I remember my first days on this campus well.
I was walking from my car to my dorm when a lifted truck full of boys drove up next to me.
Immediately, they began to harass me. I became increasingly uncomfortable, tried to avert my attention, keep my face to the ground, ignored what they were saying: all the things I had been taught growing up.
Then I heard it. “You better wave back at me, bitch.”
“Bitch.”
Because I hadn’t complied with their harassment, did not think that their taunting was considered flattering and was not compelled to wave back to a group that had treated me as if I were an animal, I was suddenly a bitch.
How could I keep my head toward the concrete? How could I allow myself to be so demeaned and degraded?
But I knew that my experience was nothing special. Every single waking second of most women’s lives, we are subject to verbal, physical and emotional abuse that many do not recognize as problematic or wrong. Many, including women, just assume that it is the norm.
Rape culture and sexual harassment have easily been enabled and continuously ignored because of one thing: the idea that women exist solely for men’s pleasure and desire.
I believe that the experience I had during my first week of school at the University of Mississippi and other girls’ similar experiences are a direct effect of pornography on male minds.
So here I stand: an anti-porn feminist.
Most boys are exposed to porn at the age of 11, long before they have the time or ability to develop a healthy sexuality.
Before these boys even enter puberty, they are indoctrinated with the belief that women are meant to be used, and even enjoy being used, to fulfill every desire that a man has. This mindset is incredibly dangerous because as the porn industry has grown, so has the demand for violent and degrading videos, pictures and erotic stories.
While kinks and fetishes can be expressed healthily in sexual relationships, porn does not give a foundation for these sexual quirks to be cultivated in safe and respectful ways.
Boys are being taught that women enjoy being called sluts, whores and bitches, that somehow we all desire to have our hair pulled or to be gang-raped, or that it is somehow sexy and erotic to have sex with a girl who is unwilling. More than that, there has been an incredible rise in the popularity of non-consensual porn, which in turn causes men to think that it is okay for women’s bodies to be exploited.
What these boys don’t realize, though, is that the adult video industry is not reality.
What they don’t know is that a woman in the adult film industry only works, on average, for three months, because after that timespan most bodies cannot tolerate any more; that many women experience anal prolapses, where their anuses literally come out of their bodies because they are “ridden too hard;” that the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Association (now closed) had an entire website devoted to warning women about the STDs they were susceptible to, including chlamydia of the eye and gonorrhea of the anus; that many porn actresses were pulled into the industry by illegal means or desperation.
So, men, if you are partaking and indulging in watching porn, know that every single scene you see is only a fantasy.
Remember that the woman tied up, gagged and being called “daddy’s nasty slut” on your computer may not be able to even speak English, or may go home with a bloody vagina and bruises all over her body.
Know that every single time you type “non-consensual porn” into your Google Chrome incognito window, you are allowing your brain to become further influenced by the belief that slipping a date rape drug into a girl’s drink at the bar is okay, or the woman wearing that leather mini-skirt was asking for it.
Turn off the computer screen and stop allowing yourselves to be convinced that women are about as equal to, if not less than, the beer can on your side-table: only existing for your disposal, pleasure and desire.
And for the love of God, stop calling us bitches.
Alexis Smith is a freshman international studies major from Picayune.
