Skådespel eller dokumenterad prostitution? : – En kvalitativ textanalys av samhällsdebatten kring porrindustrin, pornografins effekter på samhället och mänskliga fri- och rättigheter

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay was to study the public debate about the porn industry and whether human rights are being violated due to pornography, from a porn liberal and a porn critical perspective, using debate articles and two reports on the subject of porn. In addition to that I wanted to examine whether the porn liberals and the porn critics have different approaches to the subject of porn. To be able to examine this I used following questions: What conceptions of human rights and human rights violations exist in the different sides of the debate, and are the rights similarly interpreted on both sides? What approach do the debaters have when it comes to dealing with people in pornography, the porn industry, and its effects on society, and what is their perception on personal empowerment? The theory I used was Amy Allen’s power theory, where she discusses empowerment in relation to oppression and domination, the three factors she relates to power, and the methods used were a qualitative text analysis and a reconstructive interpretation. The results that came out of this essay regarding human rights in connection to porn, the porn critics mean that the porn industry violates several human rights by still being legalized, while porn liberals think that criminalizing pornography would mean a violation against human rights, and therefore want to protect those rights. Moreover, the porn liberals tend to focus on the porn consumers and what is preferable to them, or the positive empowerment that can come out of taking part in pornography. The porn critics, on the other hand, only focus on the negative parts of pornography, where women in pornography, pornography consumers and their sex partners all take harm in one way or another due to porn.