Schraf,
You bring up a lot of good points. I wonder if the long-term effects of exposure to sexually graphic images can really be measured in a lab format. Yeah, I might feel depressed and inadequate immediately after seeing hours of video of bodybuilder guys without an ounce of body fat making out with beautiful women. But something tells me after I leave the lab and see everybody walking around in winter clothes again, my self-esteem would slowly return.
The best point you made was about the constant barrage of images from non-porn sources. Just this morning I saw that Outkast video (they show it every hour on the hour on both MTV and VH1) for the song "I Like the Way You Move." The scantily-clad women working in the garage, for example, couldn't be dressed like women who actually may work in a garage. Because the point of that scene is that women wouldn't be working in a garage, yo! It's comedy! And later in the video we see the presumably African plantation, where scantily-clad women are, well, grazing. Women should feel fine about these images? And I fully agree, the sliver of the spectrum that is allowed to be visible on magazine covers is a message to women that they don't deserve to be seen unless they're real skinny.
If I deplore the fact that the entire female population is not represented in our notion of beauty, I'm disgusted by the way the entire female is often not represented in these images. There's a big difference between only showing a woman's rear end in an jeans ad and a clinical gyno-shot of just her naked hindparts in a magazine. Does anyone else get a bad decapitation-vibe after seeing several shots in series of a woman's body without seeing her face?
It's a free country and all, so I don't suggest censoring these images simply because I have problems with them. However, I wish they constituted a smaller percentage of our standard images of women. And I think women have every right to feel insulted that these seem to constitute the only acceptable representations of female sexuality in our culture.
The dark nursery of evolution is very dark indeed.
Brad McFall
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