The men who watch this sort of thing believe it is okay to buy a person. They buy women at strip clubs. They buy prostitutes. If they are rich enough, they fly to third world countries and buy 12 year old sex slaves. It is the same attitude towards women in any case.

It is the same attitude which claims women shouldn’t hold certain jobs, can’t drive as well as men, aren’t as smart, are more emotional (in a bad sense), are better at parenting and housework (and so should do all of that), shouldn’t hold political office, etc. It’s the same attitude which claims most rape victims are liars (bullshit) and that women being brutally raped is just part of war and to be expected.

I’m fed up with it and won’t say that it’s okay and healthy to have those attitudes, because it’s not. It’s the same damn attitude that fuels the whole problem of misogyny and mistreatment of women. Violent and hateful porn is part of that problem.

But porn is a much larger issue than just this one problem. Pornography and the sex industry as a whole involve abuse of women in many cases. In many places in the world, women and children are literally forced into sexual slavery. Women are also forced to work in the sex industry to pay family debts or to simply pay the bills because women do not have equal access to many of the relatively high-paying blue-collar jobs men can get. Rich men then use these women and children because they feel entitled to do so and do not care about these people and in fact do not truly see them as people at all.

It is that same attitude that leads to the production and consumption of misogynistic porn. It is hateful and wrong and says something very poor about the character of men who participate, even as viewers. But misogyny is so deeply ingrained in our culture, that many people don’t even recognize it when they see it. It’s “normal” in the sense that it is common.

What worries me isn’t the porn itself. It’s what it says about our society which consumes it (male and female). Producers make what they can sell. Mysogyny sells.

Sara, I see your point, male characters are usually in charge. That’s not quite misogynistic though, until the man does something degrading or abusive to the woman. Again that is a large percentage but I don’t think the majority of porn has it. A whole lot of porn, as you say, is bad but does not need to be. I think the producers are making wrong assumptions about what the audience wants.