Pornography Essay, Research Paper
Pornography is displaying your body in a fashion that is indecent and in a manner that is vulgar towards your own personal image. Some people believe that pornography is discrimination against women. I feel as though if the person displaying him or herself feels that it is not immoral or hurting their self-esteem, then they should be able to do it without being judged by others.
There are different forms of pornography that individuals look at in different ways. Some types include movies in which people are having sex, or even pictures of children with no clothes on. You have to look at each case with a different attitude because it is different when you have a full-grown adult posing nude in a magazine and when there is an adult with pictures of children nude in his house. Also, there are types of pornography, which are illegal that you must take into account. Having a magazine such as Playboy is in no way, shape, or form illegal, but having pictures of children posing in the same manner as the women in the magazines is definitely illegal because the children are not of proper age in which they can make judgements because they have not been exposed to the real world where people judge you based on your appearance and how you show yourself. There are some forms of pornography that are obscene. For example, when you see a porno movie where there are women or men with animals or with inanimate objects. These are just ridiculous and show bad towards all of humanity because no one in his or her right mind should even think of doing anything like this.
Pornography has always been identified with obscenity; it is whether or not the average person that is applying contemporary community standards says the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prudent interest. This is stating that if a normal person in a set community believes something is unjust or immoral, than chances are it probably is and the majority of the people around them also believe that it affects them in the same manner. Obscene materials are such that they have the tendency the deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, such as those who carry pictures of children with them in a sick manner, who may pass them onto their perverted friends.
Different people look at pornography in dissimilar fashions because everyone has separate views on different topics. For instance, you can read a passage out of a magazine and think that it is obscene and you will think that the entire publication is perverted because you think that one sentence is immoral. The good thing about the Roth test is that the material is judged as a whole so if just one sentence is seen as unjust, then the whole article will be determined as moral and not obscene. The test allowed the obscenity of a specific work to be determined by unlikely people who were vulnerable to this kind of test. On the other hand, this test judges materials to be immoral by what the average person believes or thinks. So by asking people who they know will feel pornography is moral, the Roth test will always work. That is like asking someone if they would like it if you gave them free money. Of course you will say yes and that is why the Roth test is biased towards whichever side the person conducting the test feels towards the specific topic at hand. Another problem with this test is that it is intended for the issues at hand during the present time. So no matter the topic at hand, you can twist around the questions so that every answer comes out in your favor. There is yet another situation that can be debated when talking about the Roth test which is who determines where to find an average person and how will you know who an average person is?
Some see pornography as sexual discrimination and a violation of women s civil rights. MacKinnon describes pornography as graphical sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures or words that also includes women dehumanized as sexual objects, things, or commodities. She goes on to point out through her essay that recent experiments have proven that pornography causes harm to women through increasing men s attitudes and behavior of discrimination in both violent and nonviolent forms. By this she is saying that when men look at these women in magazines, they look at women as if they are inferior to themselves. This is not the only way you can look at these types of materials. Some people look at pornography as art. They see a woman s body as very natural in the sense that this is how we were meant to be seen, without clothes and in the nude. MacKinnon is for the constitutionality of city ordinances that would prohibit pornography. That means that each state as it would be, can regulate its own laws against or for pornography. She goes on to state that pornography is not a fantasy or a corrupt and confused misrepresentation of natural and healthy sexual situations. It institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, which fuses the dominance and submission with the social construction of male to female. So by women portraying themselves in this manner, males are gaining more power and control over women because we start to see them as objects.
Pornography should not be identified with promoting discrimination and violence against women because men don t look at a porno movie or magazine and then go out and rape some random woman. Pornography shouldn t even be looked at as an obscenity because if the person in question is willing and fully able to make the decision to pose nude, then I see no reason why this should upset anyone other than herself. One person can believe something is pornography and in direct violation with women s civil rights, but another person can believe that it is an expression of one s beliefs. Erotica is sexually explicit materials premised on equality but is still offensive to people who dislike pornography. There are some forms of pornography that I do find offensive and that is when you see humans having sex with animals or having some kind of sexual relations with them. Or when you see a grown adult with children. That is just repulsive to me because that is not natural.
I don t believe it is a good idea to have different states having different laws prohibiting pornography. When we have situations like this, it creates tension between the people who don t enjoy looking at those materials and the people who think it is degrading to women. This brings up another problem, which is when someone gets in trouble because of pornography, and they go to court, it all depends on how the judge and the jury feel is the appropriate definition of pornography. So you can have a person who was charged as a sex offender in one state but go to another state and be a normal person who hasn t committed a crime. I think that the laws, which prohibit pornography, are all dependent on what the high society people in that specific area think should be done. I will admit I am not in the upper class around where I live but we have never had a problem with pornography because we have never made such a big deal about restricting laws against age. I feel that children should be shown and taught what exactly pornography is and what is moral and immoral about it. If we teach them what is right and wrong about sexuality then we won t have any problems with rape or sexual abuse. The only bad thing about saying that is if someone in return says that it is bad to expose children to that material before they are of proper age, but who is to say when you are of proper age to see those because kids mature at different ages. There are some children nowadays that are more mature than many adults.
I feel that pornography has its ups and downs but should be taught to children at a young age so they can see what is what and how you shouldn t treat women like objects. Pornography is fine to a certain extent but should not be overplayed or done in such extreme fashions or situations. We should not be exposed to bestiality or pictures of children in uncomfortable situations. No one should care if you have porno movies in the privacy of your own home because you are not outside in the real world raping women just because you just saw a naked woman in a magazine. We should have the same laws that prohibit pornography nationwide instead of just in each individual state because then all of the people who like it go to one place and that segregates instead of blending which is what we want to have no matter what the situation may be. There are some forms of pornography, which are acceptable, but there are others, which are repulsive and should not be displayed.
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