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Abstract
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Pornography as something harmful
Using statistical data, Waltman (2021) describes how pornography as a social practice disregards equality by exploiting people from multiple disadvantaged backgrounds and contributes to gender-based violence. The exploitation and abuse that pornography production inflicts on members of disadvantaged groups is connected to sexual aggression and gender-based violence. Pornography has a close link to prostitution. There is an association between increased pornography consumption and increased sexual aggression, increases in attitudes promoting violence against women, and more frequent purchases of prostituted sex.
Robust and statistically significant data show that consumption of pornography contributes to substantially more gender-based violence and to an array of attitudes that minimize, trivialize, or normalize it (Waltman, 2021). Studies confirm strong links between childhood abuse and neglect, homelessness, and prostitution. Poverty is a predominant reason for entering the sex industry. The pornography industry can use money to coerce prostitutes to participate in unsafe and borderline cruel practices.
Waltman raises the question: What conditions obstruct and enable legal challenges to the production and consumption harms of pornography, and what are the alternatives? He claims that examination of the politics of legal challenges to pornography may provide a blueprint to guide studies of other complicated, seemingly intractable, social problems. This includes challenges to climate change that face "problematic existing norms" that obstruct efforts to mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Waltman recommends a problem-driven approach following the political theorist...
Language: en |