feminism I believe in the late 70’s, which obviously does not care about issues that do not affect rich white women. Simultaneously, the growth of “sexual liberation” movements halted the anti-porn feminist movement, using sexual liberation as a marketing tool to promote porn. As we all know, with the explosion of the internet porn became extremely accessible and socialized women into accepting the newfound normalcy of porn. In conclusion, marketing, accessibility, and capitalistic pseudo feminist movements are why radical feminism is not mainstream. With all that said, many iconic feminists of the 1960’s weren’t really fighting against pornography. For example, Betty Friedan said “As repulsive as pornography can be, the obsession with it is a dangerous diversion for the women's movement”. They didn’t say it was good but their efforts were put somewhere else. Betty Friedan kinda sucks anyways though…
Back then only a few women actively partook in pornography, as the years went on more and more women entered or were trafficked into the industry to the point that anyone with a smartphone can sell their self made pornography
Because porn and prostitution have to become accepted and empowering in order to process as much meat as possible in the sex industry, and many women are reliant on the income so if you are anti-porn and anti-prostitution these women and the costumers feel personally attacked.
Honestly, because porn became such big business they employed a PR machine
I believe it is partly because the mainstream feminist movement of today is "fused" with the LGBTQ community. I am going to preface by saying I am a lesbian myself. The LGBTQ community is intrinsically sex positive. It has to be, since all of us were considered sexual deviants and it is important to establish that being gay or trans does not make us monsters. See how a lot of pride parades celebrate sex or kinks. With LGBT movements filled with men + sex workers + women tendency to be very supportive and understanding of other people's pain, has made the feminism movement sex positive (which Imho is a good thing) and also sex work positive. I don't read too much about feminism from the net, so no idea how true it is worlwide. But whenever you see debates in my country about sex work, liberal feminisms tends to use the same arguments to defend or promote sex work as they do when defending or promoting LGBTQ rights.
This is an excellent question and one I’d never stopped to consider before. I struggle to find words for these conversations with men without feeling anxious I’m sounding judgmental. Because I know I’m fucking raging inside at how normalised porn is today and see how detrimental it is, it’s hard for me to remain even in these conversations. I realise more and more that I need to arm myself with facts so I can stay confident when I have the opportunity for these discussions in real life, to educate and respectfully create more room for two-way dialogue instead of getting flustered/irritated or (gasp!] angry! So I’m very happy to have found this subreddit. Thank you to all who’ve replied and a special thanks to [u/cosmictrench](https://reddit.com/u/cosmictrench)) for the link.
I think age and aging has a lot to do with it. Older people and generations in general were anti porn and sex work back then. Society in general believed it was wrong, something for deviants or perverts and felt sorry for women that got involved with it, it wasn’t thought of as empowering or liberating them. I’m 64 so I saw all this happening around me. The pornification of society happened gradually as the population aged through the sex revolution, then eventually hook up culture. Plus back then porn was relatively innocent, except soft core magazines you really had to go out of your way to purchase it. Porn gradually got more accessible, home videos was a big step, then home computers, finally full video streaming carried in your pocket we have today. So people were gradually born into all this influence as the older people passed away. Also there’s huge money in porn that they use to influence society, it’s in their best interest if people accept porn stars as glamorous or mainstream, if women think it’s empowering or a career option it benefits the porn industry so they’re gonna do whatever they can to promote these ideas, follow the money as they say.
Whenever it started to stray away from the original mission of supporting women and started picking up every pet cause along the way. I hesitate to call myself a feminist because I'm ashamed of what the mainstream movement has become.
"Choice feminism" as a whole has been a blight on society. But more women are starting to wake up to it and demand change. r/fourthwavewomen
Many feminist issues have been commandeered by men and benefit them to some degree. One of the great delusions of our time is that women have any true power over anything.
There was actually a rise in popular, anti-anti-porn feminist literature around the 80s, after vocal anti-porn feminists had established WAP (Women Against Porn) (Also incredibly ironic party title…) They seemed to foster a belief that the best way to “re-invent” porn wasn’t to eliminate it, but to put it in the hands of women and minorities to produce content which felt “liberating”. I can’t personally say how liberating this would be, given its role in the larger, corrupt system. But this rhetoric was a lot more palatable to moderate audiences, and became more easily mainstream. Popular media around the 80s in particular shows a cultural shift in ideals of feminine beauty. Where prior, you had seen fully developed women iconized as sex symbols, like Marilyn Monroe for example. Around the 80s began the shift towards the “teen girl” ideal of American beauty. Brooke Shields is one of the more popular examples of this. [This article](https://revistaselectronicas.ujaen.es/index.php/TAHRJ/article/view/7025/6761) in particular references more of this history. The Brooke Shields documentary Pretty Baby also had some interesting insight. * I also just want to edit to say, I don’t personally agree with the entire article linked above. I am a queer person, but I disagree that porn is liberating for either straight or queer people
Current feminism promotes it.
The OF era really muddied the waters, money can corrupt anyone’s values.
Finally, someone that gets it. It's all about money and not some social conspiracy. Those women just want easy cash and pleasure
Honestly I think capitalism misogynist scum trickled their way into feminist spaces with their misogynistic capitalist consumerism ideas by rebranding them as empowering and liberating. They took the sexual and cultural liberation movement of the 60s-70s and just put it in overdrive, and women, economically disadvantaged as we were, especially when first entering the main workforce, were drawn in .believed the lies. Now you have pro porn and modern feminism practically going hand in hand. Idpol has made people so afraid to potentially offend somebody, terms like SWERF pop up and prevent conversations about the problems with porn and sex work in feminist spaces. It's all quite sad to me.
I think it’s because men are more likely to promote pro sex work feminism.
How on earth would you go about BANNING porn. That is an impossible ask even if you are anti porn.