Men and porn

Now here's a really interesting article - I found it through an email from Spinifex, the Australian feminist publishing house, which put out Pornland by  Gail Dines earlier this year. The article originally appeared in the Guardian under the title "The men who believe porn is wrong". It was reprinted in the Melbourne Age with a different headline: "Men who hate porn". Here are some quotes:

'[Matt] McCormack Evans, now 22, has just co-founded an online project to get men talking about their use of porn. Other such projects have often come from a religious, conservative standpoint, but the Anti-Porn Men Project is grounded in feminist principles, in the notion that pornography is an important social issue, and has a bearing on violence perpetrated against women and wider inequalities. There are, so far, 10 other people who will be writing on the site, and the idea is to create a community, he says, "where people can share their experiences and problems, and find an alternative voice".

In setting up the site, McCormack Evans is one of the few men worldwide to publicly discuss pornography from a feminist perspective – positive about sex itself, open to the idea of people engaging in the widest range of consensual sex acts, but concerned about the industrialisation of sex and where this leads....'

'While an enormous amount has been written about how pornography affects women – particularly the terrible way in which they are sometimes treated within the industry – less has been written about how it affects men, which seems odd given that, as McCormack Evans says, pornography is a product predominantly "made by men, marketed by men, and consumed by a massive male majority".


One obvious problem for many porn users is the conflict between their stated belief in equality and respect for women, and the material they're watching in private. McCormack Evans says he used to exist in a "kind of double consciousness. For that half hour when I was watching porn I thought, 'This is separate from my life, it won't affect how I view the world.' But then I realised it did."