Men try — and fail — to guess whether scenarios are porn or #MeToo stories

In a project titled “Be Frank,” Dutch filmmakers Damayanti Dipayana and Camilla Borel-Rinkes asked a group of men to read different stories and then guess whether the scenarios were from a porn script or a #MeToo story. The men ultimately failed on many of their guesses — because it turned out all the stories were from porn scripts, highlighting the fact that aggression toward women is incredibly common in pornography.

"The project aims to close that gap and enables men to be part of the conversation and the solution," Dipayana told HuffPost.

The exercise shows just how normalized violence against women is in the pornography many men — and women — are consuming, which ultimately helps to normalize that behavior in the real world.

The final clip in the video states that, “88.2 percent of porn scenes contain some form of physical aggression against women.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffroNXjIUGI?start=56&feature=oembed

This is a both scary and important revelation, and it speaks volumes to how we condition men to treat women on the most basic of levels. Studies have shown that pornography has the power to shape both real-world expectations of sex, as well as our actual turn ons — meaning the regular viewing of aggressive sex may in fact lead men to want aggressive sex.

As Jennifer Johnson, Ph.D and co-author of a study on male pornography consumption wrote, "Pornography is not mere fantasy for men; instead, it shapes how they engage in intimate behaviors."

This is a sobering reminder that we have to do better as a culture when it comes to conditioning men about appropriate sexual behavior toward women. Let’s hope men are getting this message, because we need them in this fight.