Anti-porn men

The Anti-Porn Men Project was recently launched. Anti-Porn Men is a website providing men with information and a platform to explore anti-pornography views and arguments.

Criticisms of porn from moralistic and religious standpoints are nothing new, but the Anti-Porn Men Project isn’t about moralistic preaching — it comes from a feminist and pro-sex perspective.

Within 20 minutes of posting a link to the website on my Facebook page, I was accused of being anti-sex. Being anti-pornography was equated with being extreme, absurd and unreasonable. I was supposedly saying sex was misogynistic.

But all I said was that I'm anti-“porn”. Is porn sex? The Anti-Porn Men Project says “‘porn’... is — generally speaking — sexually explicit material that is characterised in some way by cruelty, humiliation, or degradation of women. This kind of material constitutes the vast majority of so-called ‘mainstream pornography’.”

There is nothing wrong with sexual imagery or videos of sex. But porn encourages sexism because the vast majority of it shows sex as something that objectifies women, and implies women's role in sex is to please men.

The women's rights movement won important victories in bringing female sexuality into the open, which was emancipating for society. But now, women's sexuality is drowned out by the avalanche of porn that depicts women's role as mere objects, and their role in sex as secondary to men's.

Men’s porn use is not an isolated and separate part of their lives. You can't spend a significant amount of time consuming sexist and degrading material without it affecting your view of women.

Porn is increasingly available and normalised in our culture. This constant degrading representation of women undermines women’s confidence and reduces their sexuality to a tool for pleasing men.

Porn presents violent, man-centric and degrading sex as the norm. Consent and safe sex are often nonexistent.

Porn implies it’s acceptable for men in positions of power to hit on and touch up women within their control or authority at.

Porn presents sex as something a man does to a woman for his gratification, at his choice, as opposed to something two people consensually engage in.

Familysafemedia.com says the average age of first exposure to internet porn is 11, and that 80% of 15 to17-year-olds have had multiple exposures to hard-core material.

This imagery damages how young men view sexual relations and women in general. Presenting objectified women as the norm undermines men's ability to interact with women as equals.

This also destroys men's confidence when they find sex to be not as it is depicted and themselves not to be sexual iron men.

I've had male friends who wouldn't have sex, even with women they were in relationships with, unless blind drunk, because they found their perceived lack of performance too stressful.

Another friend felt guilty for forming an emotional relationship with a woman without wanting to share it as a graphic sexual conquest with the rest of the footy team.

I want my sexuality back! This doesn't mean calling for censorship of pornography or just attacking those who watch it. It means saying sexuality is a beautiful thing that we all should enjoy. But porn is not sex, porn is not real and porn is not healthy.

Let’s stand up for a real sexuality, so our brothers don’t feel like freaks for caring, and our sisters can feel sexually safe and welcome. To do this, we need to be Anti-Porn Men.