Massachusetts legislators heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing on March 16, 1992. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.414-415).
Testimony of Jaye Morra
…I’m a senior at Wheelock College in Boston…
I was taking a class with Gail Dines, a professor at Wheelock College, who has introduced me to feminism…
I’ve been raped once before. I don’t want to be raped again. I was raped at a university, knowing that pornography runs rampant at that university.
I studied pornography for approximately 17 hours in two days, so that I could do a lecture at Simmons College on the effects of pornography… I found articles giving directions of how a guy should take his girlfriend away for the weekend and all these things he should do to her while they are away. I was reading through this, and these things were absolutely torturous, giving men all kinds of ideas of what they can do to their girlfriends, and how they can hit them where the bruises won’t be obvious to people, and torturous things such as not letting her go to the bathroom and making her hold it for hours, and hours, and hours, and when she finally can go, to make her go in a litter box, and all these kinds of things.
Then I decided to protest Video Expo, which is a pornography store that opened up right near my college, and three women’s colleges are surrounding the store. A radio station, very popular with college men, was giving away free adult videos to only fraternities in this area, which really scared me, because I know that there are lots of rapes in colleges and I know that there are lots of rapes filmed in colleges. So I went on to protest, and I got a great response.
See also:
Gail Dines Presents: Pornography and Pop Culture (explicit)
Gail Dines
is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Wheelock College in
Boston. For 20 years she has lectured across the country against
pornography and sexist portrayals of women. A Google video (1 hr 2 min) is now available of the lecture she gave to a rapt audience at the Pornography and Pop Culture conference
at Wheelock on March 24. This video describes the increasingly harsh
misuse of women in modern pornography–such as in the emerging
“ass-to-mouth” genre–and how the people, money and values of porn
reach deep into mainstream media and corporations.
This video includes explicit still images. Some may find it painful to
watch, especially victims of sexual violence. Acknowledging this,
activists have found that presenting today’s porn in an unfiltered
fashion is “an effective and rapid consciousness-raiser about misogyny and male views of women”. We have seen our opposition claim that we should go easy on porn because it’s a form of “art”, that it represents the empowerment of women, or that today’s porn is no more harmful than paintings or century-old erotica pictures. We feel the best counter to these arguments is to show people what today’s porn actually is.
Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Bridges: “So how many scenes didn’t contain aggression? About 10%.”
Capital Video’s Magazine Rack: Bondage, Racism and More
“Because her body is beginning to ache, she writhes on the carpet. It makes watching her even more arousing.”
“A bed is still one of the most convenient bondage platforms invented
by man. If the headboard is of the metal type, rather than solid wood,
so much the better. A girl’s wrists can readily be tied to it,
imprisoning her.”
“Tied to the post, Tracy takes a fearful whipping.”
“With
the shapely divorcee twisting like a snake and frantically protesting
the indignity he was inflicting on her, Rex proceeded to peel her black
panties down…”
Free Book Download: Diana Russell’s Against Pornography: The Evidence of Harm (explicit)
Against Pornography is unusual in that it goes beyond abstract
discussions of pornography to present the raw material, so readers can
judge for themselves. Dr. Russell reprints and analyzes over 100
cartoons and pictures from publications like Playboy, Penthouse,
Hustler and Cheri.
Behind the Scenes of Deep Throat with Linda Lovelace
[Explicit language:] “Marchiano traveled to campuses to speak out about
her two and a half year imprisonment by her husband/manager Chuck
Traynor. Linda’s speech encouraged women on the campus to protest
outside the fraternity-sponsored showing of Deep Throat. She said that
in this movie there are visible bruises all over her body that attest
to part of her torture. The fraternity brothers’ response, was to shout
out during Deep Throat: ‘Fuck her, hurt her, rip her.’ Toward the other
females on the screen they screamed comments such as ‘Ugly bitch and
whore.’ They chanted, ‘Bruises, Bruises, Bruises!’ continually during
the film.”