Hysterical feminists discuss porn

I recently sat through Gail Dines talking, on you tube, for about 40 minutes about the damage porn does. I was expecting a challenging, thought provoking critique of pornography and so I sat and watched, opened minded. 

Gail Dines has been described as a “Radical Feminist” and the world’s largest anti porn crusader. What I actually sat through was less science and more propaganda. Dines appears to be a Mary Whitehouse’esque prude who has some sort of shame based problem to pornography. When you read her history she was born into an orthodox Jewish family and it would appear this deeply religious, Conservative, upbringing is filtering her thoughts here.

She speak eloquently about pornography use and her reasoning is cleverly presented but unfortunately 100% incorrect and easily debunked.

One point she makes is that once you start watching pornography you need more and more extreme versions in order to continue your enjoyment, this is called the content progression thesis. She says how she interviews men in jails who had been prosecuted for viewing child sex abuse images. Pretty compelling evidence ! Unfortunately not so. It’s an amazing a professor of women’s studies totally ignores research proving the opposite to be true, The Kinsey institute specifically tested this hypothesis and found it incorrect. In fact porn use sanitised over time and the researchers specifically called out that treating porn use in a similar way to drug use was invalid and unhelpful.

Also, as somebody who describes themselves as a scientist, you would think Dines was well aware of survivor bias. This is where only a small subset of use is analysed rather than the whole leading to incomplete conclusions. For example, in WW2, in an attempt to make aircraft more resistant researchers looked at the location of bullet holes on returning air craft and strengthened the planes there. This had no effect because they were only looking at the survivors and not the aircraft that were downed. Dines herself is doing exactly the same thing here. She is interviewing those at the end and not the entire audience.

Ultimately this was less science and more propaganda. It was a prudish, kill joy, angry encouraging a philtrum ring wearing young woman to have shame, and hang ups, over a very natural, enjoyable part of life. Dines’ latent misandry does slip out once or twice when she explains women should really date other women and not men.

Dines comes across as a charlatan and her interviewer a naive young girl. Really both need to do much better.