News > October 30, 2008

By Caitlin Brooks | Asst. news editor

“We live in a rape culture,” Matthew Ezzell, a leader of the Stop Porn Culture Movement, said. “Within a rape culture, 100 percent of women live with the threat of rape everyday, and our media is pervaded by images of sexual violence against women.” Ezzell was the first of three lecturers who spoke at the Porn Wars Symposium held Oct. 25. Students intrigued by the event’s name and hoping to leisurely view pornography for six hours on a Saturday afternoon would have been sorely disappointed in the symposium’s message: pornography is harmful to women and to the men that attempt to live up to the unrealistic expectations of masculinity presented in mainstream pornography.

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Lecturer Matthew Ezzell (right) explains why “porn culture” has negatively influenced the people of this generation. (Kelly Makepeace/Old Gold & Black)

Ezzell lead the symposium with a talk titled “Pornography, Lad Mags, Video Games, and Boys,” which focused primarily on the negatives effects the porn industry has on impressionable boys. To illustrate his point and provide a gateway into the conversation, Ezzell related the reactions of some college students when he asked them if having sex with a drunk girl who had passed out was rape. The students allegedly said, “If you have sex with her when she’s passed out, you’re taking advantage of the situation. If she wakes up, then you’re taking advantage of her.”

“What kind of society do we live in where this is the answer from a typical college male? How is this possible?” Ezzell asked.

The answer? Our super-saturated porn culture. According to the most recent statistics, 1.5 hardcore porn films are produced every hour of every day worldwide. The dominant themes in these flicks? All women at all times want sex from all men, women like all the sexual acts that men perform on them, and the women that do not at first realize these things will do so with a little force. According to Ezzell, these are extremely dangerous, hazardous assumptions represented to more than 70 percent of young adolescents who stumble across them on the Internet.

After revealing these telling statistics and others, Ezzell brought the discussion around to more everyday, public pornographic materials; namely Lad Mags (think Playboy, Hustler) and videogames (Grand Theft Auto). Ezzell illustrated his point using images and articles taken from Playboy and Maxim including one article titled, “How to Cure a Feminist” from the November 2003 issue of Maxim. He argues that all of these main-stream media sources idealize male dominance and female subservience.

He then showed a graphic montage of scenes from Grand Theft Auto in which the protagonist is depicted soliciting hookers, having sex with them in cars and then killing them to steal back his money – all in the course of regular game play. This same character then frequents a strip club where two women give him a lap dance as he proclaims; “Now this is what I call the American dream.”

“Central to all of these issues is the concept of control, the domination of women, but what people need to realize is that feminist sex is better.

That is to say sex in which both partners are equal will always be better than sex that is demeaning and dehumanizing to one or both partners,” Ezzell said.

Ann Scales, a professor of law at the University of Denver and visiting professor of law at UNC Chapel Hill delivered the second lecture of the symposium. Her talk was entitled “The Law is Some Tricky Shit: Pornography and the Law.”

Scales focused on the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause and the numerous exceptions to it, including policy on obscenity. Miller v. California defines obscenity as not protected under the freedom of speech right when the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find the subject matter offensive. As Scales pointed out, “This makes it a moral issue. When morality is the issue, who decides?”

Scales proposed that obscenity, specifically pornography, should not be about morality or socially accepted behavior.

“This definition (of obscenity) addresses the moral harm, but not the gendered harm of words,” Scales said. “This is not about what might offend mom and pop; it’s about the actual harm done to children, sometimes to men and most often to adult women.”

She proposed that society and the law put the designation of obscenity and harm in the hands of the victims of the industry; the women who are forced to perform sexual acts, or have dehumanizing sexual acts performed on them because they feel they have no other options in life. “Why is child pornography illegal, but pornography of women is not illegal?” she asked.

Scales mirrored Ezzell’s statements at the end of her lecture. “Pornography leads to icky sex. Ours (the Stop Porn Culture Movement’s) is the pro-sex perspective.”

The final lecture was a two part discussion lead by Jane Caputi, an eco-feminist and professor of women’s studies and communications at Florida Atlantic University. Her discussion of the everyday objectification of women was prefaced by the showing of her documentary titled The Pornography of Everyday Life, which criticized how sexual violence has been infused into our culture.

The documentary, comprised mostly of images from retail advertisements and magazine covers, depicted women consistently dominated by men, even in ads for seemingly innocuous products like jeans and shoes. One of the most striking images, the June 1978 cover of Hustler Magazine, depicts the bent legs of a naked woman being pushed through a meat grinder.

The documentary also proposed a thoroughly eco-feminist message; degradation of women is paralleled by abasement of female pagan gods by Christianity and other male dominated religions. As women became less sacred in society, so did the idea of Mother Earth.

Following a question and answer period on the documentary, Caputi moved to a slideshow and discussion on the pornography of the 2008 presidential election. Using an extensive collection of images degrading everyone from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin on aspects of their personas from race to gender to intellect to age, Caputi illustrated that no one is safe from dehumanization and humiliation in a culture that condones and conforms to images of everyday violence and oppression.

The three speakers rounded off the lecture with a question and answer period and a plea that anyone interested in stopping the cycle of violence perpetuated by the pornography industry should go to www.stoppornculture.org to learn what they could do in their communities.