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Discourses Of Pornography

Decent Essays

Discourses of Harm This brings the debate to how the ‘pornification’ of acts, namely violent, hurtful and discriminatory ones, have effected parts of society and will most likely continue to do so if pornography still portrays these said acts. With the population viewing pornography at younger ages than ever before (Turner), and using the porn that they view as a form of education, then the violent and harmful porn that exists must be taken into consideration when talking about the effects it has on society. In 1987, James B. Weaver’s investigated how violence and rape portrayed on screen was read by men and women. The test group was shown various scenes from popular films of neutral/not sexual content, consensual sex, female-instigated sex, male-coerced sex, and eroticised violence which included scenes of a “slasher” film. The investigation interestingly found that “the men spotted some aggressiveness in consenting sex, whereas the women did not. But more significantly, the men judged rape to be about half as violent as murder, whereas the women considered rape to be about as brutal a crime as murder” (Zillmann 115). It should also be noted that the sexual scenes shown were heterosexual. Baron and Byrne found in their 1977 investigation that “sexual acts involving aggression and violence are among the least arousing sexual depictions for men and females” (Nelson 178). A number of studies mentioned by Nelson found that there were low levels of arousal in

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