Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry Read Free Page A

with out-of-date ideas. The result is that it’s very difficult to get the kind of support and help thatyou need to recover – particularly if the relationship is long-term and loving and you are trying to repair after the crisis.
I needed to mourn the loss of my relationship as I knew it and thought of it, and of my sexual self. I needed help in knowing how I – we – could rebuild a relationship with someone who could view and talk of women in those terms and still hold respect for him and for myself. To some extent I’ve managed to live with that dilemma, not as I would have liked it by his reflective and remorseful analysis of what has happened, but by trying to understand the process myself whereby affectionate, intelligent, kind and thoughtful men can become hooked, for want of a better word, in this strange, isolated, distorted world.
In the end I found a confidential online counselling service dedicated to women whose partners are involved with habitual Internet porn the most helpful. My long screeds of email message would be carefully responded to with insightful understanding and practical suggestions. Whoever you are out there who wrote replies to my emails, often frenetically tapped in the small dark hours, I thank you.
I have no time whatsoever for those who see pornography as liberating or empowering to women’s sexuality as this is absolutely not my experience at all. The distress caused sleepless nights, lots of crying, a constant feeling of being on edge, an anger that was all consuming.
A while on now, is it better? Carefully reassembling a relationship, mourning and accepting what has been lost, trying to make some parts anew, takes much time and patience. I still have enormous anger. Anger at him for, as I see it, being so easily drawn in to it. Some of my anger has, as I come to understand the psychology of porn viewing more, moved on to the industry. Yes he was responsible for his actions, but the industry is so slick at inveigling its way in. It toys with the masculine mind as our culture has made it. It quickly becomes a habit, desensitising, a siren pulling men in to dare to look at increasingly edgy images. Secret, exciting, elicit, nefarious. All the elements necessary to relationships – care, respect, responsibility, empathy, are not only deliberately negated in porn, but alternative reassurances and flatteries are subliminally implanted in their place.
Yes, my partner promised not to view again, and has kept to that. But only after a long period can I relax and trust him again. In the early days of abstinence, although he declared he did not need porn, and invited me to search his Internet history any time, the hidden cache files still told the truth of glimpses at porn here and there. So shifting the habit was not as easy as he had declared. The topic is sensitive and raw still. If it resurfaces in our conversation, he oftenhas another newly minted justification to offer that is supposed to convince me of the innocuousness of the porn and his viewing of it – never the real acknowledgement of responsibility or the harm to our relationship. I wait for the day he’ll say he thinks he understands and that he’s sorry.

Catharine A. MacKinnon
X-Underrated: Living in a World the Pornographers Have Made 1
The belief that pornography inhabits its own physical and mental world is an illusion. Nothing restricts its effects. Yet the protective myth of its spatial separation and cognitive confinement endures, even as pornography visibly takes over more and more public and private space, invading homes and offices and transforming popular culture.
There is such a thing as pornography, as its producers and consumers well know. No one is making tens of billions of dollars from, or masturbating to, the Bible, for example. This is only to notice that the pornography industry and mass media have long operated in separate spheres defined by content. In the name of taste, values or division of labour,