People love to think of Europe as this subcontinent of free love and sex and booze and drugs.
Basically, Eurotrip.
So it comes as quite a surprise that the European Parliament will vote on “a sweeping ban on pornography in the name of gender equality”.
How does that even work?
Apparently the ban is more on “sexualization in the media”, which would eliminate approximately 99.3% of all advertisements in Europe.
Oh and remember that old feminist myth that porn “makes men more sexually aggressive”?
Actually, there’s “empirical evidence that it reduces the incidence of sexual violence”.
Zack Beauchamp takes it a little far, though:
pornography bans defeat feminist aims in a more direct way: they result in restrictions on feminist and pro-LGBT speech. Since pornography is notoriously hard to define, laws generally ban “violent” or “degrading” depictions of sexual activity. However, such terms mean different things to different people: feminist literature often contains graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and, to a right-wing evangelical, same-sex sexual activity is intrinsically degrading.
Feminist literature is full of sexual assault, yet feminists want to ban porn as the cause of sexual assault?
The stereotyping of “right-wing evangelical” opinion does make me chuckle, however. I’m pretty sure they’re not huge porn fans, no matter who’s in it, and find it all “intrinsically degrading”.
Beauchamp continues to wax poetic about the evils of a Canadian Supreme Court ruling talking about restriction of degrading pornography, tying it to “right-wing evangelicals” when in fact few of them give a shit about Canada or its free speech issues.
But back to Europe. And Canada for that matter.
See what happens when you don’t have a First Amendment?
