Minneapolis city officials received testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn, those
who consume porn and those who produce it at a hearing of the
Minneapolis Government Operations Committee in December 1983. This
letter is published in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.221-223).
Letter of Robin Morgan, December 5, 1983
In twenty years as a writer, activist, and lecturer on women’s rights in this country and internationally, I have heard literally numberless testimonials from individual women and women’s groups (in this country and abroad) about the deleterious effects of pornography on their own and other women’s lives, both in the public and private realms… [L]iterally hundreds of women have mentioned to me the anger and despair they feel when their husbands, lovers, or other male partners press upon them specific sexual acts which these men learned from pornographic materials–acts of bestiality, sodomy, “swinging”, forced group sex, etc. The men feel such pressure on women is acceptable because porn is acceptable, and pornography was the so-called “educational” source…
[T]he work of Dr. Natalie Shainess (psychiatrist of New York) and Dr. Frank Osanka [sic] (psychologist and child-abuse specialist, Chicago) show that convicted rapists who, even five to seven years ago, expressed remorse about their acts of violence, recently show no such remorse and often cite as a reason for their guiltlessness that “everyone knows women want to be raped; all the porn stuff proves that.” Furthermore, Dr. Richard Gelles, probably the nation’s foremost expert on domestic violence, has written and spoken publicly on the correlations which exist between pornography, abusive sexual demands made on women in the home, and domestic violence against both women and children…
Perhaps it is academic to add that pornography is demeaning to male sexuality as well as to female; it trains young males and encourages in older males the worst possible attitudes about sexuality in general and about female human beings in particular; it ill prepares men for encountering genuine female sexuality, or even for encountering aggression-free, mutually satisfying, affectionate relationships at all.
See also:
Robert Jensen: Influence of Pornography on Sex Offenders (explicit language)