The whole concept of "objectification" of women strikes me as muddle-headed. What do those feminists want to be known as? Verbs? nouns in the nominative case? So tell me, are they afraid of being seen as direct objects or indirect objects? The former, I guess.
What females don't need is to be controlled against their will; in other words they need to be free to make choices according to their nature.
As for the harm of pornography, yes the women should not be harmed in its making. So long as the activity portrayed in the pornography is legal (else the photographer is an accessory to the crime), I don't think it should be banned, though. Freedom of speech and expression are extremely important.
I think the main reason so many people look at pornography warily is that so much of it is bad. When sex or nudity is presented in the media, it is not generally presented as something beautiful, but as something degraded. I don't think there is any profound explanation, just that the heads of HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, etc., don't have good business sense. Take the recent series on ABC about who are the sexiest people in America. Do they really think many males find it sexy to judge females by precise characteristics of chin structure, breast size, etc.? I'm sure that very few males judge that way. That show would have done much better if they just put the females up there in sexy bikinis, let them express themselves a little bit, and then had the judges say something at least halfway poetical or smart about why the females were sexy/not sexy (e.g., something about what the judges think the appearance implies about the females' personality). They only got the sexy bikinis right. A show like that presumably appeals to people who judge the opposite sex by appearance, so why the *%$&! did they concentrate on degrading people who judge by appearance by making out that such people judge extremely superficially. Does it make business sense for a network to produce a show that degrades its audience. No, of course not. How come the media when portraying nudity or sex almost invariably cater to a trashy audience? People marvel that MTV's ratings have gone down. No surprise to me. They're total idiots. All they have to do is show sexy innocent girls in bikinis and half the men in America would watch. No, the stupid twits, they go to drunken bashes full of girls and boys not being not at all innocent and hire Jerry Springer to degrade them even more. It would be difficult to force oneself to watch. That such shows can do even somewhat well is a testament to people's desire for a better intuitive understanding of sexuality. Someone could make scads of money and do great service to society by portraying pretty nude/semi-nude females in the mainstream media who seem to possess decent half-way sensical sensibilities toward sex. Those are the females the vast majority of men are interested in.
It's tempting to think that so much pornography is bad because there is something of an alliance between prudish women and rakish men. It's obvious why disgusting men want sexuality degraded--portraying sexuality as degraded makes their own degradations seem more normal and thus more acceptable. Prudish women, on the other hand, want affectionate sexual behavior to seem degraded because if people view affectionate behavior as degraded, they have an excuse for not being affectionate--for being cruelly mercenary and calculating in their mating behavior. Note that the groups that want sex and nudity to be portrayed as disgusting don't want the portrayals to be disgusting so much because they really want to look at disgusting pornography, but because they want others to view it and sex as disgusting. Thus, it is not the audience of pornography that wants pornography to be disgusting, it is the people who try to make others watch it (who apparently dwell excessively at MTV, ABC, Cinemax, HBO, etc.); therefore, it is not audience desires that are responsible for nudity being portrayed as disgusting, but stupid management in media companies.
As for the internet, I have noticed that portrayal of sex is much more likely to be disgusting and ugly than portrayal of nudity. Unlike the latter, which on the internet often is artistic and sexy, I couldn't imagine myself seeking out the former. So though I don't support a ban on either, a ban on portrayal of nudity would IMHO be several degrees of magnitude worse than a ban on portrayals of sex.
