cinnabon

“No one thinks that way about young women without porn.” Oh excellent. Someone alert the historians. During the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, tens of thousands of women were raped and subjected to sexual violence. Sexual violence has been documented across wars, invasions, slavery and genocide throughout human history, long before Pornhub, internet porn or even the fucking internet existed. And if we want an especially grotesque example, meet Thomas Thistlewood, an 18th century British enslaver in Jamaica. He kept an extraordinarily detailed diary for roughly 37 years, 37 volumes and more than 14,000 pages, meticulously recording his sexual exploitation of enslaved women and girls. Yale describes the collection as documenting thousands of sexual assaults against more than 100 women, including punishments when women resisted. One documented victim, Coobah, was purchased by Thistlewood at 15 and first raped by him at 16. So unless Thomas Thistlewood had an absolutely phenomenal 18th century wifi connection, I’m struggling to see how pornography taught him that women and girls could be sexually brutalized. You can absolutely argue that pornography may influence modern sexual attitudes, expectations or behavior. That is a legitimate subject for research and debate. But “no one thinks that way about young women without porn” is not an argument. It’s historical illiteracy wearing a feminist hat. Men did not need Pornhub to invent gang rape, sexual slavery or the idea that women’s consent was irrelevant. Humanity managed to produce centuries upon centuries of horrifying evidence of that entirely on its own. Porn can be part of a discussion about contemporary rape culture. It is not the fucking origin story of sexual violence against women. That particular horror has a résumé several millennia longer than broadband.