All this talk about SEX

As uncomfortable it is reading and writing about sex, I can't wait for the discussion on this book tonight. 

The history about feminist rights in relation to pornography was interesting and frankly something I had not thought of. Maybe it is because I don't see pornography as something taking away my femininity
but of seeing sex as an act of art. I understand the binary issues that obviously come along with the objectification, aggression, and stigma of porn. Ross discusses the female/male binary mostly in the book and I would say tends to focus more on the female side than the male. Her book alone, I would assume doesn't blur the line of the binary but reinforces it for her readers. 

Some of the issues I was interested in were female consumerism and women as a commodity. Ross said "It is not at all clear that women are less able to distinguish between the real and the virtual and therefore at greater risk from their online sexual activities than men (83). I think what Ross is trying to say is that women get sucked into online consumerism and are at a greater risk to believe (emotionally) that they some how connect to what they are seeing on the screen. This reality then turns women into a commodity and online media outlets pander to their needs and desires (Freud/Lacan). The reality of this is that women whether catered to or not are still being used a way to make money. I think that is what Ross was trying to get at in the porn section.

From the fourth chapter, over and over as I watch television/movies/internet women who are in trouble and have to be saved from the big knight in shining armor. The anecdote is always the same no matter if the women is the main/lead character there is always a man with whom she runs to in the end. This anecdote has been maintained in our patriarchy system and doesn't seem to change generation to generation. Men still want to protect, provide, and being in charge of women. No matter where I go I always see some aspect of this in action. It is interesting to look at this anecdote through a political lens and think about why media portrays the male/female binary in this way.
Some interesting statistics about porn consumers:

"40% of the 'adult' Internet consumer marker" is women (Ross 82).

"Investigators say 30 percent of all web traffic is porn. The porn site, Xvideos, receives a staggering 4.4 billion page views and 350 million unique visitors per month.

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/322668#ixzz2MD4ePWPF" (Digital Journal).  

Both of these statistics note that the viewers are neither male or female. However, on another site Purehope.net the statistics are focused primarily on men:

Internet & Television Pornography

• 70% of 18 to 24 year old men visit pornographic sites in a typical month. 66% of men in their 20s and 30s also report being regular users of pornography. (First-person: the culture of pornography, R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Baptist Press, 28 December 2005)
• 40 million U.S. adults regularly visit Internet pornography websites, and 10% of adults admit to Internet sexual addition (Internet Filter Review, 2006).
• 20% of men admit accessing pornography at work (Internet Filter Review, 2006).
• The number of television sexual scenes has almost doubled since 1998. 70% of all shows have some sexual content — averaging 5 sexual scenes per hour compared to 56% and 3.2 scenes per hour respectively in 1998. (Sex on TV 4, a Kaiser Family Foundation study, November, 2005)
• 56% of divorces involve one spouse’s continued use of Internet pornography
  (Family Research Council, The Effects of Pornography, 2009)

Interesting Video:

While watching Chelsea Lately last night, I saw a clip about a man and wife who have had
their vintage porn collection stolen. The main focus was on the male but and included on a small portion of the woman talking about herself and her husband using the porn for themselves. 




http://digitaljournal.com/article/344113