The pornographic industry’s success in marketing and selling films with misogynistic and racist overtones provides a disturbing look at our sexually charged culture, Robert Jensen, associate professor of journalism at the University of Texas, said Wednesday.
"Gonzo pornography," a successful type of film where women are portrayed in submissive and humiliating situations, has become more prevalent as the industry has evolved, Jensen said.
"The picture of the world we see in pornography is rooted in the realities of patriarchy and white supremacy in a capitalist economy," he said. "Everything is a commodity, and everything must produce profit."
Jensen said the drive for profit in the pornographic industry, which spent $12 billion in the production and sale of some 13,000 hardcore movies last year, motivates producers to continually push the envelope in depicting sexual acts in films.
Softcore pornography is defined as any image or video that is intended to be sexually arousing, but is not fully explicit, whereas hardcore pornography is intended to be graphic and explicit.
Jensen said a pornography producer told him that films with a focus on anal sex have risen in popularity because they provide men an outlet to release their anger.
"Men like anal sex because they know most women don’t want it," Jensen said, quoting the producer. "When men get pissed off at the women in their life, and they want to exact some sort of revenge but are precluded from doing so in real life-- – then they like to watch it on film."
The success of such films, many of which push the boundaries of penetration beyond even anal sex, mirror society’s increasingly disturbing views on eroticism and arousal, Jensen said.
"There’s no explanation for some of the acts seen in pornographic films other than the humiliation and degradation of women," he said.
"At its core, the mass marketing of heterosexual pornography is about eroticizing the domination of women."
Another disturbing trend in the industry is the production of so-called "interracial" movies, a term used by the industry to define any film that stars a non-white actor, because they play on deep-seated racism, Jensen said.
"Most of the material you will find in interracial pornography plays on some of the worst stereotypes of our culture: the hot-blooded Latina, the animalistic black woman, the demure Asian woman," he said. "All of these ugly stereotypes are right there on the service. There’s nothing covert about it."
The openness of the industry in its portrayal of racist, male-domineering sexuality, as well as the increasing availability of pornography provides an image of what Jensen said he considers to be "what the end of the world looks like."
"Take white supremacy and patriarchy, put them in a commercial setting where everything must be made into a commodity – even our most personal spaces of our bodies – and produce images of routine cruelty and domination that is sexualized," he said. "That is, to me, the most frightening aspect of pornography."
