Let's further normalize pornography.

I recently came across the movie trailer for Middle Men. Has anyone else seen this?

"The guys who brought the XXX to the www."

It's absolutely disgusting. The film features money, guns, and porn: three prominent sources of violence in our culture. The guys in this movie are cultural terrorists, assassins of the future and executioners of morality. The most obvious goal of this movie is to normalize pornography and desensitize people to the violence and objectification within it. The internet has become saturated with porn and, in effect, is a breeding ground for addiction, pedophilia, violence, guilt, divorce, unhealthy attitudes towards sex, racial stereotypes, sexual aggression, misogynistic attitudes, as well as numerous handicaps in social situations.

This is the basic plot of this movie:  Luke Wilson plays Jack Harris, who helps introduce pornography to the World Wide Web and the World Wide Web to your credit card. But Jack's just the middleman: He clears the path for the inventors of online porn, paying off all gangsters, attorneys and other crooks and cronies who come at him. In Houston, 2004 we see Jack peeling out of the driveway beneath an apocalyptic storm with $4 million in a zipped-up bag. Bad things are happening, he tells the audience, and all because "I figured out a better way for guys to jack off." Jack's new perks include private jets and porn-star privates. The movie is fast paced and is always showing another guy who either wants to kill Luke Wilson or get money from Luke Wilson or kill Luke Wilson and then take his money. Wilson just gets to luxuriate on the porn's profit, but also seems to suffocate in the feeling of walls closing in on and crushing the poor bastard who thought he'd gotten the Good Life. Jack treats every encounter, no matter how intimate or dangerous, like a business transaction. He gets stuff done, even if it involves blackmailing the Harris County district attorney.
(Click here to read the full article).

I've done a little research on reviews for this movie, and sadly most of them are actually good reviews. When I did find a decent review, other people commented on it, declaring that the anti-pornography point-of-view is "ultra conservative or puritanical." Religious groups aren't the only people involved in the anti-pornography movement. We also include feminists, ex-porn stars, psychologists, sociologists, and anyone who knows that pornography can contribute to the breakdown of marriages and personal relationships. To have an anti-pornography stance is not to be ultra conservative, it is to recognize that the women in these films, magazines, websites, etc. are actually real people. The "Anti-Porn Feminists" blog based out of London effectively sums up the question "What's wrong with pornography?" in eight points:

Pornography harms women.
Pornography is not fantasy. Pornography happens in the real world, to real women; everything you see in pornography happened somewhere to a real woman.

The pornography industry is a multi-billion dollar global industry.
Pornography exists to make money. It is an industry that chews women up and spits them out; it is an industry where exposure to violence, harassment, injury and infection are seen as normal and acceptable.

Pornography doesn’t expand our sexuality – it stunts it.
Mainstream heterosexual pornography dictates a narrow and limited idea of human sexuality. In pornography, male sexuality is predicated on cruelty, coercion and degradation; female sexuality is predicated on submitting to or appearing to enjoy being subjected to cruel, coercive and degrading treatment. Pornography eradicates women’s sexual agency, and makes it harder for women to find out about their own bodies and their own sexuality.

"Business is a lot like sex... getting in is easy, pulling out is hard."

Pornography portrays sexual violence against women as normal, natural and an inevitable part of male sexuality.
Sexual desire does not develop in a vacuum. The prurient attitude we have to sex in this country, combined with a lack of decent sex education, means that many people use pornography as their primary source of information on what sex is supposed to be like. Mainstream heterosexual pornography tells men that the sexual abuse of women is exciting, and that women enjoy being abused. It tells women that in order to do sex properly, they have to put up with and enjoy such abuse.

Pornography reinforces male supremacy, and the idea that men are entitled to sexual access to women’s bodies.
Men define themselves as being whatever is not a woman, in order to be a man it is necessary for there to be a subordinate group of women for men to compare themselves to and feel superior to. In mainstream heterosexual pornography men are always the active agents and women are always the passive objects. No man in pornography ever fails to get what he wants; the women in pornography exist solely to satisfy men’s desires, they have no will or desire of their own except to service men’s needs.

Pornography portrays sex and women as disgusting.
The words used to describe women and women’s bodies in pornography betray the fact that women and sex are seen as dirty and disgusting by the men who use it: ‘bitch’ ‘cunt’ ‘slut’ ‘fuck toy’ ‘fuck hole’ ‘dirty’ ‘filthy’ etc etc.

Pornography promotes misogynistic beauty standards.
In mainstream heterosexual pornography women are interchangeable, it trains women and men to see a natural female body – one with pubic hair, or small breasts, or any fat – as unnatural and disgusting.

Pornography affects you.
Even if you are not a pornography consumer, a significant number of the men you interact with every day will be. It’s difficult to imagine that a man can spend a lot of time viewing and masturbating to degrading images of women without that pornographic ideology having a negative effect on his view of women.


This movie is sickening and offensive. Living in this porn culture, I'm not sure why I am surprised that this movie made it to theaters and into the minds of the public. The men in this movie are violence and rape instigators and I can't fathom why there would be a movie made to glorify them. I quite obviously find that objectifying half of the human race is more than just a little distasteful.