I like Cordelia Fine. I spoke to her at the Growing Up Fast and Furious Conference last year, not knowing she was about to present. I want to read her book Delusions of Gender which is not only well reviewed but considered a book of important ideas. Have a look at her website to see her considerable achievements.
Cordelia Fine wrote the lead article in The Monthly this month. I saw it at the newsagents, and, lucky me, found I could read it for free online, so I'm sharing the link here.
http://www.themonthly.com.au/dehumanising-effects-smut-porn-ultimatum-cordelia-fine-3782
The article describes, explicitly, what happens in porn, so not for the squeamish. She looks at the book Pornland, by Gail Dines and the new anthology edited by Melinda Tankard Reist, Big Porn Inc.
... social norms need to be wrested back from the pornographers, as many contributors to Big Porn Inc are attempting to do, and returned to something more closely aligned with the idea of half the population enjoying as much respect and recognition of their full humanity as the other. It isn’t prudishness that explains why there aren’t endless images of headless men’s bulging crotches on billboards, and prepubescent boys in ‘mankinis’ like little sex objects in training. It’s just … civility. Pornland world-order, in which women exist to titillate men, does not belong in everyday life. In the twenty-first century, Zoo magazine belongs on the front counter of a convenience store about as much as a magazine called Best of Black and White Minstrel Shows.
She ends with a call for a Lysistrata type campaign. Dines says there's no room for porn in a just society. Fine suggests ‘No equality, no porn.’
Interesting.
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