Abuse and Pornography: How Women are Making Porn Fashionable — by Patrick Wanis
The following article is taken from FoxNews and was written by Patrick Wanis:
Porn is becoming a new ideal and value for young girls. And women are responsible.
Women are consuming and endorsing porn such as ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ — a book recognized as ‘mommy porn.’ Poorly written, it is not a how-to-manual and it’s not poetic erotica. Pulp / romance novels transformed into a new genre embracing porn as literature – explicitly sexual scenes featuring bondage/discipline, dominance/submission and sadism/masochism
More than 20 million copies have sold in the US (40 million worldwide), and it is yet another example of the way porn is becoming more than socially acceptable amongst women. Moreover, it is becoming an aspirational target for women. Women and the media have linked consuming porn or behaving like a porn actress with instant money, fame, power, glamour, prestige, respectability and social acceptability. In other words, if you become a porn actress or behave like one, you will triumph with all of these things.
Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian became famous and rich for making a sex tape, and they spun off empires of TV shows, fashion lines, perfumes and paid appearances. The message is: one leads to the other. But it is women who made Kardashian famous. And it is women who have become the fans and consumers of everything Kardashian and books such as Fifty Shades of Grey.
Using sex for money and fame, women have found a new way to feel powerful and secure without a man or even necessarily a family – Octomom has openly become a porn actress and stripper.
Mothers, too, are now sexualizing their daughters and dressing them up as sexual candy for the world. Lindsay Jackson dressed her 5-year-old, Madisyn ‘Maddy’ Verst, in a sexy police uniform and a Dolly Parton outfit complete with padded breasts and padded backside for a TV reality show. And Jessica Simpson dressed her 4-month-old girl in bikinis.
Porn could never have become mainstream and socially acceptable without the support and endorsement by women. In human behavior, we call this ‘the law of frequency’ — the more often two things are linked, the more powerful that association becomes until they become inseparable. And women and the media have linked consuming porn or behaving like a porn actress with instant money, fame, power, glamour, prestige, respectability and social acceptability. In other words, if you become a porn actress or behave like one, you will triumph with all of these things.
Accordingly, girls are more fascinated and driven by the desire to become famous than they are to become an engineer, doctor or scientist: Kim Kardashian has 14 million followers on Twitter. Thus, women are creating new values and morality promoting money, power and glamour as more important than intelligence, achievement, motherhood or contribution. Studies reveal that female college students are more narcissistic than males. And teenage girls are now also becoming fans of porn actors such as 26-year-old James Deen.
The paradox is that women are becoming more educated than men as women surpass men in attendance and graduation rates – for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do also. But, women are failing to realize the dangers of falling for porn or promoting porn as the new fashionable profession and path to fame, riches and glory. This is the antithesis of female empowerment as MTV, Kim Kardashian and Octomom are teaching young girls to gain power over men by using sex.
Women have now created false empty idols and have lost their real sense of self-worth, value and significance, replacing it with fleeting pseudo-power and artificial values and relationships, leaving them feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied.
I appeal to women to beware of being deceived and betrayed into the world of porn and sexual objectification the same way that women were tricked into smoking cigarettes in the 1920s.
In April 1929, a PR expert, Edward Bernays, working for a US tobacco company, hired young models to march in the New York City parade and alerted the press that they were fighting for women’s rights by lighting “Torches of Freedom” as they lit up and smoked cigarettes. The media publicized the event and it helped to break the taboo against women smoking in public. In the same way, women today are using porn as a misguided attempt to gain power and freedom, and to become more powerful and independent. And they are only betraying and fooling themselves.
Pornography is much more than a moral or social issue.
Renowned physicist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Dr. Jeffrey Satinover says porn is “a form of heroin, hundred times more powerful than before.” Forensic psychologist, M. Douglas Reed and renowned pharmacologist Candace Pert reveal that pornography is like a drug that triggers the brain to release a psychopharmacological flood of “epinephrine, testosterone, endorphins (endogenous morphine), oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, and phenyethylamine,” which can lead to addiction and various other behavioral disorders.
Gal Dines, professor of sociology and women’s studies and chair of the American Studies Department at Wheelock College in Boston, has written about and researched the porn industry for over two decades. Professor Dines, author of “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality,” believes porn is a public health issue with documented negative effects on young people, distorting “the way women and girls think about their bodies, their sexuality and their relationships.”
Pornography is equally damaging to adult relationships and social bonds – men are struggling to develop close, intimate relationships with real women with some men now preferring porn to sex with an actual human being.
Bottom line: porn does not promote love or sex but rather cruelty and hatred to women, and so, while women continue to endorse and make porn fashionable or a new ideal, they are foolishly robbing themselves and undermining all of the positive strides and triumphs they have made in their quest for equality.
Patrick Wanis, PhD, human behavior and relationship expert. For more visit: Patrick Wanis. Follow him on Twitter@behavior_expert
Read more: How women made porn fashionable
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- Posted in: Culture
- Tagged: Fifty Shades of Grey, guest post, pornography
A Cry For Justice 
All I can say is, “Come, Lord Jesus” … rise up within us. Give us the grace and faith to overcome this cold, dark world and bring Your Light and Truth. Warm our hearts with the Flame of Love. Help us to hunger and thirst for righteousness. Fill us with passion, even obsession, for Justice, Truth, and Righteousness. Make Your home in us, truly… make us a holy habitation for You to cleanse and rule in our hearts, homes, families, and nations.
When I was a little girl, the clothes at the mall looked like little girl’s clothes. I’m only in my 30’s but I’m horrified at how little girls are dressed these days. Look what happened to little Jon Benet Ramsey years ago all because her parents exploited her to look and behave like an older woman. It’s sad.
Surely, we all know that not only “women are responsible.”
Why would women be doing this now?
I am curious about the study that shows that female college students are more narcissistic than male.
I didnt think he was saying women are totally responsible for porn, but this particular phenomenon we are seeing now, ie, “mommy porn”? Of course men promote it too. The main reason I found it so interesting is that he recognizes that this stuff is no friend to women though it purports to be.
Yes, the narcissism study would be interesting to check out.
I’ve heard quite a few statements from women to the effect of “me too- I can be as sexual as a man!” and I can only think their thoughts stem from a system where they see male sexual struggles as a thing to be envied rather than as repulsive.
My guess is that a lot of this is a response to women feeling their sexual identity is subservient to men’s. I think about comments on this very blog about women who have experienced sexual trauma because there wasn’t a place for them to understand about what healthy sex in a marriage is all about, so they accepted male mistreatment. A lot of the churches teaching in sex revolves around men- teenage boys are given talks about how not to be tempted by women into sexual fantasy, and teenage girls are given talks about how not to tempt boys. In doing this, the church makes women objects to men- their sexual identity is wrapped up in how men think about them and how they “make” men think. And notice that the subtle message is that every sexual sin is the woman’s fault- “Sure the guy acted poorly, but can you blame him with that woman being dressed like that?”
And look at teachers like Mark Driscoll whose church is exploding with 20 and 30 something’s- this is from his precursor to teaching the book of Esther:
“[Esther] grows up in a very lukewarm religious home as an orphan raised by her cousin. Beautiful, she allows men to tend to her needs and make her decisions. Her behavior is sinful and she spends around a year in the spa getting dolled up to lose her virginity with the pagan king like hundreds of other women. She performs so well that he chooses her as his favorite. Today, her story would be, a beautiful young woman living in a major city allows men to cater to her needs, undergoes lots of beauty treatment to look her best, and lands a really rich guy whom she meets on The Bachelor and wows with an amazing night in bed. She’s simply a person without any character until her own neck is on the line, and then we see her rise up to save the life of her people when she is converted to a real faith in God.”
He is totally sexualizing the book of Esther and making it out to be a book about her sexual performance rather than God’s providential work and faithfulness to his people. How terrifying the experience must of been for Esther (as I understand it a girl around 13-16?) and one of the most popular preachers today runs around and decries her moral character based on her sexuality? The story is of a wicked and immoral king who gathers women into his harem to be used by him sexually and then tossed away, and she gets blamed for for the sex? What message is this sending women?
So you have all of these women being told that their sexual identity is bound my men and they see porn as being a man’s thing, and I my guess is they want to somehow redeem it. They want to say “I am sexual on MY terms, not yours. I can have fantasies too!” It is never going to be the world’s solution to redeem sin in a Godly way- rather than men not engaging in porn, we see the opposite- women want in on the action too. At least they can feel they aren’t being objectified by men if they do it themselves. That’s a sad concession, if true.
I think this stuff is a direct line from the church not being salt and light- books like 50 Shades of Gray are a symptom, not a cause. We need to stop making sexual sin a male centric issue and recognize that both genders share struggles in this area, both genders can approach sex in a healthy way, and both genders have sexual needs and impulses that can be met within the relationship God intended.
Thank you Jeff S for that interesting comment. I agree with everything you’ve said.
Mark Driscoll’s take on Esther makes me want to vomit, guffaw or weep. What idiocy! And he is lauded as a bible teacher by those who should know better. No-one reading the book of Esther could draw they conclusions Driscoll drew unless they were twisted and sex-obsessed themselves. I pity the women in his church, but it seems like his congregation has itching ears or are under his spell. May the Lord draw out of there those who are really His!