On his blog today, gender studies professor Hugo Schwyzer critiques the feminist credentials of the alt-porn website Suicide Girls and wonders whether porn can ever empower women. Hugo writes: The Suicide Girls site (I won’t link to it, but you can figure it out yourself–it is not “work safe”) is the pioneer “alt-porn” center on the […]
Continue reading Hugo Schwyzer: ‘Suicide Girls’, Empowering to Women?
Capital Video places job ads on Monster.com, a large employment site. We recently asked Monster to reject these ads, and we invite the public to contact Monster and support our request. We wrote: I would like you to consider removing all job ads for Met-Cap Management/Capital Video from your site. Capital Video runs a large […]
Continue reading Ask Monster to Reject Capital Video’s Job Ads
Calvert claims that it “is one of the nation’s largest socially responsible mutual fund firms with approximately $14 billion in assets under management.” Among other things, it refuses to invest in companies that produce porn, saying: Calvert believes that consumers have a right to products and services that are safe, of high quality, and not […]
Continue reading Ask Calvert to Divest from Porn Distributors
The AIM Health Care Foundation is a “non-profit corporation created to care for the physical and emotional needs of sex workers and the people who work in the Adult Entertainment Industry.” This AIM handout (PDF, explicit) tells porn workers, “THE FOLLOWING SEX ACTS CAN PUT YOU AT RISK FOR THE FOLLOWING STDS. THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE […]
Continue reading Types of Porn and Their Occupational Safety Risks (explicit)
Van F. White was the first person of color ever elected to the city council of Minneapolis. He writes about his evolving views of porn in “Pornography and Pride”, published in Men Confront Pornography (1990, p.290-292)… I’m 59 years old, and I’ve known something about pornography for many years. When I was young, I worked […]
The website Family Facts has gathered citations of numerous studies that find that porn consumption correlates with increased rates of infidelity, use of prostitutes, aggression and rape-supportive beliefs. We highlight a few of these studies here: In 1992, the Journal of Interpersonal Violence reported that “Childhood exposure to pornography is significantly related to rape fantasies […]
Tommy Devine has been observing the Valley’s political culture for some years as the man behind The Baystate Objectivist [see interview]. In “Freedom and Decency”, posted on 1/13/07, he shares his reactions to one of NoPornNorthampton’s recent publications… Like most people who work in any field involving self-expression, I’m an absolutist where freedom of speech […]
A federal judge has upheld the rights of Berlin, CT residents to protect themselves from the secondary effects of a topless bar near homes. Today’s Hartford Courant tells the story… BERLIN — In a key decision that upholds the town’s sexually oriented business ordinance, a federal judge has rejected a lawsuit from Gold Diggers LLC, […]
Continue reading Hartford Courant: Judge Backs Sex-Business Ordinance
The following story has been reported on CNN and elsewhere this week. This account is from the website of a Florida TV station: A 31-year-old Central Florida man accused of hanging a woman from a tree and videotaping her torture and rape was attempting to create a bondage-porn video for cash after recently declaring bankruptcy, […]
Continue reading Police: Woman Hung From Tree, Tortured For Bondage-Porn Video
Robert Kaplan is a frequent contributor to The Atlantic and author of Mediterranean Winter: The Pleasures of History and Landscape in Tunisia, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece; Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History; and The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century. In his latest Atlantic article, “A Historian For […]
Continue reading The Importance of People’s Perceptions, Myths and Irrationalities