May 12, 2009

Porn and hate crimes

Filed under: Gender,Media,Sexuality,Violence — Tags: , , , , , — Melanie @ 9:41 am

Following an article at the Washington Post on hate crimes:

The number of hate crimes involving race and religion declined in the United States last year, leading to a slight drop in the overall total, but incidents related to sexual orientation and ethnicity showed increases, according to federal statistics released yesterday…

Crimes against Hispanics also increased for the fourth year in a row, the ADL said, with 595 incidents reported in 2007, compared with475 in 2004.

“While we welcome the fact that reported hate crimes declined slightly in 2007, violent bigotry is still disturbingly prevalent in America, with nearly one hate crime occurring every hour of every day of the year,” ADL director Abraham H. Foxman said in a statement.

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez explores the role of porn in these racially specific hate crimes:

There are 4.2 million porn sites on the Web, totaling more than 400 million Internet pages. An astounding 25 percent of all search engine requests are for pornography. Pornography profits each year exceed the profits of NBC, ABC and CBS combined.

And yet no one in the rising-Latino-hate debate has thought to look at this sector of the media for indications of violence and hatred toward Hispanics, and Hispanic women in particular. Except me. Because I’m practical like that, and I’m not afraid to go there. Or anywhere, really.

Rape of Latinas Popular on the Net

I’ve been keeping tabs on the popular free porn site Redtube.com, which is essentially the X-rated version of YouTube, and have found a very disturbing trend.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, videos claiming to depict the rape of Latina maids or Mexican women seeking green cards, etc., have appeared in the top five videos of the day, often in the No. 1 spot, with high ratings from the site’s users.

Often, these videos depict women crying, begging for mercy and enduring unwanted anal sex. (The popularity of Latinas in these videos is all the more alarming when one considers that Latina actresses comprise less than half of 1 percent of all TV and movie roles in the United States.)

It is no coincidence that as hate toward Latinos and immigrants rises, Hispanic women are being presented in a very popular, profitable (and, we pretend, invisible) media outlet as the ideal rape victims.

For recent posts on porn, click here and here


3 Comments »

  1. I don’t think they care as long as they get money for the movie

    Comment by Ana — September 1, 2012 @ 4:11 pm

  2. I don’t think I have ever seen videos on the “mainstream” porn websites, such as Redtube, YouPorn, PornHub etc. depicting rape, especially not of Latina women. I’m reluctant to believe the article and I am interested to know where you gathered your information; whether it be through personal experience of these websites or hearsay? It feels as though the bias is too great on this article. Granted there is the dark side to internet pornography, and some sides do advertise pseudo-rape videos but even then this is a very small number of videos on a very small number of websites, and by no means is their a probative link between this kind of extreme pornography and the increase in sexual abuse of minority groups. Correlation does not imply causation.

    Comment by th3presscorpse — January 25, 2013 @ 4:49 pm

  3. Magnificent web site. A lot of useful info here. I’m sending it to several friends ans also sharing in delicious. And certainly, thank you to your sweat!

    Comment by Neil — March 2, 2013 @ 5:41 am

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