Meagan Tyler is Senior Lecturer in the School of Management and the Centre for People, Organisation and Work at RMIT University, Melbourne. You can hear her in conversation with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens this week on The Minefield.

For #MeToo to truly be a reckoning for male sexual entitlement and cultural norms of sexual harassment, abuse and assault, we need to talk about porn.

In fact, it seems rather extraordinary that pornography hasn't figured much in the current #MeToo moment. We've heard a lot about how pop culture shapes harmful sexual scripts, but ignoring the role of porn in shaping pop culture is faintly ridiculous.

Pornography is ubiquitous. While more than three-quarters of Australian men report having watched pornography in the last year, younger cohorts are even more likely to consume pornographic material and use it habitually - on either a daily or weekly basis.

The increasing accessibility and acceptability of pornography have been mutually reinforcing.

A smart phone is now the dominant way in which (mostly male) consumers access online porn, thus moving pornographic content from the private realm of the home to virtually anywhere in the public sphere - including workplaces.

The workplace connection is more than mere speculation. Many online porn sites show their traffic is highest during standard working hours, suggesting access to pornography while at the office is relatively unremarkable. Which reminds me of an aside made by a sports journalist, some years ago, about a fellow colleague in the press box:

"tabbing between his match report and a constant stream of hardcore pornography ... The thing that initially staggered me was the sheer audacity of it, that the presence of both female and male colleagues, who were sitting metres away with clear views of his screen, hadn't been enough to deter him and that he felt perfectly comfortable doing it in full view. Welcome to Blokesworld."

Women everywhere inhabit Blokesworld. A world formed by patriarchal standards and structures where men, constructed as the dominant sex-class, are to be provided sexual access to women, as a subordinate sex-class. This arrangement is so unquestionable to some, that students will demand access to pornography through university infrastructure, and members of the commentariat will go far as to defend men's use of porn at work as though it is some sort of fundamental labour right.

But what does it mean for women to work in spaces where their male colleagues are also watching eroticised sexual inequality and violence?

The public display of pornographic material has been recognised as making working environments hostile to women. But the printed pornography of twenty years ago, recognised as a form of unlawful discrimination, seems very mild in comparison to mainstream porn today. The pornography industry itself has been quite forthright in explaining the way that "extreme" porn has become mainstream. And there are, for example, a variety of directors and performers on record raising concerns about the physically and psychologically punishing nature of U.S.-produced pornography.

These concerns are supported by one of the most quoted studies on contemporary pornography and violence against women, which found that almost 90% of scenes in bestselling porn contain "physical aggression." The researchers also note that perpetrators are "usually male," whereas targets of aggression are "overwhelmingly female" and that women are often shown accepting or even enjoying their abuse.

The eroticising of this abuse, the representation of women not avoiding - or even enjoying - violence perpetrated against them, is a key point. In one of the few attempts to link #MeToo and porn culture, two Dutch filmmakers asked men to try and differentiate between women's accounts of sexual assault and scripts from porn films. The comparison highlights the difficultly in discerning any difference.

In 1987, the feminist theorist and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon wrote:

"If pornography is an act of male supremacy, its harm is the harm of male supremacy made difficult to see because of its pervasiveness, potency, and success in making the world a pornographic place. Specifically, the harm cannot be discerned from the objective standpoint because it is so much of 'what is'. Women live in the world pornography creates. We live its lie as reality ... To the extent pornography succeeds in constructing social reality, it becomes invisible as harm."

Her words could not have been more prescient. And I'm reminded of them every time I hear someone ask about the potential of "ethical porn."

The desperation to believe there must be better porn is telling. It seems pornography has so wholly colonised our shared ideas of what sex is, and what sex could be, that it is becoming impossible for some people to imagine what sexuality might look like without it. Porn has become synonymous with sex, rather than - more accurately - being understood as a particular model of commercialised sex, produced under conditions of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

There are, of course, proponents of pornography who still claim it's an avant-garde art form that holds some promise of sexual liberation. But these notions look astoundingly out of touch in sexual cultures where porn is the norm. And claims that harms are absent in gay pornography - or so-called "feminist pornography" - have been well and truly picked apart by Christopher Kendall and Rebecca Whisnant, respectively. As Whisnant surmises:

"Either it is feminist to celebrate and advertise women's 'authentic' desire to be sexually dominated, or it is not. Either it is ethical and honourable to 'play with' and promote dynamics of humiliation and violence that terrorize, maim, and kill women daily, or it is not."

The #MeToo movement has shown that we are quite capable of understanding the way movies, music and the mainstream media are implicated in shaping social norms of sex and sexuality. If we can manage this, then surely we can understand that the material most men masturbate to also deserves scrutiny.

So, for all the men who have been asking what they can do in light of #MeToo, here's a place start: stop linking your sexual arousal to women's sexual subordination. Stop watching porn.

Meagan Tyler is Senior Lecturer in the School of Management and the Centre for People, Organisation and Work at RMIT University, Melbourne.