TW//mentions of SA, porn addiction, objectification

One thing that really stood out to me in Throwing Like a Girl is how Iris Marion Young criticizes bioessentialism, which is the idea that men and women behave a certain way because it’s just “biology”. She shows how people explain things like throwing differences as natural, when they’re really learned through social expectations. It is similar to how people perform worse due to the stereotype threat, which is when minority groups tend to underperform on tests because they believe that they are not capable of performing well, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I think that same logic of “inherent” or “biological” behaviors can be applied to how men justify watching porn by saying “men are visual creatures”, which is not based in fact at all. That phrase is so harmful because it makes it seem like objectifying women is unavoidable, instead of something that men are choosing to participate in. 

Porn is extremely dehumanizing because it turns people, often women, into objects meant to be looked at, not individuals with complex life experiences who have their own agency. Young talks about how women are taught to experience their bodies as something to be watched and judged, rather than as something they fully control. Porn takes that even further by reducing women to their body parts and presenting sex as something women exist to provide. It trains people to see women’s bodies as products rather than as a part of an intimate and sacred human interaction.

The idea that porn allows people to “buy” consent is disturbing on its own as well. Consent in porn is always available and detached from real emotional or physical consequences. Sometimes consent can even be depicted as NOT freely given, and disrespected, as part of r*pe fetishes. Humans were never meant to have instant and unlimited access to sex like this, and pretending that it’s just “natural male sexuality” ignores how artificial and extreme this level of access actually is. The harm doesn’t just affect the person consuming porn, it impacts the women in it, who are often exploted, and women in the modern dating world that have to deal with unrealistic expectations and porn-driven violence and entitlement.

Just like Young argues, bioessentialism isn’t harmless. It is used to excuse behavior that causes real harm by making it seem inevitable, and vanishing accountability for those who are engaging in them. Saying “men are visual creatures” works the same way as saying “girls throw like that”. It hides socialization behind biology.