Anti-Anti-Porn Rant

The previous post puts me in the mood for this.

One of the things that really burns me is the way pornography is blamed for rape. I take that kind of thinking very personally. My Mother, as it happened, grew up to religion-based sexually repression. She used the Biblical story of Onan to justify beating me if my hand touched my genitals even during peeing. She considered pornographic magazines and movies disgusting. Yet she raped me hundreds of times and even masturbated to my distress as often as she had the urge.

She didn't start with dirty pictures and then advance step by step to rape, the way anti-porn fanatics will tell you it always happens. She went straight for the rape. I know that she tried to groom other children for molestation, both boys and girls. She later justified her own masturbation to me by pointing out that Onan was a man. It's different for women, she said.

By contrast, my Father was constantly using pornography. My Mother disapproved at first, then learned to shut up and tolerate it, because, she later told me, it made him more interested in her. My Father never molested me sexually in any way, and he never displayed any interest in other kids either. Or other wives, for that matter.

I'm certain the porn-as-gateway-to-rape scenario happens. But I'm also sure that for every person who follows that route there are ten people who become rapists because they are severely sexually repressed, hate the sexuality of others and use rape initially to punish others for being sexual. And that if they could be introduced to porn to gradually, say, starting with the easy stuff, like Sears underwear ads, and working up to old early Playboys or Cosmos, their hatred of sexuality might be overcome and their impulse to rape dramatically reduced.

My Mother started raping me and torturing me when I dared have erections in front of her as an innocent 16 month-old. Her gateway to rape was a fear and hatred of a toddler's sexuality. Her hatred of pornography was only another symptom of the hatred that made her a rapist.

One of the reasons people can keep justifying anti-pornography is the fact that in many countries when pornography is outlawed rape statistics are also unbelievably low. You have countries where if a woman reports a rape she's charged and executed for adultery, or a victim of an honor killing, and instead of seeing that as the factor that keeps rape reports down, these fools say, "Look, there's a country that doesn't allow pornography, and they don't have rapes!" Bullshit.

My own experience as a child and now also bears that out. I asked for help repeatedly back then and was told I was being lewd. The sexual repressiveness of the Fifties prevented me from being a statistic. Since then pornography has become much more available. Almost exactly the same time, it became possible for children to report sexual abuse. So now there seems to be more than ever. Because of pornography? OF COURSE NOT. It's because kids going through what I was going through can now talk about it, because society is less sexually repressed.

If anything pornography deserves credit for being at least a small factor in freeing people to speak out about the crimes committed against them.