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4. Porn: girls will be sluts

How do pornographic images shape gender and sexual identity? Sociologist and author Gail Dines answers this question in her TED Talk "Growing up in a Pornified Culture."

Today people live in an image-based society and no longer in a print-based society like some decades ago. In an article published in Details magazine, entitled "How Internet porn is changing teen sex," pornographer Joanna Angel says: "The girls these days just seem to come to the set porn-ready." In other words, the culture is socializing young girls to be ready for pornography whether they ever end up in a porn site or not. They have been taught to hypersexualize and pornify themselves.

When you look at the hypersexualized images surrounding us, from ads to magazine covers and music videos, they all come down to the image of a sexy, good-looking young woman. Since every image has a viewer in mind, who is the target here and what message is this kind of image sending out? The answer is simple. It targets men, and the message is: fuck me.

So, before a male growing up in this culture can even speak, he's surrounded by images of females offering themselves to him. As for young girls, when they are developing their sexual identity, they learn they have two choices: they're either fuckable or invisible. A girl then will most likely go for fuckable in order to fit in and feel appreciated.

The second factor in the culture that plays a big role for boys, of course, is porn itself. As society moved from print porn to online porn, everything changed. Here's another quote from Details magazine: "There is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face." In case you don't know, money shot is ejaculation on the face—and just for the record, it can give the woman sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhea in the eye.

The Internet made pornography accessible, affordable and anonymous, the 3 As that drive demand. According to The Huffington Post, in 2013 porn sites were already getting more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined. It's a multibillion-dollar industry backed up by other industries such as hospitality, IT and credit card services. Corporations traditionally not associated with porn are behind its distribution.

A study analyzing 300 porn scenes showed that 90% of the top watched scenes contained at least one aggressive act of physical and/or verbal abuse against the woman. Dines typed the word porn into a search engine to see what would come up for a boy seeking porn for the first time. Here's what she found in a few seconds, with free access to anyone: "The major act on virtually all websites is gagging," Dines explains. "This is when the men puts the penis so far down her throat that she gags almost to the point of vomiting. They put a lot of mascara on her face so that she's actually tearing and you can see the rivulets of mascara running down. As she's chocking, he grabs her hair, pulls her towards him and says, 'Look at me.' This is a kind of sexual psychopath. When you think that porn is a major form of sex ed, think about what's gonna happen to the next generation of boys, most of whom are brought up on hardcore mainstream Internet porn."

Meatholes

A 12-year old boy that seeks porn on the Internet for the first time is certainly not thinking about gagging. But the text that goes along with the images teaches him this is what he enjoys if he wants to be a man. Here's what a popular site advocates: "Do you know what we say to things like romance and foreplay? We say fuck off. We take gorgeous young bitches and do what every man would REALLY like to do. We gag them til their makeup starts running ... And then we give them the sticky bath."

The next constant scene the boy is going to see is violent pounding anal sex. The promotional copy for the video Annally Ripped Whores, for example, goes like this: "We at Pure Filth know exactly what you want. Chicks being ass-fucked till their sphincters are pink, puffy and totally blown out. Adult diapers just might be in store for these whores when their work is done." This is the violence present in regular mainstream porn, as Gail Dines points out. An introduction to sex that is disturbing and traumatizing to young boys.