1. The sex industry trafficks hundreds of thousands of women and children every year.
2. The industry is racist; white women get paid more than black women.
3. Porn is used by pedophiles to groom children for sexual abuse.
4. Major themes in modern porn are to do with abuse, not sex.
5. Studies show that porn addiction ruins people’s sex lives.
6. Studies show that men are more aggressive towards women after watching porn.
7. Porn addiction is now the leading cause of divorce.
8. Domestic violence and sexual assault/abuse perpetrators get ideas from watching porn.
9. There are high rates of injury, infection and long term health problems among porn workers.
10. Workers in the industry are not protected by industrial or workplace legislation.
11. What about men who “choose” to watch people being abused in order to get off?
12. Oh so you think people “choose” to work in coal mines and then die of lung disease twenty years later?
13. Porn is not like it used to be (this one is handy for giving people an easy out and allowing them to save face and hence, neutralise their defensiveness).
14. Men don’t buy porn to see sex; they buy it to see women being punished (this helps makes the point that sex has nothing to do with it; porn is not sex; helpful when people try to shame you as being ‘anti-sex’ – maybe it’s really pornographers who are anti-sex).
15. When profits are involved, ethics and integrity go out the window (Socialists know this, and it might help to make the point that porn is the biggest industry in the world).
This list was compiled by myself and my readers. Thankyou to all who contributed. The original thread can be found on this site.
Excellent, thanks.
Some really good ones in that list. Although I rarely engage with non-radfems. For my sanity.
Oh this is not meant to encourage any radfem to go out and enlist non-radfems for consciousness raising groups. But when, during the course of your day, the issue comes up at all, I thought it would be a good idea to have some comebacks ready to fire off – for our sanity.
very very helpful, thanks so much for this.
I’d change number 3 to be that porn IS child abuse. But really, this is very good. I love “It’s not empowering to be a toilet!”
No.3 is generally meant to be showing children adult porn in order to convince the children that sexual acts are “normal”, making them more compliant for abuse. Certainly the act of showing porn to kids is child abuse in itself.
Hell yeah. Exposing children to porn is definitely a form of sexual abuse and would warrant a notification to Community Services, and that would not be a controversial stance to take at all. However, this list is specifically about having an arsenal of anti-porn criticisms ready with which to (theoretically) cause mainstream peeps to re-think the whole porn argument. Sowing seeds if you like. Something can’t be so harmless if it’s used for such foul purposes, is the argument here.