Porn as Propaganda

I don’t know if there is anything inherently wrong with pornography. People been depicting sex for thousands of years. Cave walls, pyramids, which are big ass tombs. Imagine having back shots on your gravestone. Niggas been on that ever since they invented art. So, I don’t think it’s anything wrong with depicting sex, but there is a lot wrong with the pornography produced in this day. And as a form of propaganda, it constantly influences your definition of what sex is, what is permissible, what is desirable, what is stimulating, what is consensual. Sexual tourism, violence against women, male dominance, transphobia, Trans fetishism, race fetishism, incest, all these ideologies are represented on the first few pages of pornhub. I think this ultimately serves as propaganda on a deep level. To make these acts and desires both normal and expected.

In my lifetime I have seen mainstream pornography go from exaggerated performances of vanilla sex to becoming performances themed around aggression and domination in the early 2000s when Ghetto Gaggers and Throat Gaggers and all that type of porn started being produced. I remember the strange feelings of shame and arousal that I felt watching those videos as a kid. At fourteen I feel like I was already a two-year porn addict, as were most of the boys I knew. This was the era of “flicks.” I remember my body watching the world redefine what sex was through those movies when I didn’t even know what sex was yet and still don’t. I sometimes think we are all broken past repair.

Acting out images we have seen in pornography is a not so secret, secret male rite of passage. I think we are being conditioned to fester a tremendous resentment between what sex is in real life and how sex is depicted in porn. Men weigh themselves against the men in pornography who get to do “whatever they want.” This is an illusion. Yet porn often tries to assure you it is not. It tries to obscure the fact that these are paid performers. I think this dynamic and how it contrasts to men’s real sex lives triggers feelings of inferiority, frustration, jealousy and ultimately fear of other men and their perceived superiority and what that must mean existentially. The men in porn must be more of a man since they get to do whatever they want and we have to ask. Under patriarchy, it is emasculating to have to ask. “Men” don’t ask. They take. They never don’t get what they want.

This dynamic exists all over patriarchy and it is one beaten into our bones from birth by the world of male dominance. There is always a way or mechanism to measure yourself against another man as lacking. And in fact, if you do not spend your life caring about and striving for the approval of other boys and men you will be cast out. And to be cast out by men, always means to be a target of men’s violence. Once you are outside the wolf pack, they will eat you. So as to not be eaten by other men we conform. Porn, as it can often exist now, helps us conform to all of those forms of violence I listed earlier.

To avoid being devoured by the world of man, men devour the world. That devouring is really encouraged by mainstream pornography. And the addiction to these images we carry in our bodies from childhood is a form of brainwashing that can be hard to break. I remember my father pretty openly watching pornography in the living room and I think I have always struggled with the resentment I felt for that. I think as I’ve made mistakes and caused harm and grown it’s uncovered some of those resentments.

I remember that my dad wanted to open a strip club before he died. He didn’t so much tell me this directly, but more so he had me draft an email to a prospective dancer when I was like eleven. This was the early days of the internet, and neither one of my parents being tech savvy people relied on me for tech stuff. I felt a numb sort of fear sending that email to that grown woman behind my mom’s back. Now that I’m older I see that as my first act of betrayal towards a woman who loved me. I think between men and boys there are often misogynistic rites of passage involving the harm and exploitation of women.

Boys tend to watch porn together and trade porn between each other. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that boys in the Black community use group sex–where the dynamic is multiple boys and one girl where consent for no one involved is established and its almost always organized by the oldest boy–as a boyhood rite of passage. We are uniquely wounded by and bound to patriarchy as a system. For Black boys patriarchy often becomes their sense of agency. We cannot control the white supremacist world around us, so we try to control women. I think everyone knows this, but I don’t think we really talk about it amongst ourselves.

So yeah, I think in all those ways, pornography can be a form of further brainwashing. Which is not a novel thought, but something rather to take more seriously.