Harry Brod explores what porn does to the male viewer in “Eros Thanatized: Pornography and Male Sexuality”. This essay appears in Men Confront Pornography (1990, p.190-206).
The proper framework for discussion about the manufacture and distribution of pornography is neither sexual ethics nor civil liberties, but business ethics. Anti-pornography campaigns should be conceptualized not as attempts at literary censorship, but as consumer boycotts for product safety…
Commercialized sex requires dependably replicable standards of beauty. Hence, personal idiosyncratic tastes must be obliterated and sexual desire forced into a single mold, with minor variations whose function is to obscure the fundamentally monolithic nature of the image… [T]he ease with which consensus is reached today on what makes someone “attractive” reveals the degree of coercive manipulation imposed on all of our sexual desires.
In pornography the body is reduced to an object, and no personality shows through. In erotica, the personality is expressed through the body as the subjective agent behind the sexual self…
Attempts to understand the connections between violence and pornography must therefore begin at this fundamental level of pornography’s depersonalization and objectification of its subjects, which are symptomatic of the early stages of inculcating predispositions towards violence, and not merely consider the degree of violence explicitly depicted in the image. It should be stressed that those who cite a supposed failure of empirical laboratory research to demonstrate that increased exposure to pornography increases propensities towards accepting or committing violent acts are guilty of a non sequitur in using this to argue against the claim that there are causal relationships between pornography and violence. Such studies, of which a significant and growing number do in fact affirm a link between violence and pornography, can only measure whether increased levels of exposure to pornography lead to increased levels of pro-violent attitudes or behaviors above what is considered a societal norm. They do not and cannot measure the effect of the general circulation of pornography in establishing a norm of dominating and exploitative sexuality throughout the culture, thus raising the general level of acceptability of violence in the ethos of the culture. While cross-cultural comparisons might be relevant to the latter question, much of the evidence often cited in this debate is decidedly not.
Despite the widespread belief that pornography serves as a release for male sexual tension, those who peddle pornography are aware that it actually serves to increase male sexual tension and discomfort, not the positive sort of creative, interactive tension alluded to earlier as erotic, but a debilitating, isolating nervousness. The following report from a man who worked on an offshore oil rig tells well the effect of
the porno mags and skin flicks provided by the companies, supposedly to release sexual tension… Its real purpose is to keep our appetites directed at suitable female objects in a situation where any personal expression of sexuality would get one in trouble. The shared hunting-pack horniness of a group of men jeering at a skin flick lets everyone feel quite normally male. The relief function is a sham: these sessions are meant to keep us tense, to keep our heterosexual identity in shape.
…The men’s movement’s consciousness of the self-destructive effects of pornography has even begun to filter out into other movements. For example, a particular incident was reported in the men’s jail during the Diablo Canyon anti-nuclear blockade. While most of the activities had a strong feminist consciousness, once 800 men were separated into the prison and prison authorities distributed pornographic literature along with other reading material, “that atmosphere began to disintegrate,” as one of the participants put it. His account continues: “Some courageous and concerned men began to see what was happening and, within a few days, succeeded in changing the jail environment back to something very close to what it had been in the camp itself [prior to the blockade].” A statement was read which, in part, defined pornography as “a disastrous pattern in which gender and sexuality are formed as weapons of power and control–in which men are formed into nightsticks, in which we become terrorists of the flesh.” He reports that the pornography subsequently either disappeared or went underground, and that men talked about the role of pornography in their lives, making connections to other forms of exploitation and domination they were there to protest.