OPPapers.com

Is Pornography Degrading To Women?

"The literal definition of pornography is taken from the ancient Greek porne, meaning female sexual slaves, and graphos, meaning writings or graphic depictions thereof" (Stock). As time has went by there have been many depictions of pornography, but the real quarrel started in the 1600's. "Danish criminologist Berl Kutchinsky traces the beginnings of of modern pornography to the 1650s, when three pornographic classics appeared." (Anonymous). Pornography is found to be not only destructive to people in general, but degrading to women as well. Pornography is degrading to women because it serves as an instruction manual for violent sexual acts, it portrays violence against women as an acceptable thing, and it portrays women as useless sex toys. Therefore, the explicit content of pornography is degrading in many ways to the women of our country.

Pornography serves as an instruction manual for violent sexual acts. There have been many sex crimes in the U.S. that have been linked to pornography in one way or another and it has been proposed that because of the many different acts of violence and forced sex in pornography, this is a cause and basic instruction manual on how to commit these acts of violence. Author of Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (S1), Diana Russell, pornography "predisposes some males to desire rape or intensifies this desire." Many others have also agreed in the point that because the violent acts committed in pornography seem to be acceptable, it may seem to some that these acts are acceptable in everyday life. If a man watching pornography sees a woman being forced to perform oral sex at gunpoint, he may perceive this as an acceptable act and proceed to commit this act of violence himself. The same is also true for younger males who are still in the experimental stages of sexual acts. If these adolescent males witness a women being tied up and raped in a pornography video or magazine, than the male, who is still curious about...