Ways porn wrongly uses the words "violate", "abuse" and "self-abuse"

Trigger warnings for discussion of abuse and forced-sex fantasies.

Two words that seem to come up an awful lot in porn advertising are "abused" and "violated". I think this is a bad thing, but perhaps not for the obvious reason.

While I am sure that anti-porn campaigners leap upon this kind of language to "prove" that porn is about violence, encouraging rape, and hatred towards women, I make almost the opposite claim: it's about hatred of sex itself.

When I think of "abuse" in a sexual-fantasy context (that is, not in the hideous, real-world someone-getting-genuinely-harmed sense but in terms of describing a fantasy) - I'm expecting some kind of "edgeplay" BDSM scene involving quite violent or heavy S/M activities.

When I think of "violated" then I think of something with a "fantasy box", in which it's set up as a fantasy and then there is some kind of coercion involved in the sexual fantasy. Typically, what I would interpret the term to mean is a scene of the "reluctant" type (i.e. the bottom's attitude goes from "no, please don't" to "Oh yes, please don't stop!"). The key element is that I believe "violated" implies that some boundary is crossed or some barrier/taboo broken for the bottom partner.

These are the types of things that anti-porn campaigners might interpret as implying hatred of women. But they are not the most frequent things to which porn advertisers refer when they use these words.

What they refer to most frequently is enthusiastically consenting PiV sex. Porn in which the typical dialogue for the female partner is consistently, "Oh, yes, mmmmm! Give me more, harder, fuck me!"

This is troubling to me because of the consideration: what would one have to believe is true in order for the most heteronormative, perceived-as-basic-to-sex sex act to be perceived as "abuse" or "violating" for the straight woman involved?

One would have to believe that the simple act of having sex means that a woman is violated. One would have to believe that the simple act of having sex with a woman is to abuse, and therefore harm, her in some way. One would have to believe that no woman ever truly wants sex, no matter how loudly and enthusiastically she is demanding to be fucked. Disturbingly, one would have to believe that even in the fantasy-land of porn, where every woman supposedly secretly wants to have sex, they still don't really want it, you have to break through and violate their barriers to get it.

Is it the porn companies themselves that believe this, or is it that the porn companies believe their audience believe it? Is it that the audiences are perceived as needing the idea of resistance in their fantasies? (Figleaf wrote a bit about this phenomenon last year.) Either way, this is surely the epitome of sex-negative thought, and porn producers are complicit in it even if they are not actually guilty of thinking it themselves.

A typical concern (to which the answer is "more, better, earlier education!") is about what young people might learn from porn, and in this context what one might expect a viewer to learn is that sex of any kind is supposed to be a form of abuse, and the woman is supposed to feel violated at the end!

What makes this much more problematic is that the coercion-fantasy stuff uses the same language sometimes to describe itself. This is a problem because if ordinary sex is a "violation" and "abusive" and coercion is also "violation" and "abusive", then what's the difference between ordinary sex and coerced sex (i.e. rape)?

There is another term that I want to address here, which is not limited to porn usage.

If you search for porn with the keyword "abuse" then a sizeable proportion of your results are going to be videos of men masturbating. These will typically be tagged as "gay porn", although since it shows a solo performer it's only "gay" because it's assumed that only men are interested in porn. These examples of porn are typically described as "self-abuse".

I absolutely hate the term 'self-abuse" when referring to masturbation (I don't think I've ever heard it used about female masturbation, though?). WTF is abusive about it? This term predates porn's usage and is widespread in society as well, but the message it contains is so utterly wrong-headed that I find it hard to process.

Abuse implies harm, implies doing violence. The term "self-abuse" frankly implies to me self-harming or at the very least self-castigation (e.g. telling oneself "I'm such a worthless piece of shit, I don't deserve to exist"). None of which is particularly sexy in my not-so-humble opinion. None of which is relevant to the act of masturbation.

Masturbation can be fun, it can be pleasurable, it can be a much-needed release of sexual tension. In general, therefore, it seems to be perfectly healthy and the very opposite of "abuse".

What, then, would one have to believe in order for it to make sense to describe masturbation as "self-abuse"? I honestly have a hard time processing the question. However, it seems to me that it could come from two different strands. On one hand, there may be a conflation between "misuse" and "abuse", combined with the trope that the penis has only two proper uses: for peeing out of and for sticking in a woman. On the other hand we have a perception of being the passive recipient of sexual pleasure, and that this is harmful or to be resisted (now, a question for the class: how might that tie into the earlier discussion of "violate" and "abuse"?) Thus, to self-pleasure is simultaneously perceived as being on some level to self-harm - to abuse oneself.

What sort of world are we living in where a sizeable proportion of (the advertising about) the art form that is most directly about enjoying sexual pleasure (i.e. porn) simultaneously is telling us that sexual pleasure is abuse?