And I thought my shrink was bad
This guy is all over the place but what it comes down to is that he ignores reality in order to claim men are being victimized by porn and don't hate women. "I know lots of guys who view violent porn and they don't hate women. They have great relationships with women."

I love statements like this. It's "Some of their best friends are black" for porn. I don't know about you, but because I don't hate black people, I also don't want to watch or support films that depict them in a degrading, stereotypical, or racist way. It's more complicated than that, but you'll notice that there's no sexist equivalent to the word nigger. We're just not shocked that women get abused. In fact, we're bewildered when they're not, when they protest otherwise. That's what women are for.

First snippet:
Porn is not harmless. But neither is it an important cause of sexual violence or misogyny. Partisans on both sides of this debate have littered their arguments with distortions, hyperbole and cheap rhetorical tricks. We have to wade through a lot of bullshit to get to the truth.

You can start by not ignoring the fact that men who do not hate women are not going to seek out entertainment that degrades them so they can get off. Men who hate women like to see justification for their hatred. Porn reflects the culture, and the culture hates women. Therefore it does play a part in causing sexual violence and misogyny. And I just bet this guy is going to come down a lot harder on feminist critics of porn that on defenders of it. He's already ignored porn's place in society.

Take, for example, the case of Timothy McVeigh, which illustrates the way someone infected by hatred by society becomes unreachable after a while. McVeigh carried one book with him everywhere and re-read it obsessively: The Turner Diaries. By the time he discovered this book he was already an alienated, racist, sexist, white supremacist. He didn't seek out Black like Me in order to fight his tendencies; he sought out a racist tract to further indulge his racism. Like your basic woman-hating porn viewer, he was already screwed up. Unlike porn, though, The Turner Diaries was not a socially-reflective multi-billion dollar business which has to change with its customer base in order to continue being profitable. In responding to demand, the porn industry is causing sexual violence and misogyny to become normalized in society. This guy totally misses that.

There follows two paragraphs. In one, the author talks about how the porn industry is faking it by talking about the free choice of the women who make up the majority of its cannon fodder---swiftly used up, badly-paid---despite Jenna Jameson---and shaped by years of previous abuse. These are the women whose existance the sex poxxes find so troubling that they ignore them whenever possible to trumpet how great porn is them. This is nice and all, but it falla a little flat because his next paragraph is "But what about teh Menz!"

Furthermore, with the near-universal availability of porn, there are now thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of men who have become addicted to it. Spending between 10 and 50 hours/week glued to their computer or TV screens looking at porn, talking dirty in chat rooms, seeking out greater and greater taboos to violate, these particular men are being victimized, their relationships betrayed, and their families and friends cheated of their presence. Such men were likely never really connected to others in healthy ways before the advent of porn, of course, nor can it be convincingly argued that the absence of this outlet would make them so, but like any addict, their compulsion makes any other options impossible, including that of getting psychotherapeutic help. The presence of a casino doesn't cause the tragedies that sometime result, but neither are casino operators morally innocent.

These guys are victims you know, even though at any point they have the ability to sit up and ask, "Why am I watching a woman who's crying in pain? Why am I watching a woman who's been called a slut and a whore? What does that say about me? Does it bother me?" No, they're victimized. The guys are totally passive; porn did this to them, unlike casinos----where chance and money---intangible and inanimate objects, by the way----are offered and traded. He's claiming that these guys were fucked up from the beginning but given that he appears determined to ignore the way most men don't resist sexism, his claims of victimization are offensive. Many men eagerly embrace and tout sexism. They glory in their dominance over women. They enforce sexist gender roles which give them power. They love the power they have over women. Men are not being victimized by society unless they fight it. Men who give in and go along get rewarded, same as the sex poxxes do.

When this guy talks about 'others' he doesn't specify gender but let's face it, by ignoring the different ways that men interact with others of different genders, he's once again ignoring so much of reality that it's hard to take him seriously. It's almost an abstinenct-only level of blindness.

Also, how offensive is it that this guy calls these guys addicts and compares them to gambling addicts? Porn is women being used and abused for the gratification of men in a sexist society. Women are human beings. (Watch the trolls miss that one by a mile.) Addicts are addicted to substances. Gamblers are addicted to the idea of winning money. Women are not substances or other inanimate objets. This betrays far too much of this guy's mindset.

On the other hand, it is amazing to me how literal and concrete is the thinking of anti-porn advocates like Jensen who watch a porno, note its sordid and dehumanizing story line, and then assume that the man masturbating to it must really hate women and secretly want to dominate and devalue them. The shock value of the story line (to the extent there is one) is intended to carry the weight of an argument that is basically superficial. After all, if some guy gets off on watching 10 men ejaculate on a woman's face -- while she begs for more -- he must be either a misogynist watching his wishes come true or one in the making.

You know, only a guy who really truly believes anything a guy tells him would fall for this crap. There is such a thing as cause and effect, and a guy who watches hateful porn is a guy who has issues with women. How hard is this to understand? Racists have a whole underground of white supremacist music, videos, and so forth to cater to their hatred. Porn that depicts women as sluts, whores, and things is the stuff that appeals to men who are sexist rather than racist. Why is he letting them off the hook? Because they said so?! This guy might have the luxury of believing this bullshit; as a woman, I don't, and that's the big difference between us. He can have his fluffy bunny beliefs and they won't harm him; they'll just harm women as he lets these guys off the hook. He's a porn watcher of a different sort; he believes in the fantasy that men who have every reason to lie would tell the truth. "Of course I hate women!" I'd love to see his questionnaire, by the way. What guy is going to admit to outright hating women?

Except that he's not. I've treated dozens of guys who might get aroused by such scenarios who don't hate women at all. They have decent and loving relationships with women. And most important, they are able to distinguish between a fantasy and reality, something that Jensen seems both unwilling and unable to do.

That depends on his definition of 'hatred of women', his definition of 'loving and decent' and his definition of how one ascertains these things. Somehow I don't trust his opinion. The last comment is a bitter swipe at Robert Jensen, who broke faith with other men when he wrote a book criticizing their porn consumption habits. How come we never call men catty? This kind of statement is a slap at Jensen that comes out of nowhere and sets up the reader for what I suspected from the beginning will be this guy's conclusion: sure, the porn industry is bad for women, but the real tragedy is the men who are addicted and not given comforting hugs by men like Robert Jensen. They feel bad! What more do you want?

Distinguishing between fantasy and reality is not a big deal. If you don't do it, you're nuts, however. This guy is slyly labelling Robert Jensen insane while bending over backward to be sympathetic to men, the poor dears.

What turns them on in porn scenarios depends crucially on the fact that the woman is depicted as excited.

This ignores the degradation in many of these films. Jensen dealt with the category of porn that leans heavily on inflicting humiliation and pain on women. He ignores that in his 'men are woobies' campaign, because he's already denied that watching the degradation of women means a guy has problems with women.

If she were depicted as primarily hurt and humiliated, these men would instantly lose their interest and erections. If there is one nearly universal common denominator in heterosexual porn it is that the women in it are generally portrayed as easily, constantly and powerfully sexually aroused, driven wild by whatever men want to do with and to them.

How does he know this? We're talking about degrading porn and the men who watches it. Now he's moving the goal posts and ignoring the men who slaver at the humiliation and degradation of women. If these guys want just sexually aroused women, why don't they just watch non-degrading porn? (Which was not the subject of Jensen's book, by the way.)

For most men, this fact is crucial to their arousal, not because they're looking for a rationalization for their violent impulses but because they are guilty about feeling strong, selfish and masculine; feel overly responsible for and worried about women; and secretly believe that women are unhappy and relentlessly dissatisfied with men and their own lives.

Where are these guys? We have a society with lots of guys in it who revel in their power and privilege as men. He doesn't even acknowledge there might be a teensy weensy problem with men. They're all victims. Notice, by the way, how he spends so much time on justifying and explaining and minimizing out of existance the motivations of men, which are always benign in his opinion. In contrast, Robert Jensen is crazy.

In the service of masturbation, these portrayals of "women in heat" momentarily reassure men against their fears, relieve their burdens and offer them a freedom they find lacking in relationships with real women.

This comes awfully close to the sentiments expressed by guys who say they go to hookers because they 'have to pay for sex anyway.' These guys want freedom all right---the freedom from treating a woman like a human being. They want fuck toys. Michael Bader here is the classic case of the guy who keeps comparing women to hamburgers in a discussion about prostitution and not getting why it's so offensive. Men just want the freedom to be selfish and amoral and dominant in a way that they can't find in relationships, so they turn to porn where women are forced to fellate men till they gag and vomit, or cry in pain till their makeup runs.

The sexual fantasies expressed in pornography, as well as those of their own private invention, are arousing to men not because women are being hurt but because they're not.

Got that? Even though Robert Jensen's book dealt with the increasingly violent world of porn, Bader wants us to consider only the porn that Jensen wasn't much interested in discussing. He's already assured us that getting off to violent and disgusting treatment of women does not mean men hate women. After all---they said so. What more proof do we need?

Jensen's main interest was in exposing the dangers of the gonzo porn industry---the Bang Bus, the double penetrations, the steadily-increasing emphasis on making women cry in pain or humiliation. Bader ignores this porn except to deny its impact, then changes the subject to what he evidently finds more palatable; what he firmly believes are the harmless, stress-relieving fantasies of men.

Pornography is the visual enactment of a sexual fantasy.

Real people act out those sexual fantasies. Many of them are women who have been abused.

That's fantasy -- to be distinguished from reality.

You know, lots of people fantasize for quite some time before trying to turn those fantasies into reality. For example, somebody who's had their every wish gratified might want to see a fantasy realized. Rape is practically legal these days. The Duke boys got away with their fantasy of raping a black woman. That's a lot of fantasies for men that are nightmares for women. Oh, wait, where are women in this tender exploration of mens' self serving self deceptions issues?

That's fantasy -- to be distinguished from an intention, wish or even attitude.

An awful lot of men ahve the fantasy of restricting womens' access to abortion and birth control. Let's check on how harmless that fantasy is, shall we?

A fantasy occurs in the imagination. The imagination is creative, capable of all sorts of tricks and distortions.

We're talking sexual, and really, why are we doing that, anyway? The subject was porn. Discussing fantasy without discussing how fantasies get old and how people wnat to put those fantasies into action is dishonest.

Recently, for example, I had a daydream -- a fantasy -- that my brother had suddenly died.

Speaking of which....what in fuck does your brother have to do with woman-hating porn? Oh, yeah, that's right: absolutely nothing.

In the daydream, lots of people came to console me in my grief.

Probably because he's such a shitty thinker. The real daydream was about his fantasy about all the fluffy bunny guys out there who just want 'more freedom' in their real-life relationships with women. As a feminist, I've heard that desire numerous times, and it's not good and harmless and innocent. It always means the guy wants a Real Doll with a pulse.

Now, in reality I love my brother and don't have a shred of resentment toward him.

Maybe his brother's a better thinker than he is.

What I did have at the time was a need for a certain kind of love and attention.

Bingo!

The meaning of my daydream was not "you wish your brother was dead." The real meaning of my daydream was, "You're so guilty about wanting attention that you think the only way you can get it is if you suffer a terrible tragedy." The meaning of a fantasy is often the opposite of its plot; whatever the meaning, it's subjective and can't easily be inferred from its story line.

All of which has what to do with a guy who enjoys watching a woman who's been sexually abused get sexually abused on camera for money? Most porn stars, by the way, aren't Jenna Jameson; new girls in the biz are often ruthlessly exploited and then discarded. Where are they again?

Over the last 10 years I've studied sexual fantasies. I've discovered that they have a fascinating but secret logic. Imagine this scenario: A guy grows up in a family in which he feels responsible for and guilty toward his mother, who he sees as unhappy and weak. He develops an implicit or default view of women as unhappy and weak like his mother. Unfortunately, it's difficult for him -- for anyone in this situation, for that matter -- to get really excited by a woman if he experiences her as unhappy and weak.

Which doesn't explain why he gets excited at the sight of a powerless naked women being ejaculated on while she cries. Or maybe it does. Interesting of course that this guy has never met an internet troll, either in real life or online. Nor does he appear to have ever consulted a woman who's had a sexist encounter with a Real Doll kind of guy. Does this guy intereact with women at all?

That's just the way our minds work. We can't get maximally aroused if we're worried, guilty and responsible.

Ah, the chivalry myth is what this is. Those fluffy bunny guys! How about the guys who get aroused when they're feeling dominant, contemptuous, and sexist? The ones that were the subject of Robert Jensen's book? The book we're supposed to be discussing here?

Fortunately, our imaginations come to our rescue, and we construct some type of fantasy or preference in which this barrier is momentarily overcome. For example, this guy in question might be attracted to strong, dominant or tough women because their energy reassures him that he can't hurt them and doesn't have to feel responsible for them.

Did anybody else get a chill at the phrase and doesn't have to feel responsible for them? Because it dovetails nicely with the notion that when men want 'freedom' in their relationships they turn to porn. Ask a woman how it feels to be with a guy who seeks sexual gratification---excuse me, freedom---outside the relationship.

Or he might like to be on the bottom during sex or even lightly restrained for the same reason. It's easy to see in these cases that if the scenario -- really, just another type of fantasy -- involves a strong and excited woman, his unconscious worries about women are temporarily negated and he can get aroused.

Womens' strength should only be so strong as to arouse men. Gotcha.

Lots of porn features strong women -- picture the dominatrix -- and the male viewer gets aroused for precisely this reason. But many other types of porn address these same issues but in a different way. For example, often the woman is portrayed as dominated, hurt or even degraded, but in the porno she's excited and eager.

When we're supposed to be talking the ordinary women in porn, switching to the powerful dominatrix is, well, a switch. It's called moving the goalposts. Now he's off into fantasy land, discussing his fantasy of what porn must be like in order for him to maintain his little fantasy world of caring and sharing men and invisible abused women.

For example, often the woman is portrayed as dominated, hurt, or even degraded but in the porno she's excited and eager.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to abuse a woman and have her like it. Really, does anyone have a problem with that? Except for anybody who notices it's an abuser's credo.

Men are doing these bad-looking things, but the women are enjoying them.

So he's a mind reader now? I tend to interpret tears and cries of pain as being other than 'enjoyment.'

Our psyches are amazing things, really. They interpret the depiction of a woman's arousal as signifying her health and happiness! And thus you find in almost all porn that women appear aroused.

So now we're talking shiny happy porn as the subject has been successfully changed to shiny happy porn that women would appear in for free!

Porn actresse, dude, are actresses. I know you like fantasies and all, but any guy who thinks that porn actresses are actually happy and shiny in their work is kidding themselves---and their therapist.

Their arousal subliminally says to the male viewer, "I'm not hurt ... I'm even happy!" In fact, were these male viewers confronted with a woman's real pain and fear, they would immediately extinguish their excitement.

Huh. Robert Jensen pretty conclusively showed that guys were getting off to womens' pain and fear,a nd that far from extinguishing their desire, it increased it.

In other words, they know the difference between fantasy and reality. They don't primarily want to hurt woman. What they really want is to be strong, selfish or masculine in ways that excite women, not degrade them. Porn provides them with imaginary scenarios in which this wish is safely gratified.

Safe from prosecution for the men, that is. One thing he's inadvertantly let slip is that these guys want to abuse women and have them like it. Seeing as how the definition of abuse precludes enjoyment, these guys are left with the unsatisfactory substitute of just seeing women be abused and disappointingly act like human beings being abused. What a turn off.

This fact accounts for the absence of any reliable, repeatable studies that prove that exposure to pornography increases the likelihood that the men consuming it will act badly toward women.

I guess he's not going to share any of those studies with us, which makes your average MRA look good, because even they have crappy studies to share.

Among the reasons for this robust finding (or lack thereof) is that the men who were studied intuitively knew the difference between fantasy and reality, between the women on the screen and their girlfriends or wives.

The girls and the wives they wanted 'freedom' from? The ones they cheated on with porn?

Add to this the fact that men, themselves, often don't understand what they're feeling or why, and you have a good understanding of why porn researchers who interview men to explore the effects of porn on male attitudes cannot come up with any convincing evidence that it poses a danger.

You know, feminists have been on this subject for a while, but they have this damnable tendency to look at the actions and discount the self-serving excuses men make for their own behavior. But I guess who wants to look at mens' actions when their words are so pretty?

Now, Jensen is correct when he points out that there is a growing species of porn that is explicitly violent and that appears more extreme in its treatment of the women appearing in it.

Well, you know---she looked like she liked it.

Know as gonzo or extreme porn, it features such things as gagging, double anal penetration, gangbangs, bukkake (in which a group of men masturbate on a woman), and face slapping. Again, despite their irrationality, the scripts almost always call for the woman to get aroused by and seek out such abuse behavior.

So she wants to be abused! Cool! There's nothing disturbing about the idea that this is a male fantasy at all. Where did this guy his license? Box top U?

One might fairly say that it's a sad commentary on the state of our culture and that of the male psyche that such depictions sell so well. But the reason that the commentary is so sad isn't because it reflects what men want to do to women.

Because that's unimportant.

It's sad because men in our culture are so disconnected from themselves and women, and often feel so helpless in their efforts to make women happy, that they require these kinds of fantasies to get aroused, to masturbate, fantasies that temporarily reassure them that they're connected to women in the most selfish and aggressive way possible and that, in the end, the women are turned on and not hurt.

I get to hurt her and she bounces right back! Cool! No jail term!

Dude, if men want to make women happy, they can stop degrading htem, stop the men who use sexist language and threats against them online and in real life, and they could actually, simply, do something for women. No wonder men don't do housework: they're trying to think up excuses about how sex solves everything and how the only form of female happiness they need to worry about is.....Well, convincing her to look happy when she's being abused.

Now, there is a subtype of these pornos that feature -- that make explicit and central -- the woman's suffering, her fear, humiliation, helplessness or some combination thereof.

Which we supposed to be discussing as it was indeed the subject of Jensen's book.

Some men require the actual suffering of a woman to get turned on. Such men have almost always been victims themselves of frightening and traumatic abuse as children and develop such fear and hatred of women that the only safe way they can experience pleasure is through turning the tables on their "persecutors" and doing to women what they feel was once done to them.

It's not his fault! He was abused! Abusing women is therapeutic for Our Hero! Notice how women are just symptoms of the poor dear's problems, and of course they don't develop problems as a result of this at all.

Out of this cauldron come rapists and other men who get sexually excited by the infliction of fear and pain on women. Were snuff films to actually exist, these would be their customers.

But they're not the nice normal guys who want to abuse smiling women, oh no. They're 'rapists', who are somehow different from guys who say, "She looked happy." You know how to find out if she's happy, pal? You ask her.

Here comes the punchline, folks.

Jensen would have us believe that this category of men is huge and that its numbers are maintained and replenished by porn.

Ask any woman online if she's been abused, threatened, insulted, or treated in a hateful way. They're certainly being replenished by something. I have people still carrying grudges against me five years on now.

I see no evidence of either of these assumptions.

We have to trust his viewpoint, his perceptions, and his opinions for this conclusion. I don't.

My research, clinical and otherwise, suggests that this type of man is rare -- dangerous, but rare.

Notice how he doesn't offer to share this research. I kind of think his idea of a hard-hitting interview would be, "So, do you like hurting women?" "Gosh, NO!"

Second, there is no basis for claims that porn causes this type of sexual violence.

This is an opinion pretending to be a fact. Given this guy's bias toward woobie males, I'm going to reject this passive-voiced editorializing yet again.

All kinds of porn, including the gonzo variety, are found in various European countries, which have extremely low rates of sexual violence.

This is classic and it really reveals how blind he is. He's talking about reported rates of sexual violence, not actual rates of sexual violence. This is why I stopped allowing people to use Japan as an example of a porn-using country with a low reported rate of rape. Given the social norms in Japan, to argue that it doesn't have a rape problem is more than ridiculous---it's dishonest. Reporting rape is difficult everywhere but in a country like Japan where sexism remains even stronger than in the US---which is saying quite a bit---it's especially hard. Japan is one of those countries, after all, where the groping problem is so bad that women have been offered sexually-segregated transportation for years. Given porn's depiction of women as whores, it's hard not to see the unrelenting abuse Japanese women suffer in public as a symptom of that 'woman-as-whore' mindset. Where else would it come from in some many men? In a culture?

Sexual violence has been seen in recent years in countries like Bosnia and Rwanda, where there is almost no porn.

What fantasy land is this guy living in? How does he verify this? Hell, how does he prove this? Dude, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you do not get to make pronouncements on what does or does not exist and then bask in the acceptance.

The fact that men can become sexually violent under extreme conditions is a fascinating and troubling fact, but I see no evidence that porn has ever been causally linked to such transformations.

Notice how he doesn't deal with the fact that men can become sexually violent under ordinary circumstances, too. In fact, this is an epidemic, and he totally ignores it. Then again, he can and must do so. Notice how women are not present in his fantasies at all, except figures of gratification to men.

Instead, I think that other factors are much more important, including various types of deprivation,

Please tell me this asshole isn't arguing that deprivation of sex causes men to become rapists. Please.

the creation of paranoid identity myths, messianic leaders and propaganda, economic competition, cultural scapegoating and ignorance.

Or you could just blame sexism, which teaches men that women are the sex class, to be abused and discarded at will, and which causes men to get enraged at women who don't comply. Let's see...do we think hatred toward blacks causes racist acting out? Is that a stretch? Is that a shock? Hatred fantasies often explode violently---look at the KKK. We don't, however, socially sanction such fantasies---or those against, say, Jews----with a multi-billion dollar industry in order to blow off steam or something.

In the absence of evidence, to argue that such sexual violence, much less male violence in general (as Jensen suggests), is caused or even exacerbated by porn is simply to substitute our own fantasies for reality. Since men who watch porn don't make such a mistake, we shouldn't either.

Another opinion posing as a fact. This guy has a career waiting for him as an MRA speaker. Maybe he ought to confront his own fantasies before he starts analyzing fantasies of people he's obviously predisposed toward favoring---those poor innocent, abused-by-porn, men-who-want-women-to-be-happy-about-abuse!

He quotes Woody Allen on his website, specifically the quote where Allen says, "If sex isn't dirty you're not doing it right." Sorry, I reject this quote and this attitude. Sex is natural. Guess who gets labelled with dirty in a sexist society?

In short, I have sacrificed brain cells so you guys don't have to. This is one of the most appallingly ignorant and deceptive things I have read, and lest you miss the point, it's this: This guy is educated, over-identified with men and their excuses, influential and totally blind.

I just ordered Jensen's book from Amazon. I won't be wasting my money on this guy's.