I’m very busy these days but found this particular piece by Chris Hedges too important not to share. It’s not for the faint hearted or for people easily offended by the explicit details of pornography. So, I’ve shared what I felt were the most important quotes from the article. But it’s worth reading in its entirety, for literally the future of humanity depends on how we deal with the scourge of pornography — how (and why) it has infested every aspect of our existence, and how it encourages and empowers the powerful to exploit, torture and lay waste to the vulnerable, male or female, all over the world.
These days, people who consider themselves ‘liberal’ won’t even admit that porn is harmful. If they do, they can’t see how it harms those who produce it “willingly,” nor can they understand why it’s so harmful to society at large. But the truth is that porn has been laying waste to human society for at least the last fifty years. It is not just a sign of end stage capitalism – right up there with money, porn is the root cause.
“The porn industry has hijacked the sexuality of an entire culture and is laying waste to a whole generation of boys,” she warned. “And when you lay waste to a generation of boys, you lay waste to a generation of girls.”
“When you fight porn you fight global capitalism,” she said. “The venture capitalists, the banks, the credit card companies are all in this feeding chain. This is why you never see anti-porn stories. The media is implicated. It is financially in bed with these companies. Porn is part of this. Porn tells us we have nothing left as human beings—boundaries, integrity, desire, creativity and authenticity. Women are reduced to three orifices and two hands. Porn is woven into the corporate destruction of intimacy and connectedness, and this includes connectedness to the earth. If we were a society where we were whole, connected human beings in real communities, then we would not be able to look at porn. We would not be able to watch another human being tortured.”
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“If you are going to give a tiny percent of the world the vast majority of the goodies, you better make sure you have a good ideological system in place that legitimizes why everyone else is suffering economically,” she said. “This is what porn does. Porn tells you that material inequality between women and men is not the result of an economic system. It is biologically based. And women, being whores and bitches and only good for sex, don’t deserve full equality. Porn is the ideological mouthpiece that legitimizes our material system of inequality. Porn is to patriarchy what the media is to capitalism.”
But it’s not just women that porn exploits and reduces to disposable trash. Porn justifies the same treatment of anyone who is weak and vulnerable, which includes children and anyone else who is poor or unable to defend themselves. But it does more than just glorify the abuse of others through sexual exploitation. It corrupts the minds of all involved, often giving victims a false sense of honor. Hence, we have sadomasochism.
“Women are told in our society they have two choices,” Dines said. “They are either fuckable or invisible. To be fuckable means to conform to the porn culture, to look hot, be submissive and do what the man wants. That’s the only way you get visibility. You cannot ask adolescent girls, who are dying for visibility, to choose invisibility.”
None of this, Dines pointed out, was by accident. Porn grew out of the commodity culture, the need by corporate capitalists to sell products.
But selling products is only part of it – a means to an end. The money they ‘make’ from products we buy is then used to produce the bullets and bombs they drop on us. The entire edifice of capitalism revolves around porn, of one kind or another.
“Around the ages of 12 to 15 you are developing your sexual template,” she said. “You get [the boys] when they are beginning to construct their sexual identity. You get them for life. If you begin by jerking off to cruel, hardcore, violent porn then you are not going to want intimacy and connection. Studies are showing that boys are losing interest in sex with real women. They can’t sustain erections with real women. In porn there is no making love. It is about making hate. He despises her. He is revolted and disgusted by her. If you bleed out the love you have to fill it with something to make it interesting. They fill it with violence, degradation, cruelty and hate. And that also gets boring. So you have to keep ratcheting it up. Men get off in porn from women being submissive. Who is more submissive than children? The inevitable route of all porn is child porn. And this is why organizations that fight child porn and do not fight adult porn are making a huge mistake.”
“Pornography has socialized a generation of men into watching sexual torture,” Dines said. “You are not born with that capacity. You have to be trained into it. Just like you train soldiers to kill.
If you are going to carry out violence against a group you have to dehumanize them. It is an old method. Jews become kikes. Blacks become niggers. Women become cunts. And no one turns women into cunts better than porn.”
Porn is sociopathy of the highest order. Violence by the rich and powerful against an increasingly vulnerable society.
What to do with the masses of people no longer needed in a fully automated economy, where half the world’s population is “unemployable?”
Pornography is the first and last stop of capitalism — the ultimate tool to degrade and dehumanize the 99% – to rob us of our worth and our value, our dignity and our self-respect. It teaches us that we exist only to serve and to please the 1%.
SHAREverything.com 
Rasha,
I saw this article on another person’s page. At the risk of sounding contrarion, I will say that while porn is regressive and reprehensible, the analysis is pretty terrible. On so many levels. The bad writing and worse theatre of Hedges trying to cater to Dines’ analysis is pretty transparent, if…one is aware of the pretenses that pseudo-feminism has brought continuously to this subject, but always able to surprise, with each new effort at a refutation. The first problem is that Hedges has to acknowledge (for DInes) that pseudo-feminism is also ..PRO-porn, but that is unexplained from the very beginning of the article, and left to sort of befuddle those who noticed it, as if he had merely (quickly) “defined” a schism in feminism which, …otherwise must be internally coherent and always morally probative. The analysis of sexual decline itself, is just sort of a “cut and paste” operation, in which porn is (seriously) taken as not only…”non-sexual” (which is correct), but rather as determining actual sexuality itself. This is so pedestrian in content, as to be nearly a satire of “philosophy” or “analytical thinking”. But of course, it is once again a satire of feminism. This “play-soldier” politics, has several of its own phony aspects, such as Hedges playing the masochistic sycophant of “the important radical” Dines ( in his own obsequious introduction, …saying at the same time, “I just met her Tuesday…”) and of course Dines brutally attacking ALL subjects and terms in the composition of the article as if she, somewhat by default, has picked up the fallen standard of sadism. All of this political theatre (in structure ) is at least a full generation old. Back then, pornography was largely an organized crime, Mafia interest. Never did the CIA-funded MS. Magazine or its editors cite the male, violent, asexual and sadistic Mafia as its originators. Now, …”technology” (which they cite) such as credit cards, independent selfie photography, and the wonders of the internet, “make” pornography rotten-ripe for a “new analysis”. Instead we get a hybrid form of cheerleaders screaming virulent steroid rage epithets at the “boys” who …”don’t want to have sex with real women” (sic) …!!! Factitious as this harrowing reality may be, …the claim to analysis reveals how much more “substantial” appeared the previous three generations’ “reliance” on fake Freudian coke-talk as an “explanation” and “science” of …all things sexual. But what the Freudian “pornography of human relations” has done to “prepare the way” for this vacuous, domineering, pseudo-intellectual representation of a couple of talking points, is really as serious a problem as pornography itself, to be frank about it ( and that means it is …a pretty big problem.) Now that is the “brief” of my critique. I hope, if anyone is interested, we can later today walk through the lessons that unedited and narcissistic writing can produce. Certainly, the pornographic cousins, like fb, rival the composition’s subject, for degradation of interpersonal relations but also, …of the ability to express a coherent thought, without contempt for the reader, or even, …given Hedges independently depressive personality, the unrelentingly and unforgivingly “reptile brain” rage which forms the second act of this tag-team of gender-war-criminal-journalists.
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Thanks for your important comment. I was in a mad rush yesterday, as I have been for the past two weeks, so did not have time to comment or think about it in depth. But I did notice that too (about the admission that some feminists applaud porn). Also, I wondered why most of his article was quoting this woman Dines, who by the way, I am unfamiliar with. It seemed as though he had no opinion on it himself. I was reluctant to include the first quote because of its reference to patriarchy, which I disagree with. But I do agree that pornography is an expression of sadistic power and control, often exercised by men but sometimes by women as well. It is an important topic and deserves further exploration.
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I did not have time to give you a better review of it. Perhaps tonight I will. It is interesting. Obviously porn is destructive. Who designed it, for what reason, and to what effect it operates, in which cultural context, is ONE question: who gets it wrong, or engages in cultural elisions of logic, and places porn in the center of gender hatred that the essayists themselves are ensconced in, with no real desire to understand, to settle out or to ameliorate, …THAT is a different set, of nearly unanswerable questions. in other words, they provoke certain responses and certain debates and vicious arguments which, they are not really prepared to moderate or, …frankly, to participate in. This is hit and run journalism (in their hands, not in yours.) Will try to get back to it later today.
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i live with someone who seems to be addicted to porn. I have no idea if porn is actually harmful to society as a whole, as this article states, because I have not researched this issue. However, I do not personally find porn even remotely appealing in any way. It actually disgusts me. But, I am currently in the odd position of having to keep my opinion to myself. On the other hand, I am opposed to using religious grounds against any and everything. Religion is also extremely harmful to society on almost all possible levels, so being against porn or anything else, for strictly religious reasons, is unconscionable. So, I really appreciate the fact that this article did not bring any manner of religion into their objections.
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I dont agree that all religion is harmful. If a religion is harmful, you need look at the principles themselves. That which is harmful, disregard or reject. But that which is good you should respect. Probably, you have seen first hand the negative impact porn has had on the life of your roommate. It’s an extremely damaging and harmful activity, to both those who produce it and those who view it.
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