I have found the articles by Robert Jensen eye-opening in this respect. A cruel edge: The painful truth about today's pornography -- and what men can do about it

It hurts to know that no matter who you are as a woman you can be reduced to a thing to be penetrated, and that men will buy movies about that, and that in many of those movies your humiliation will be the central theme. It hurts to know that so much of the pornography that men are buying fuses sexual desire with cruelty.

People routinely assume that pornography is such a difficult and divisive issue because it's about sex. I think that's wrong. This culture struggles unsuccessfully with pornography because it is about men's cruelty to women, and the pleasure men sometimes take in that cruelty. And that is much more difficult for people -- men and women -- to face.

"Gag Factor #10" is a 2002 release from J.M. Productions. The company's web site notes the Gag Factor tapes' awards as "best oral series" and answers the question, "What makes Gag Factor different than all other blowjob tapes out there?"

1. Every girl must swallow the load of cum!

2. Every girl gets throatfucked until she gags and almost pukes!

3. Gag Factor has more stroke value than all other blowjob tapes combined!

So, there's nothing surprising in the observation that some pornography includes explicit images of women in pain. But a healthy society would want to deal with that, wouldn't it? And from my research, both through these content analysis projects and my reading of material from the industry, it seems clear that mainstream heterosexual pornography is getting more, not less, cruel. A healthy society would take such things seriously, wouldn't it?

Men typically consume pornography specifically to avoid love and affection.

That means pornography has a problem. When all emotion is drained from sex it becomes repetitive and uninteresting, even to men who are watching primarily to facilitate masturbation. So, pornography needs an edge. Pornography has to draw on some emotion, hence the cruelty.

As Jerome Tanner put it during a pornography directors' roundtable discussion featured in Adult Video News, "People just want it harder, harder, and harder, because like Ron said, what are you gonna do next?" Another director, Jules Jordan, was blunt about his task: "[O]ne of the things about today's porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I'm always trying to figure out ways to do something different. But it seems everybody wants to see a girl doing a d.p. now or a gangbang. For certain girls, that's great, and I like to see that for certain people, but a lot of fans are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff. It's definitely brought porn somewhere, but I don't know where it's headed from there."

Director Mitchell Spinelli, interviewed while filming the first video ("Give Me Gape") for a series for his new Acid Rain company, seemed clear where it was heading:

"People want more. They want to know how many dicks you can shove up an ass," he says with a shrug. "It's like Fear Factor meets Jackass. Make it more hard, make it more nasty, make it more relentless. The guys make the difference. You need a good guy, who's been around and can give a good scene, fuckin' `em hard. I did my homework. These guys are intense."

We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women.

When a female student has a meeting about a research project with a male college professor who the night before was watching "Gag Factor #10," who is she to him? What is she to him?

When a woman walks into a bank to apply for a loan from a male loan officer who the night before was watching "Two in the Seat #3," what is he thinking?

When a woman goes in front of a male judge who the night before was watching "Sopornos #4," does she want to throw herself on the mercy of the court?

In pornography, women are three holes and two hands.

Women in pornography have no hopes and no dreams and no value apart from the friction those holes and hands can produce on a man's penis. If anyone doubts that, let me describe one more video from my research, one more video from the mainstream section of a store that carries adult product, where men rent and buy films to help them masturbate.

"A Cum Sucking Whore Named Kimberly" is a 2003 release from Anabolic Video Productions. The tape is a compilation of five scenes featuring Kimberly, taken from five other films produced by this company. The first scene is from "World Sex Tour #25," in which two men explain that this will be Kimberly's first anal scene and first d.p. Kimberly is French Canadian and speaks little or no English. At the end of the scene, when the men ejaculate into her mouth, she starts to gag, and the two men tell her (through a translator off screen) that she has to swallow the semen, which she does. Through the translator, they tell Kimberly to say, "Thank you for fucking me in Montreal." Kimberly says, "Thank you for fucking me in Montreal." The scene ends with the two men talking later about the experience. "We blew out her asshole," one says. This is how the film presents Kimberly's introduction to what she will be in pornography, what men want her to be.

The remaining scenes follow Kimberly through her "career" in pornography, finishing with "Gang Bang Girl #32." In this scene a frustrated football coach berates his players after practice, asking them whether they are "football players or fags." He says they will lose the game the next day, which he wouldn't mind if his players were men -- he just hates to lose with fags. He turns to the assistant coach and says, "prove to me they're not fags" before walking away. The proof will be in the 13 players having sex with Kimberly, one of the cheerleaders in the stands. She comes down to the field and engages in sex in a variety of different positions. As the men wait for their turn, they stand around her, masturbating to keep their erections, joking and laughing. At one point she is in a double-penetration with a third man's penis is in her mouth while she masturbates two other penises.

She is three holes and two hands.

Anyway, Robert Jenses also writes eloquently about "white privilege". Just like his papers about pornography are eye-opening to me as a heterosexual male, his papers about white privilege are equally eye-opening as a white European male. I highly recomment his writing.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman