News > November 6, 2008

By Wasif Huda | Staff writer

On Oct. 30, the university sponsored “Sexism, Identity, and Intimacy in a Pornographic Culture” in Brendle Recital Hall. Gail Dines, a renowned feminist and professor of sociology and woman’s studies at Wheelock College, who is also the founder of the Stop Porn Culture Movement, gave the presentation. The hour-long event talked about the birth of the porn industry during the 1950s and how it has evolved into such a powerful market, generating $57 billion a year.

“It was meant to create social awareness about how dangerous pornographic culture is,” junior Carlos Maza, one of the event’s organizers, said.

“Both in terms of violence against women and the kinds of sexual identities it produces for men and women.

“I think we felt that there was a serious lack of feminist discussion and activism on campus, so we were hoping to use a topic as controversial as pornography to spark some feminist sentiments in the Wake Forest community.”

Porn was first used to instill the consumer culture into American men, who had lived through both a depression and a war. These were people who did not know how to spend; furthermore, they were very suspicious of consumerism. Then Hugh Hefner’s ingenious idea of Playboy was introduced.

“He offered a way for men to think of themselves as consumers ... Hefner offered men the way to be heterosexual and unmarried, and what was that way, become a Playboy. He actually created a new identity for up-and-coming white middle-class Americans,” Dines said.

“The idea Hefner was selling was that if you consume to the point that we suggest in this magazine (Playboy), you are a Playboy.

“What’s astounding is that if you go through the earlier editions of Playboy, you will notice that there are virtually no pictures of women, but the images of these women were those women you are able to buy, if you consumed.”

“What Hefner did was not so much commodify sexuality as much as he sexualized commodity.”

Hefner paved the way for the soft-core industry, but the porn wars soon followed, when Hustler and Penthouse came into market, each aiming to push the boundaries of what displays of sexuality were appropriate for everyday society.

“Porn (today) is circulated through very important channels that are central to the American system of capitalism,” Dines said.

However, much of the porn industry’s success today is accredited to the Internet and the privacy it offers to consumers.

“The Internet revolutionized pornography; over 13,000 videos a year are being produced,” Dines said. But what was private, is now becoming very public.

“We have allowed porn to hijack our culture, and society is as healthy as its culture. This will have a profound impact on human development,” Dines said.

During the discussion that followed the presentation, numerous questions were asked regarding the existence of porn in society: Should it be banned? To what extent should it be censored? What about the right to artistic freedom?

And perhaps the most frequently voiced question – Can society exist without porn?

The answer, “We are not talking about banning it; we are talking about grass root level education that aims to increase awareness towards the kinds of injustice that this industry is practicing on women,” Dines said.

“We should have the porn industry in line by the law like every other industry. We should be allowed to sue. Women who are being butchered emotionally, spiritually and physically should be allowed to sue the industries they work for.”

But there is more to treating the porn industry problem than economic policy.

“They can coexist, but not in a truly healthy way. Pornography creates flawed and degrading images of both women and men, and these images have incredible potential to affect the minds and views of consumers,” Maza said.

“If we truly want an equal, respectful and tolerant society, then we need to abandon these images completely. Sexual stimulation does not outweigh our obligation to treat all members of society with dignity and respect,”

The event provoked many students to think twice about the culture prevalent in mainstream society.

“Before coming to the lecture I didn’t think much about the effect that porn has on a women’s self image, the effect it can have on domestic violence,” junior Amanda Slemp said.

“After the event I was exposed to all these gritty issues. The presentation was very informative, at times very disturbing too,” sophomore Lauren Dayton said.

“As a female, being bombarded with images of women being degraded, it was a little hard to take.

“However, after seeing it I think it’s important we talk about it so that we are more aware of it. It will continue to happen, but making people more aware of how much degradation there is in porn will make it socially unacceptable and will hopefully make it stop,”

“It is an addiction, but I feel that if people work and we have a system in place to treat these kinds of people, we can get out it,” Slemp said.

Dines aimed to shift the audience members’ perceptions about pornography. “I hope the audience will at the very least rethink their opinions about pornography and pornographic culture,” Maza said.

“I think it’s naive to expect everyone who came to the event to stop using pornography completely, but I think that it’s reasonable to expect many people to start feeling extremely uncomfortable with the most violent and degrading aspects of it after seeing Dr. Dines’s presentation.”