You're absolutely right here and I would love to read more of that stuff and digest it a bit. I'm open to any suggestions you may have and I'll sincerely read them.
I have read some critiques, like Violence and Pornographic Imagery by Natalie Percell. While I'm a big fan of philosophy, including feminist philosophy, (Beauvoir is one of my favorite writers ever, I'm a sucker for phenomenology and consider Ethics of Ambiguity one of the best philosophical works ever written, along with The Second Sex), I haven't found it compelling and when it runs counter to just about all of the observed data on the subject, it certainly doesn't trump those observations.
That doesn't mean it's not without use. Philosophy often has a place in describing the human experience, which can be different from the facts of reality (hence my love of phenomenology, it offers us access to a different realm of the human experience). Philosophy is complimentary to science, not antithetical to it.
That particular book and others who dabble in the same porn-causes-violence myth are fatally flawed simply because much of what is said is demonstrably untrue.
My gripe with the anti-porn feminist stuff I've read (though there's a lot more out there) is that there were four fatal flaws:
1. They go against all the observable facts with claims about how porn is harmful or makes people violent when it empirically, demonstrably does not. The "porn makes men violent" myth isn't the only one. There's the "all performers are forced to make porn against their will" myth and others. There's the "men who watch porn ignore their wives because porn hooks them" myth. Even Nicholas Kristoff's crushing NY Times piece on the non-consensual videos and underage trafficking victims of Pornhub only found fifteen instances total, which is terrible, don't get me wrong, and Pornhub rightfully got what they deserved when credit card processors refused to take payments for them and they were sued to high heaven. But those fifteen cases among millions, while unspeakably awful, shouldn't be considered typical.
2. It hoists up a certain type of porn, namely rough stuff, as if it's the norm. A male-dominated scene of violent, rough sex isn't the same as a scene where a couple explore something like a hotwife dynamic, polyamory, or a bisexual relationship. Scenes that focus on mutual pleasure and consent are vastly different from rough scenes, etc. Men are unshackling themselves from the same homophobic beliefs that have held us down for thousands of years. Not only was "cuckold" the second most popular search way back in 2012, but the data shows that men are getting much more heteroflexible and male bisexual porn searches are skyrocketing. (1) Of course, porn isn't causing this just like it's (not) causing people to behave badly, but it is allowing people, especially men, a comfortable place to explore their preexisting desires as they challenge traditional definitions of masculinity that were rooted in creating an Other out of women and LGBTQ people. Porn is just an impotent bystander in these larger cultural shifts, not a causal agent.
3. Conflating of moral harm, someone being harmed by the production or consumption of pornography, with a dislike for it. If all the actors and viewers are consenting, where's the problem, the moral harm? It's their bodies, their choice, simple as that. It's extremely hard to convince me that something is bad for people and they just don't know it without serious evidence, like a 4,000% increase in lung cancer rates in smokers and a plausible mechanism for how this is happening.
4. Misleading statistics. Authors often find one study with serious methodological flaws and ignore the rest. One study found that "88% of porn contains violence against women," but the study counted things like consensual hair-pulling or butt slapping as violence on par with sexual assault. The two simply aren't close to the same and should never be compared together. Subsequent research disproved this and the researchers rightly called it out. Anyone still touting this claim as indisputable fact is either ignorant or lying.
Anyways, thanks for hashing this out. If you've got any recommendations, comment the book titles and I'll check them out. I'm all ears.
1. https://medium.com/sexography/2022-will-be-the-year-of-the-heteroflexible-man-cf53a6919fc3
