Our world is shaped by porn preferences – and it’s evident literally everywhere. Models advertise subscriptions to OnlyFans on social media, sex workers blog about their daily lives, and erotic novels generate huge revenues. People’s interest in sex is a demand that has long been met by supply, but porn is far from a neutral product. As Americans fuel the growth of a multi-billion dollar industry, it in turn affects their culture.
Sophie Gilbert talks about how the industry has defined ideas about femininity, sex, and power.
“When I was a teenager in the late 1990s, my friends and I thought that a woman’s power consisted primarily in her sexuality,” my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a recent article. – Other strengths either simply didn’t exist or weren’t worth paying attention to.” I spoke to Sophie about her new book on pop culture and femininity to understand how porn has become the defining cultural phenomenon of our time.
Sophie Gilbert: Personally, what I’m seeing right now is a normalization of frankly rude, regressive attitudes in politics and popular culture, not just towards women, but towards immigrants, gay people, transgender people. The kind of offensive and dehumanizing behavior that characterized the pop culture of the 2000s is resurgent, but this time its source is not bloggers and secular commentators, but politicians and media personalities with huge audiences. I see the reason for this as the fact that certain types of porn have accustomed many to cruelty.
That’s one side of the coin. But as I was writing that sentence [in the book], I thought about how porn has reinforced the idea that men should be the center of attention in every aspect of culture! This concept is deeply ingrained in our minds, even if we are not aware of it or cannot put it into words.
Sex sells and sexual openness is considered “liberation”. Criticism of porn is perceived as regressive, a condemnation of women’s freedom, and sanctimonious.