I know, interesting title. This is why I am thinking about porn right now. As most of you know I am a nurse and I work in a hospital. I am a supplemental staff nurse for the peri-operative services department at a branch of a world-renowned teaching hospital. Right now several of the nurses I work with are discussing a best selling book called Fifty Shades of Grey. It's kind of hard to be at work and avoid the conversations about this particular book and yesterday was no exception. Two of the nurses I work with were discussing it and someone asked me if I had read it. Well, in typical Lorri fashion I didn't exactly keep my opinion to myself. My response was (and this is pretty much a quote) "Porn is porn, and I hate porn! Being porn aimed at women doesn't make it any different and the fact that there aren't pictures doesn't stop it from being porn." Well, you could kind of tell I had put my foot in it and they were a little startled by my reaction. They really didn't think of the book as pornography. Why is that? Do people really think that unless there's a photograph attached something isn't pornographic? There's a tendency to re-label something as though that makes it into something different so Fifty Shades of Grey gets the more innocuous label of "erotica" and that makes it socially acceptable. But it's still porn. It is created specifically to trigger one's sexual response and there is no emotional or spiritual response being sought.
I once heard a pastor argue that romance novels are a type of porn and while I dismissed him out of hand at the time I've come to believe he really had a point. One of the things porn does is create unrealistic expectations in men, one of the primary feminist arguments against porn is "pornography presents a severely distorted image of sexual relations and reinforces sex myths, that it always shows women as readily available and desiring to engage in sex at any time, with any man, and on men's terms, always responding positively to any advances men make." I normally don't agree much with feminists but I think they've hit the nail on the head there. That IS a big part of what is wrong with porn. Now, if you paraphrase that wouldn't it describe most romance novels? i.e. "romance novels present a severely distorted image of male/female relations and reinforce relationship myths" While I think the comparison falls apart eventually there's still quite a bit to think about. Romance novels do create unrealistic expectations in women, read enough of them and you start seeing romantic interest in every man who disagrees with you (because he's really just fighting the love he feels inside) and you begin to believe that the right man will solve all your problems with nothing more than his great love for you (that he keeps hidden because he fears you don't love him back) and you'll live happily ever after (once he's dominated you and swept you off your feet). As you can probably tell I have issues with romance novels also, and I read a TON of them between the ages of 16 and 25!
My husband told me a story last night about Abraham Lincoln (and I'm paraphrasing here as I've only heard this second-hand). Apparently Lincoln once asked an audience "how many legs does a dog have if you count the tail as a leg?" When the audience responded "five" he told them that the answer was still four. Why? Because the fact that you called a tail a leg did not change the fact that the tail was still a tail and not a leg. You can call something "adult" or "erotica" but the truth is it is porn.
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