The word pornography is derived from the Greek words porni (“prostitute”) and graphein (“to write”). It originally encompassed any writing or art works that depicted the lives of prostituted persons.

Since its inception, pornography’s meaning and grasp have expanded to include videography and photography, wherein people are documented engaging in sexual acts for the gratification of voyeurs, primarily as a facilitator for masturbation, though there is extensive evidence that pornography is also used by abusers as a training manual for both women and children to reenact the abusers’ favorite scenes.

Pornography videos, once an underground market with organized crime affiliations as recent as the mid-20th century, has become a legal and massively successful global industry. Its normalization in mainstream society is affiliated with helping to shape, reinforce, and popularize a masculine / male-dominated view of sexuality, in which women are seen as sexual objects for male consumption.

A radical feminist perspective maintains that pornography has meaning as a manifestation of misogyny, its confirmation of a sexist system that socially, politically, and economically sees women as lesser than men. Based solely on various content analyses of pornography, which regularly and disproportionately depict acts of violence against women, the feminist perspective is accurate.