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What Porn Did to American Culture

Sophie Gilbert discusses how the industry defined womanhood, sex, and power.

There’s a resurgence of the kind of offensive and dehumanizing behavior that we saw in popular culture during the 2000s, and this time it’s not being doled out by gossip bloggers and celebrity commentators, but by politicians and people with massive media platforms. Even the kinds of things we’re seeing now with the porn actors Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips engaging in really extreme sexual stunts for kudos and fame—that was happening during the ’90s with Annabel Chong and Jasmin St. Claire. Sophie: This was basically the point of the piece, and of my book—to try to understand why women of my generation were so easily persuaded that we couldn’t, or shouldn’t, push back against how we were being treated, both in media and in real life.

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