The most interesting piece out of the three readings for this week hands down was The Macho Paradox. The author Jackson goes into grave detail about how the porn industry was initially crafted by men for men, and that even in today’s world women porn directors make up a very small portion of the industry in comparison to men.

“Pornography tells lies about women, but it tells the truth about men” (182 Jackson). When I first read this quote I thought it was more insinuating about the fact that for women both porn and masturbation are seem as taboos, but for men they’re almost everyday commodities and very casual parts of conversation. But as I continued to read I was interested to find out it was actually explaining that porn capitalizes off of this concept of fantasy women. This is something I was already aware of, but in the aspect of body standards and beauty standards. However, the author in this case is more so talking about the treatment of these fantasy women in porn and how that can escalate into real life.

“The idea that consumers of porn can masturbate and have orgasms to that kind of treatment of women and not have it affect their attitudes toward the women…in their lives is more a fantasy than anything the most creative porn writers can conjure up” (186 Jackson). For some reason I never really connected the dots that the way men treat women in porn could have some tie to how they do in real life. Women are more or less almost always portrayed as submissive and subordinate in porn, like they only exist for one thing. To go on further and somehow connect that to sexual violence also made me really sit back and think. “Sexual violence is common in our society not because there are so many sick men, but because we socialize normal boys to be sexually dominant and normal girls to be sexually subordinate” (188 Jackson).