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Sex and Violence
Violent pornography today deserves at least partial blame for a spate of recent mass school shootings in the US, including at Parkland, Florida in 2018, according to US Representative Diane Black (R-TN), in her 2018 campaign for governor. Representative Black blames America’s recent plague of school shootings on, “… deterioration of family”, violent movies, mental illness and pornography. Black claims that pornography is readily available in grocery stores, beyond parental control, “It’s available on the shelf when you walk into a grocery store. Yeah, you have to reach to get it, but there’s pornography there”.1 Although I find no “violent pornography” in my local (California) grocery stores and wonder if it is sold in Tennessee grocery stories, violent sexual pornography is available free or at low cost in great abundance on the internet.
In February 2018 Google searches of “violent pornography” spiked to an all-time high, nearly double the rate of such searches over the past five years.2 By 2019 internet searches for “violent porn” continued to climb and regularly spike,3 Pornhub, one of the largest pornography providers, urges viewers to “Discover the growing collection of most relevant XXX movies and clips”. “Although the internet teams with pornography, no other sex site attracts as many visitors and features more extreme brutal rough violent scenes than Pornhub!”4 Heavy-R, another purveyor of violent porn, advertises viewers to, “Watch free violent sex videos at Heavy-R, a completely free porn tube offering the world’s most hardcore porn videos. New videos about violent sex added today!” Porndig, another popular website, advertises “Hardcore Porn and violent scripted scenes with actresses who love to be fucked with a pinch of violence! Absolutely free and exciting porn for you!”5
While violent pornography offends many, it appeals to a rapidly growing audience from a variety of socio/political backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, and genders. Violent pornography depicts previously forbidden sadomasochistic fantasies, reflecting society’s deepest, rawest, and most hidden drives despite practices that remain socially taboo and possibly illegal.
What role does violent pornography play in popular culture? Most pornography studies adopt either a pro-pornography or an anti-pornography perspective, and both sides debate alleged harms or benefits of porn. Some researchers deride porn as “deviant”, “harmful”, “addictive”, “criminal”, while others emphasize porn’s “educational”, “therapeutic”, or “pleasurable” effects.6
For Baby Boomers, memories of violent pornography might include X-rated movie theaters, topless bars, or “stag films”. Russell Sheaffer notes that scholars generally define stag films as early (i.e. twentieth century) and primitive pornographic films.7 Peter Lehman adds that stag films often follow the plot lines of America’s bawdy songs, which express venerable “dirty jokes” and “white trash” sensibilities. Popular stag films express ribald joke plot lines, including “the farmer’s daughter”, and “a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar …”, and they often evoke violence. In one renowned instance, John Wayne Bobbitt, a 24-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant, infamously raped his wife Lorena after arriving home drunk. Outrages and angered by her husband’s drunken (and unsatisfying) rape, Ms. Bobbitt slashed off his penis as he lay in a drunken stupor. The resulting tumult introduced graphic violence on John’s and Lorena’s part and inaugurated a spirited debate about male and female sexual violence. Lehman describes John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut (1995), a stag film with a feminist twist: “if you don’t learn better sexual technique and start being more sensitive to your partner’s needs, you’re going to get yours cut off too, and what’s more, you’ll deserve it”.8 Bobbitt’s case evokes both rape-revenge as well as male castration fears and became an ideal narrative to express feminist issues of the era.
The word “pornography” derives from the Greek porni (“prostitute”) and graphein (“to write”) and originally signified a work of art or literature depicting prostitutes.9 Today, pornography often carries pejorative connotations evoking extreme and presumably exploitative acts of communication, as in “that’s pornographic!”
Culture of Violence
Violent pornography, of course, exists within a culture often described as violent. H. Rap Brown, 1960s’ activist, famously observed that, “Violence is necessary. It is as American as cherry pie”.10 Author Chris Hedges argues that Americans inhabit a “culture of violence” enforced and perpetrated by vigilante groups, slave patrols, gunslingers, Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts detectives, gangs of strikebreakers, gun thugs, company militias, White Citizens’ Councils, the Knights of the White Camellia, and the Ku Klux Klan. Hedges notes that heavily armed mercenary paramilitaries, armed militias such as the Oath Keepers, and the anti-immigration extremist group Ranch Rescue, along with omnipotent and militarized police forces, form a portion of a seamless continuation of America’s gun culture and vigilante tradition. He labels justifications for our current pro-gun culture “the rhetoric of violence”.11 Henry A. Giroux reminds readers of US history of violence, “Mind-numbing violence, war crimes, and indiscriminate military attacks on civilians on the part of the U.S. government are far from new and date back to infamous acts such as the air attacks on civilians in Dresden along with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War”.12
US military forces serve on continuous active duty worldwide and have fought wars annually since the founding of the nation in 1776. At present, the US fights overt hot wars on “terrorism” on many fronts, from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, and the Philippines to covert operations worldwide. It relies on bombers, missiles, military drones, special forces, and cyber-warfare to defeat its enemies. In August 2016 the US released guidelines for dealing with foreign and domestic terrorists. At first suppressed, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) forced the US government to release these guidelines for the use of lethal American military force outside areas of active combat. It revealed that decisions ultimately reside with the President.13
The US’s obsession with violence translates into overwhelming dominance in the sale of lethal weapon production worldwide. Presently, America supplies 75% of the global trade in arms. In addition, the US bears the burden of having the highest per capita rates of murder, the highest percent of its population possessing firearms, and the world’s most violent popular culture.14 In the US, twice as many women are murdered by males than American warriors fallen in battle. American women suffer not only physical abuse but also emotional and financial abuse.15
Shockingly high levels of domestic violence and highly visible instances of societal violence reinforce the idea that the US finds itself mired in a “culture of violence”. This culture creates and nurtures violent pornography, which perpetuates stereotyped gender roles and valorizes violence toward women, divisive racial relations, and child exploitation.
Saturated in media violence, Americans overwhelmingly perceive violent crime as rising.16 However, violent crime rates precipitously and continuously declined in the last two decades. Violent crimes reported by victims rose during the 1960s and 1970s, peaking in 1981 at 4,770 per 100,000 people. From that point until today violent crimes plummeted to 1,690 per 100,000 by 2009, a decrease of 65%. By comparison, the rate of violent crimes reported to law enforcement peaked in 1991 at 758.2 out of 100,000 before steadily plunging to 431.9 in 2009, a decline of 56%.17 Crime rates plummeted even during the Great Recession, defying dire predictions of crime rate spikes.18
In the face of precipitously plunging crime rates, media ramped up depictions of violent events. Journalist Carolyn Gregoire already observed back in 2015, “… it’s nearly impossible to turn on the TV, open up a web browser, or scroll through Twitter without being assaulted with notifications of a new world disaster (or two, or three …)”. Because of the intense drama surrounding real-world violence, the news media focuses on violent events. Gregoire believes media’s fascination with real-world violence arises from humanity’s “natural negativity bias”, which attracts attention to the most threatening, depressing, and anxiety-causing events, i.e., media’s sadomasochism. She further observes that media-depicted violence finds widespread acceptance because it initially appears less threatening than actual violence since, “… we don’t process the input as threatening stimuli”. We cannot avoid, she argues, internalizing negative stimuli from pop culture and the media, “… which can affect mood and cause one to feel more negatively towards today’s cultural environment …”.19 The pessimistic public climate regarding the alleged acceleration of criminal violence may induce some observers, like US Representative Diane Black, to blame high-profile school shootings on media violence and the prevalence of violent pornography.
Today’s popular culture is perpetually saturated with violent and abusive language as well as actions. While many perceive violence as physical, Andrea Borghini explains that verbal abuse also qualifies as violence even in the absence of physical attack. She reminds us that verbal abuse includes accusing, undermining, verbal threatening, ...
