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Recommended: Pornography and violence to women

In the late Seventies, America became shocked and outraged by the rape, mutilation, and murder of over a dozen young, beautiful girls. The man who committed these murders, Ted Bundy, was later apprehended and executed. During his detention in various penitentiaries, he was mentally probed and prodded by psychologist and psychoanalysts hoping to discover the root of his violent actions and sexual frustrations. Many theories arose in attempts to explain the motivational factors behind his murderous escapades. However, the strongest and most feasible of these theories came not from the psychologists, but from the man himself, "as a teenager, my buddies and I would all sneak around and watch porn. As I grew older, I became more and more interested and involved in it, [pornography] became an obsession. I got so involved in it, I wanted to incorporate [porn] into my life, but I couldn’t behave like that and maintain the success I had worked so hard for. I generated an alter-ego to fulfill my fantasies under-cover. Pornography was a means of unlocking the evil I had burried inside myself" (Leidholdt 47). Is it possible that pornography is acting as the key to unlocking the evil in more unstable minds?

According to Edward Donnerstein, a leading researcher in the pornography field, "the relationship between sexually violent images in the media and subsequent aggression and . . . callous attitudes towards women is much stonger statistically than the relationship between smoking and cancer" (Itzin 22). After considering the increase in rape and molestation, sexual harassment, and other sex crimes over the last few decades, and also the corresponding increase of business in the pornography industry, the link between violence and pornogrpahy needs considerable study and examination. Once the evidence you will encounter in this paper is evaluated and quantified, it will be hard not come away with the realization that habitual use of pornographic material promotes unrealistic and unattainable desires in men that can leac to violent behavior toward women.

In order to properly discuss pornography, and be able to link it to violence, we must first come to a basic and agreeable understanding of what the word pornography means. The term pornogrpahy originates from t...

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...onse to Langton." Philosophy & Public Affairs. Summer 1992: 65-79.

Jenish, D’Arcy. "The King of Porn." Maclean’s. 11 Oct. 1993: 52-56.

"Did Sexy Kalvin Klein Ads Go Too Far?" Maclean’s. 2 Oct. 1995: 36.

Kaminer, Wendy. "Feminists Against the First Amendment." The Atlantic Monthly. Nov. 1992: 111-118.

Leidholdt, Margaret. Take Back The Night: Women on Pornography. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980.

Nicols, Mark. "Viewers and Victims." Newsweek. 10 Aug. 1983: 60.

Russell, Diana E.H., ed. Making Violence Sexy: Feminist View on Pornography. New York: Teachers College Press, 1994.

Webster’s Dictionary. Miami Florida. P.S.I. & Associates. 1987: 286.

Weisz, Monica G., and Christopher M. Earls. "The Effects of Exposure to Filmed Sexual Violence on Attitudes Toward Rape." Journal of Interpersonal Violence. March 1995: 71-84.

Whicclair, Mark. R. "Feminism, Pornography, and Censorship." Contemporary Moral Problems. ed. James White. Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN: 1994.

White, Mary. "Women As Victim: The New Stereotype." Spin. Apr. 1992: 60-65.

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