Gail Dines on Growing Up in a Pornified Culture (Full Transcript)

Gail Dines at TEDxNavesink

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Dr. Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, Massachusetts. Dines specializes in the study of pornography. Here is the full transcript of Dr. Gail’s TEDx Talk entitled ‘Growing Up in a Pornified Culture’ at TEDxNavesink conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: Growing Up in a Pornified Culture by Gail Dines at TEDxNavesink

Gail Dines – Anti-pornography activist

Thank you. Today what I’m going to talk about is: what does it mean to grow up in a pornified culture? What does it mean to live in a society where you are surrounded by images of hypersexualized, pornified women? What does it mean when you live in a society where basically pop culture is shaped by those pornographic images?

And what I’m going to talk about is how those images shape gender and sexual identity because today young people grow up not in a print-based culture, like those of us over the age of 35, and I’m being nice here — but they grow up in an image-based culture, so let’s wander through the world they live in.

So when I lecture to people, often therapists or parents, they don’t really know the world their kids live in. But you know what? The media does. So here is a magazine called Details which is like Cosmopolitan for men. And they had an article called “How Internet porn is changing teen sex?” They interviewed a pornographer called Joanna Angel, and she said, “The girls these days, they just seem to come to the set porn-ready.” What does that mean?