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From: sad Category: Life Date: 29 June 2009 Time: 10:44 AM Review: If you have forgotten that sexism exists (lucky/stupid you) a trip to Madrid will remind you. All down Calle De la Montera are many, many women who are prostitutes. This must mean that there are many, many men who pay for sex. There are many men who see women as some kind of sexual commodity. These are women who can be bought (and sold, I didn’t recognise the pimps). This to me is an extension of pornography, where women are objects enacting male fantasies (of power). I think that pornography and prostitution are both things that are damaging to sexual relationships between men and women. I think that our sexual tastes are shaped to a certain extent by our culture, I think that if teenagers’ first introduction to sex is through pornography I believe their expectations about sex must be coloured by this experience (as research has corroborated). Similarly if men can buy women’s for this invasive and intimate act, I can not imagine that these men will really be able to think of women as equals, but instead as some thing (an object) they dominate and rule. I think it is very depressing that clearly so many men want relationships of this kind. The women were out from early morning and all through the night. Obviously they must be making money from their hours, and that money is coming from men. Poverty is a factor, and clearly men have the money that the women need. The men I was with ‘had a good laugh’ by asking the women how much they charged and their bourgeois values were probably titillated. I think that these things reflect our Victorian attitudes to sex, where it is a taboo, enjoyed not because the act is pleasurable but because it is ‘sinful’. I think that the porn industry is a product of this attitude to sex and women whilst also propagating it. I don’t think that the objectification of women as seen in porn does appeal to all men, just as many men won’t be able to be turned on by paying for sex. It is interesting though that ‘educated’/middleclass men are ready to admit that they are porn watchers, while prostitution remains a no go area. Men who watch porn do not feel implicated in the degradation of women, though of course they are, they provide the market. Women who watch porn must get their enjoyment from it through the desire to be desired by men, alienated from their own desire, Lacan can say it better. Women who act in porn do so voluntarily and I am sure that women who alter their bodies do so voluntarily as well. Who do they do these things for? Whose ideal image of ‘woman’ are they enacting? Our culture is to blame; the desire for power in men (often describe as masculinity) is a recurrent theme. As I get older I realise that I will have to put up with the fact that many men will be happy to be in relationships with people half their age. It seems a shame that all many people want is power rather than challenging and meaningful interaction. Go see it for yourself Calle De La Montera.