Porn Neg Arguments A2 Porn is Obscene:

-Pornography refers to material dealing with sex designed to arouse its readers or viewers. Websters Dictionary defines pornography as writings, pictures, etc. intended primarily to arouse sexual desire. -Under aff interpretation of pornography, almost all sexual material should be banned. -Aff makes the argument that commercializing obscene material demeans the first amendment, however how is the aff to set reasonable limits upon this? Under that interpretation only the sale of porn should be illegal, not a reason to vote aff. -The affs three step method is also flawed: -It fails to provide a reasonable definition of hardcore beyond patently offensive hardcore sexual conduct. This leaves many books, movies, etc. unbanned. Under this definition, nudity does not equal obscenity. The Supreme Court recognized this in Jenkins v. Georgia, when it ruled that the film Carnal Knowledge was not obscene. Justice William Rehnquist wrote in that 1974 case that nudity alone is not enough to make material legally obscene under the Miller standards. -They attempt to define patently offensive under contemporary community standards, they leave this up to the average person. The application of this is troubling. Supreme Justice Berger said: Nothing in the First Amendment requires that a jury must consider hypothetical and unascertainable national standards when attempting to determine whether certain materials are obscene as a matter of fact, It is neither realistic nor constitutionally sound to read the First Amendment as requiring that the people of Maine or Mississippi accept public depiction of conduct found tolerable in Las Vegas or New York City. -This is especially troubling in regard to the internet: The 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Child Online Protection Act in June 2000, writing that Web publishers cannot restrict access to their site based on the geographic locale of the Internet user visiting their site. -Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if First Amendment protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection, wrote Senior U.S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. in ACLU v. Gonzalez. -They also claim that porn increases sex crimes, but in a paper published in 2009 in the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Milton Diamond said: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19665229 "Indeed, the data reported and reviewed suggests that the thesis is myth and, if anything, there is an inverse causal relationship between an increase in pornography and sex crimes. Further, considering the findings of studies of community standards and wide spread usage of SEM [sexually explicit material], it is obvious that in local communities as nationally and internationally, porn is available, widely used and felt appropriate for voluntary adult consumption. If there is a consensus against pornography it is in regard to any SEM that involves children or minors in its production or consumption. Lastly we see that objections to erotic materials are often made on the basis of supposed actual, social or moral harm to women. No such cause and effect has been demonstrated with any negative consequence."

A2: Porn degrades women

Porn doesnt degrade women or cause any negative effects as highlighted by the Diamond evidence read above, cross apply that argument down. It actually empowers women and limiting the discussion to academics and not the workers themselves dooms any progress Mireille Miller-Young, an associate professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of the forthcoming manuscript A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography and a co-editor of the forthcoming The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure." 2014

The popular rhetoric about pornography as violent, degrading, and harmful to women and society ignores the diverse ways that women actually interact with it. As a researcher of the porn industry for the past decade, I have interviewed dozens of performers and have found a much more varied picture of pornography in womens lives than characterized by antiporn activists. For some performers, pornography is a path to college and out of poverty. For others, it is a chance to make a statement about female pleasure. For instance, I have found that women enter the pornography industry because they are enthusiastic about its potential for lucrative, flexible and independent work. Women who previously worked in the retail sector or in nursing found that pornography offered them greater control of their labor, and surprisingly, it treated them with more humanity. Some women found that it enabled them to rise out of poverty, take care of their families or go to college. Others emphasize the creative aspects of pornography, and say it allows them to increase their economic mobility while also making a bold statement about female pleasure. According to the performers I interviewed, the greatest challenge faced by women who work in the pornography business, in addition to social stigma, is gender and racial inequality. Overwhelmingly, women do not control the production and distribution apparatus of the business. The men who run both the large companies and the smaller, amateur businesses tend to marginalize womens perspectives and priorities and to foster a competitive environment that pits female workers against one another. African-American women and women and men of color in general are paid half to three-quarters of what white actresses are paid. Like in other kinds of industries, they face prejudice and inequality in structural and interpersonal forms. But they also challenge them. Porns workers are fighting to achieve greater control over their labor and the products they produce. The Internet is fast democratizing the porn business. Women from all kinds of backgrounds soccer moms, single mothers, college students are filming themselves living out their own pornographic fantasies, and they are broadcasting these images to the world. My interviewees show that pornography is an industry with both tremendous potential and powerful constraints. The women who work in pornography believe that we should not treat porn as an intractable behemoth and social evil, but they emphasize that it can be made better, especially with respect to workers' rights. The debate about pornography should not be controlled only by academics, politicians or religious groups; a voice should be given to the performers and their complex experiences.

It degrades men just as much as women, if it degrades at all.

By making the critique, the recreate the sexist hierarchies they describe Stern and Zalewski 09 MARIA STERN, lecturer and researcher at the Department of Peace and
Development research at Gotberg university, AND MARYSIA ZALEWSKI, Director of Centre for Gender Studies at university of Aberdeen. Feminist fatigue(s): reflections on feminism and familiar fables of militarization Review of International Studies (2009), 35, 611630, Cambridge journals) DF If, as poststructuralism has shown us, we cannot through language decide the meaning of woman, or of femininity, or of feminism, or produce foundational information about it or her; that subjects are effects rather than origins of institutional practices and discourses; that power produces subjects in effects; or that authentic and authoritative agency are illusory then the sure foundations for the knowledge that feminist scholars are conventionally required to produce even hope to produce are unattainable. Moreover, post-colonial feminisms have vividly shown how representations of woman or
women which masquerade as universal are, instead, universalising and inevitably produced through hierarchical and intersecting power relations.45 In sum; the poststructural suggestion is that feminist

representations of women do not correspond to some underlying truth of what woman is or can be; rather feminism produces the subject of woman which it then subsequently comes to represent.46 The
implications of this familiar conundrum are far-reaching as the demands of feminism in the context of the knowledge/political project of the gender industry are exposed as implicated in the re-production of the very power from which escape is sought. In short, feminism emerges as complicit in violent reproductions of

subjects and knowledges/ practices. How does this recognisable puzzle (recognisable within feminist theory) play out
in relation to the issues we are investigating in this article? As noted above, the broad example we choose to focus on to explain our claims is militarisation; partly chosen as both authors have participated in pedagogic, policy and published work in this generic area, and partly because this is an area in which the demand for operationalisable gender knowledge is everincreasing. Our suggestion is that the increasing requirement47 for knowledge for the gender industry

about gender and militarisation re-animates the sex-gender paradox which persistently haunts attempts to translate what we know into useful knowledge for redressing (and preventing) conflict, or simply into hopeful scenarios for our students.

We dont need to identify correct representation or epistemology as a prior issuewe should adopt a pragmatic approachdetermining what works rather than what is True. Richard Rorty, Professor of Philosophy at Princeton and the University of Virginia, Professor of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at Stanford 1982,Consequences of Pragmatism Pg Pg. xiv
Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or "good," supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area . It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of "number." They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call "philosophy"-a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set
of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any

more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that "there is no such thing" as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a "relativistic" or "subjectivist" theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God.
They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language
is too unphilosophical, too "literary," they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach.

Also, Porn is beneficial, according to Gert Martin Hald and Neil M. Malamuth, highly regarded scholars of porn, in 2008: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10508-007-9212-1 In their survey of 688 young Danish adults (men = 316; women = 372), Hald and Malamuth found that respondents construed the viewing of hardcore pornography as beneficial to their sex lives, their attitudes towards sex, their perceptions and attitudes towards members of the opposite sex, toward life in general, and over all. The obtained beneficial effects were statistically significant for all but one measure across both sexes. Now here is the kicker: A positive correlation was obtained between the amount of hardcore pornography that was viewed and the impact of the benefits reaped. This positive correlation was found for both sexes. In other words, the more that one watched porn, the stronger the benefits (for both sexes)!

General arguments against banning:

If not for porn, people will take out their sexual desires in other more harmful ways, as indicated by Diamond Claiming that pornography changes people is to shift all the blame to the porn. Porn doesn't change us, it is the result of a degrading society. Degradation isn't inherent to porn. Just like alochohol or whatever it can be abused. Why is the depiction of a healthy act bad? Shouldn't we just be concerned with the fetishization and addiction? We have seen the effects of the attempt at prohibition of alcohol or drugs. It only leads to a rise in popularity of the material in question and the creation of groups whose sole purpose becomes to traffick the material and a waste of government money. These gangs cause violence that was never there to begin with, this far outweighs any negative effects of the material Their basic argument is that evil white men make porn to sell to working class white men so that they view women as sex objects and help to maintain patriarchal control and force more women into a degrading job where they are brainwashed into thinking that porn is a good way out and are then taken onto porn sets and raped repeatedly and forever traumatized. The evil white men who make and sell this porn realize that the evil white bourgeois men are becoming desensitize to its effects because the evil white buyers are now solely interested In seeing women degraded so they need harder and harder shit which leads to rape, child, and beastiality porn which the evil white men will then feel compelled to act out in real life. This assumes so many things and the negative effects of these assumptions have been highlighted above. From South park, To quote Jesus in response to Buddha saying that porn is addictive Watching porn isnt like doing coke you fag!

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