why men should be porn free

"The pornography industry has done a masterful job of focusing the discussion on womens choices. Everyone who ever had a conversation or done work on this know that the first thing you get in a Q&A period is that if women are choosing to perform in this who are we to say? Who are we to condemn the women in pornography? I think everybody has made it clear that we don't, that's the whole point. I've never been in a feminist space where anyone condemned the women performing pornography. What we have to do is focus on the choices men make. We have to develop an argument and what I want to lay out now is how we can talk to men. Whether we agree with this thing, this argument of womens choices a lot of people have accepted that and we have to be able to respond to it. So how do we respond to men who say listen women choose, who am I to say differently? We know of course that womens choices like all choices are constrained in various ways. That people who have histories of sexual abuse, people who have very few economic opportunities or perceive very few economic opportunities. One argument to make to men is when you pop a dvd into that player and when you masturbate to those images of that woman how do you know that she is one of the women who claims to make a completely free choice? That is you don't have enough information to know what choices that woman made under what conditions. And occasionally someone comes back from that and says well what if I knew? What if i knew the woman? What if I had some information? What if I read her autobiography, what if? And there's a response to that as well, and this I borrow from a really really bright young feminist lawyer Michelle (?) who developed this argument around prostitution. She says, listen, even if you could guarantee that that particular woman had made a completely free choice unconstrained by anything or in the world. When you contribute to the demand for pornography you are creating a world in which systematically large numbers of women who are not making choices quite so freely are going to be injured. That is creating a demand and fueling an industry guarantees that women will be hurt or injured in the future."

~Robert Jensen
Professor, Anti-Pornography feminist
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