Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity

By: Robert Jensen  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

In our culture, porn makes the man. So argues Robert Jensen in Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. Jensen's treatise begins with a simple demand: "Be a man." It ends with a defiant response: "I chose to struggle to be a human being." The journey from masculinity to humanity is found in the candid and intelligent exploration of porn's devastating role in defining masculinity.

Getting Off seamlessly blends personal anecdotes from Jensen's years as a feminist anti-pornography activist with scholarly research. In his trademark conversational style, he shows how mainstream pornography reinforces social definitions of manhood and influences men's attitudes about women and how to treat them.

Pornography is a thriving multi-billion-dollar industry; it drives the direction of emerging media technology. Pornography also makes for complicated politics. These days, anti-porn arguments are assumed to be "anti-sex" and thus a critical debate is silenced. This book breaks that silence. Alarming and thought-provoking, Getting Off asks tough, but crucial, questions about pornography, sex, manhood, and the way toward genuine social justice.

Robert Jensen is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity.

Publisher: South End Press

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Activist not Academic - I enjoyed the beginning and the end of this product. The middle part has a long expose on pornography that is unnecessarily graphic. the conclusions, motivations, and impulses presented in this book are all fairly incisive and culturally accurate. I'd recommend this to anyone wondering about the nature of masculinity. Although its author is a well respected academician, the book can't stand up to graduate level discussion and is too graphic to give to undergrads.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Right on. - I have been struggling with the ideas and issues that this brilliant book discusses for years. I am genuinely thankful that this exists. It reaffirmed many of my current beliefs, helped me further understand why I feel the way that I feel, and offered me new knowledge and more importantly, hope.

Read it. For the love of humanity, read this book.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Good points, a painful read. - In my opinion, there were good and bad apects of this book.
In any critique of pornography, descriptions of the recorded acts are necessary-- otherwise, it's just euphemism and it is easy for readers to assume that it's "not that bad." Jensen describes a number of mainstream films and includes quotations from the films themselves and from interviews with the performers. The sections were very difficult for me to read, but Jensen certainly made his point-- porn is extremely hateful towards women. I am not sure he could have made him point without including these excerpts, but they were very unpleasant.
Jensen is such a radical feminist that he thinks the entire system needs to be overhauled; it's not enough for men to "protect" or esteem women enough to stop looking at porn-- they must reject the entire concept of masculinity, because Jensen interprets the patriarchal system as essentially creating a "rape culture." I am not sure that I agree with this completely, but reading the book did make me realize that seemingly innocuous comments and behaviors (extreme competitiveness, for example, or even phrases like, "*Real* men don't eat quiche") do contribute to the idea that "real" men are macho and perhaps rightly given to violence as a way to prove their masculinity. I don't know what to make of this, really, and I don't think that Jensen himself gives a convincing account of an alternative.
Finally, I think Jensen is really limited by his moral perspective. In his discussion "What is sex for?", for example, he refuses to even consider the argument, "For procreation," because that would disenfranchise gays and lesbians. This was when the book broke down for me-- if Jensen is not even willing to consider the main purpose of sex in his discussion, then I don't think he's dealing in reality. Sex simply does produce children, and that must be taken into account even if it makes us uncomfortable about issues of sexual orientation. His explanation ("to produce light rather than heat") is very silly, and even in context it doesn't mean that much.
I thought Pamela Paul's *Pornified* was a better researched and more reasonable account of the porn culture.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
this is important - WOW. This is one important book. It's about a subject I think most of us don't deal with very honestly because it's so hard to look at. Robert Jensen calls the porno industry on its woman-hating, and what it does to its fans. It's not about sex so much--the way rape isn't about sex so much as it's about assault. This is like that. Just read it.

Customer Review: 2 out of 5
Only useful for radicals - I wrote a long well thought out review. Unfortunately it didn't make it through the filtering process (apparently Amazon didn't appreciate my vulgar synonym for sex). My criticism boils down to this: Robert Jensens logic and rhetoric are in dire need of improvement. I agreed with many of his theses, however he continually made logical fallacies in his attempt to substantiate them. For instance one of his favorite fallacies is "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" (after this, therefore because of this). One of Jensen's main arguments on pornography and rape is actually the "textbook" example of "Post hoc ergo propter hoc" as seen on the CSU Northridge website on logical fallacies and debate. Embarrassing. Along with weak analogies and other logical failures, he basically left all his arguments open to easy destruction. By the end of the book, he had done more to hurt his cause then help it. The whole affair is shameful.

My other main gripe with the book is his continually repeated thesis that "men hate women." Not only do I disagree, but I think that his attitude is damaging to men and women everywhere. His entire attitude is one of divisiveness, men vs. women. His critiques of society are well deserved, but he is going about it all wrong. Blaming entire genders, races or religions for the problems in the world are not going to solve them. If you want a truly conscientious and intelligently thought out critique on the disintegration of the relationships and love between all people then read "The Art Of Loving" by Erich Fromm. I am scared to think that we have political activists like Jensen out there, if he sees any modicum of success in his vision it will be at our expense. My solace is that I cannot imagine any emotionally healthy person could possibly embrace his message.

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