What's the correlation between economic models and depictions of sex and nudity?
Capitalist consumerism causes the least common denominator to rise to the top. Look at most entertainment - it's vapid and soulless. Look at the Top 40 charts. Mostly boring autotuned garbage that all sounds the same. Look at the fashion industry - mostly a bunch of starving waifs with coke problems wearing the skins of brutalized animals or clothes made by sweatshop slaves in third world countries and that is considered elite haute couture fashion that you would be robbed of in some areas for wearing. With capitalism, there are no ethics. Whatever they can mass produce and cook up an ad campaign for is good enough, no matter how damaging or mediocre it is.
With most porn, it plays up to our most base ideas of what sex is and what the relationship is between men and women and people of different ethnicities. It does not present a healthy and natural view of sex. It's mostly fake and presents caricatures of people. Women with fake bleached blonde hair, huge breast implants and other plastic surgery, fakely moaning ecstatically while being roughly rammed in all orifices and drenched in bodily fluids. Men with giant penises (or penises that are made to look huge through camera angle tricks) and bodybuilder physiques or men who are fat slobs screwing pretty young girls (Ron Jeremy, for example). Porn is also very racist, playing on the long-held racist notion of black men being ravenous animals with giant penises who prey on "innocent" petite, pale, blonde, blue eyed white girls (apparently the biggest market for that sort of porn is actually white men).
Yes, there is porn that is actually woman friendly, romantic and passionate and porn that presents a healthier view of sexuality and a wider range of bodies. But that's not the porn that sells. That's not the porn that people are watching. Industries based around consumerism do not support that which is "higher" and most beautiful in humanity. Industries based around profit must make their product sell to the highest number of people at the least cost to themselves. The way to do that is simple psychology. You play on people's insecurities and prejudices, whether subconscious or not. Sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, fatphobia, etc. are all deeply ingrained in Western society so the stage is already set for those things to play out in our sexual relations. Pornography is mirroring what is already in us and selling it back to us. Sometimes it's like the case of the chicken and the egg. One thing's for sure, though, our society is very sick and disturbed.
Industries like pornography also prey on the economically disadvantaged and those who have been abused. If you're poor or broke, it's all too easy to get sucked into porn. Many porn actresses and actors get into it because they need the money. We've all heard the stereotypes of young girls with dreams who move out to LA with dreams of becoming a Hollywood actress, but fail and end up sucked into Hollywood's nasty sibling. It's much the same reason as why people become strippers, escorts or full-blown hookers. Porn also draws a large amount of rape victims because they are used to being treated like dirt and their already unhealthy view of themselves and sex fits perfectly with much of porn, which is degrading, humiliating, objectifying and exploitative. Those people simply go into dissociative states during porn shoots. I have seen this in clips and seen porn actresses mention it.
Industries like pornography and the modeling industry are built on people's self-hatred and their fantasies of what they wish they looked like and acted like. Most of us don't like our bodies to one degree or another. All of us have envied someone else for their looks (which confer social status in this culture) and felt insecure about ours. We feel too fat, too hairy, our breasts are too small, our penises are too small, our hair is not straight enough, our eyes are not blue enough, our skin is not light enough, our skin is not smooth enough, our muscles are not toned enough, etc. So we will spend huge amounts of cash in order to artificially acquire the traits that we so covet.
Humans are social animals. We all want to fit in and be accepted. The entertainment industry takes these simple social instincts and turns it around, makes it ugly and blows it out of proportion. So now we not only want to be accepted, we want to be "cool", rich and famous because that is how our culture says our value is measured by. We will throw our dignity out of the window to become this distorted image. We will destroy ourselves to do so. After all, everyone wants to be a somebody and nobody wants to be a nobody. And who are we but nobodies?
