The end of literacy and the triumph of spectacle - Chris Hedges
"What does it say about our culture that cruelty is so easy to market?" Jensen asks. "What is the difference between glorifying violence in war and glorifying the violence of sexual domination? I think that the reason porn is so difficult for so many people to discuss is not that it is about sex - our culture is saturated in sex. The reason it is difficult is that porn exposes something very uncomfortable about us. We accept a culture flooded with images of women who are sexual commodities. Increasingly, women in pornography are not people having sex but bodies upon which sexual activities of increasing cruelty are played out. And many men - maybe a majority of men - like it."
The Porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. ... The lighting in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acs onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd, The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting, oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads if sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilised dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of pulse, taste, breath - or tenderness. Those in the films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotions, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble of plastic.
Pornography does not promote sex. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precluded intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else's expense.
The cruelty takes a toll on the bodies, as well as the emotions, of porn actresses. Many suffer severe repeated vaginal and anal tears that require surgery. ... Roldan, like most of the women did not eat on nights before she was filmed. she flushed out her system with enemas and laxatives. " I would starve myself," she says, " so I wouldn't have to suck on my shit. The worst was when it came out of another girl and it was not clean and you had to do it."
The Sex those in the porn industry claim to promote is as fake, absurd, and unattainable as the facade of the Luxor casino and hotel. Porn is not about love or eroticism. It is about power and money. It is a transaction. Ot is based on the conversion of women into objects.
