Conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly borrowed from Dworkin in her 1987 book Pornography’s Victims : “Those who become addicted crave more and more bizarre and more perverted pornography, and become more callous toward their victims. Pornography changes the perceptions and attitudes of men toward women, individually and collectively, and desensitizes men so that what was once repulsive and unthinkable eventually becomes not only acceptable but desirable. What was once fantasy becomes reality. Thus conditioned and stimulated by pornography, the user seeks a victim.”
I didn’t know these arguments have already been used to argue for a total ban on pornography since 1980s. The slippery slope is so real.
They argue with emotion and assumptions, rather than reason or prediction. The same arguments used to justify banning or censoring violent media, such as movies, music, video games, etc. are the exact same as the ones used to justify banning/censoring/regulating pornography, and those arguments continue to stand without empirical validity.
There is no reason why pornography that does not involve the use of real children should be banned.
There is no harm caused by their existence, creation, or consumption, immediate or otherwise.
They manufacture this culture of sexism apologetics which they exploit to further their own agendas, often times to the detriment of their own supposed “feminist interests”.
But they don’t care.
I should also point out that Phyllis Schlafly was the ringleader of an anti-women’s rights conservative activist group, the infamous “Phyllis Schlafly Eagles”, an organization which lobbied viciously to prevent the Equal Rights Amendment from being ratified.
Their reasons for doing so were, in essence, the same arguments used by sex-negative feminists and religious prudes to justify banning porn - that giving women true equality to men, by eliminating any unnecessary or arbitrary roadblocks for women to achieve true equality - would negatively impact, possibly destroying, the “nuclear family” by not incentivizing women to become stereotypical housewives and submissive maidens!
Followed by, of course, unfounded pessimistic assumptions that this would lead to the downfall of American society, akin to a “fall of Rome” scenario.
Noticing a pattern here?? It’s almost like censorship is unjustified by facts or reason! It’s almost like it all comes from the same place!
