Submitted by Victoria McMagnus on Thu, 02/14/2008 - 20:07.
Porn warps normal sexual responses. It enslaves people into a self-destructive lifestyle that ruins their relationships while making their puppet-masters very rich.
If it wasn't for sex education classes at school, most of today's youth would learn about sex purely from pornographic imagery. In countries like China and India this is already the case. Such imagery used to be fairly hard to find, and would be bought and sold surreptitiously to "dirty men". Now, however, porn is everywhere and with its pervasive presence on the internet it has become mainstream and virtually uncontroversial, except in the most vile forms. Before ever experiencing sexual intercourse with a woman, many boys have spent years gaining their sexual experience by watching porn.
Experience has little effect on the mating behavior of the lower animals. An inexperienced rat will copulate instinctively with as much efficiency as an experienced rat. When we look at primates there is a different story. Young monkeys need to see adult monkeys engaging in normal sexual behavior and they themselves imitate many of the postures as pre-sexual responses. Monkeys raised in partial isolation, where each is in a cage and can see, but not touch, each other, are usually unable to copulate at maturity.
Humans watching porn are having their brains programmed with sexual experience that will affect their attempts to copulate in the future.
The absence of any sense that couples being viewed are in love is an insidious influence in porn. Often it is not even a couple involved but just random individuals, either men or women, in any number. This helps to disassociate sex from love. The elements of humiliation or violence obviously do that too.
Men and women get strange ideas about each other as a result of porn, with many decent men finding women make unfair assumptions that all men are of the same type and ascribing various perversions to them. Many women feel they have to live up to pornographic expectations if they want to be found attractive to their men. They will undergo surgery and feel neurotic as a consequence of this. And yet the truth is, more and more men really do expect their woman to fit this kind of stereotype.
Porn causes impotence in men. It is like a drug that conditions the user to cease to enjoy natural pleasures in life. Normal love making quickly becomes mundane compared to the thrills gained by looking at a new image in a magazine or on the computer. This has emasculated the man , since he can no longer get properly aroused by a real woman and requires what amounts to the equivalent of a paper dolly. How pathetic that is.
There is money to be made from this, not only the $billions from porn itself, but from sex therapy, divorce lawyers, and the medicines that are sold to cure erectile dysfunction. Society pays the price, as well as individuals, but society is now totally geared to serve corporate profits.
The cult of individualism says that life is all about pleasure and that there is nothing wrong in indulging in anything that pleases you. We used to have religiously endorsed standards, but these have now been swept away. People are rudderless and look to the media for an idea of what should be considered normal. By so doing they are asking to be exploited. The media sells them whatever brings them pleasure and keeps them tame. Sex sells, and has become nothing but a product that is very lucrative.
Don't expect our governments to do anything to solve the problem. They are fully complicit in the whole thing. It is up to each of us to ensure that neither we nor anyone we care about falls into this trap.
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References??
Wow. There isn't a single piece of real information to be gleaned from this article. If you are going to make as many broad sweeping statements as are made here, please give some sort of facts to back them up.
Opinion pieces accomplish nothing, they either preach to the choir or enrage the opposition. Neither course can lead to any meaningful change.
Porn is fun, but bad.
I like looking at pornography. Does that mean that it is healthy or useful? No.
Pornography is bad, dangerous and damaging in so many ways that I would need half the day to explain.
However, I will take this opportunity.
The human body is beautiful, sex is wonderful and love is fantastic...porn is none of these.
Porn teaches everyone involved an unrealistic, numbing and dehumanizing lesson every time.
It ruins the minds of young boys (and girls) by giving a demoralizing quality to all women. Women become sex objects and not people.
A man who grows up on porn will never treat his wife fairly, because there is no way that she can meet the expectations that he has poisened his mind with. I know for a fact that all women that I have had intimate realionships with do not like sex like they show on porn. Most of them consider it painful and degrading.
A man who looks at porn will never be satisfied with his partner, because he believes a lie that says that sex should look like porn. The girlfriend and wife become a piece of meat and not a gift of love. They will never be good enough, because they can't provide the experience that the porn stars are portraying.
Porn, while, fun for a moment has life long consequences. Once you get hooked, you can't forget it. I wish that we would have not had the Playboy channel when I was 12 yrs old. It poisoned me for life. It's like a drug.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important. C.S.Lewis
http://evenhand.blogspot.com/
Here's a thought: How about
Here's a thought:
How about those "poor children"'s parents teach them something about sex, instead of leaving it for the school system. Porn is bad? Here comes the censoring comity... really!
Erectile dysfunction isn't
Erectile dysfunction isn't as widespread as purported to be, and many cases are genetic.
Premature ejaculation is much more pervasive. Young boys masturbate as quick as possible in fear of being caught white-handed. Masturbation doesn't force the male take the female's pleasure into account. Because of this, many men can't last long enough to please their partner. Like it or not, that critical orgasm is important for a successful relationship.
However, animals masturbate too. The difference is they aren't secretive about it. It's natural. It increases fertility, alleviates sexual frustration, lowers blood pressure, allows balance when one partner has a bigger sex drive than the other, etc.
(EDIT: And, of course, lowers protein levels.)
The thing is, modern society is so fucked up we even fail at jerking off. It's something families try to avoid talking about; kids are clandestine masturbators. They shouldn't watch porn, but shouldn't be punished for masturbating to Sally McVirgin down the street. When stallions are punished for masturbating, they masturbate more and their breeding habits are fucked up. I'm not saying you should drop your pants in front of Johnny and show him how it's done, but don't fall into either extreme: letting them watch hardcore pornography or paddling them when they touch themselves. That's when it becomes something totally awesome like heroin and getting beat down by a cop in front of your schoolmates.
For real
True that. It's so rediculous that people put down mastrubation...
In fact (I learned this in church when I was little and didn't know about science vs. theology) I am pretty sure somewhere in the bible it says that "It is better to spill your seed into the womb of a whore than on ground" or something to that effect.
So god would rather me get some woman preagnant than to have a discrete jerking in the privacy of my room? (besides god, I use tissues, I have more dignity than to just let it fall on the floor. Fucking nasty.)
Lets look at the facts. All men have at least done it, (and if not then I'd say it's a cause for concern.) your dad has done it, the President has done it, every guy you see at school/work has done it, the Pope has done it...and I could very well go on. And I can't say as much because I'm not one...but Ladies? The subject always comes up as if it were men and only men who do it.
And besides, think about how messed up it would be to walk in on your kid while he was in a fierce battle with his purple-helmet warrior...that would be whack. For you and him both. So parents: If you hear a faint rustling in the bathroom, just leave it alone...
Masturbation
The article is about effects of Pornography, not about masturbation. People have been masterbating long before porn was available to six yr olds.
Only religious extremists
Only religious extremists think there's anything wrong with either male or female masturbation. As has been mentioned here, it is more healthy than unhealthy and certainly worse to have hang-ups about it. Anyone would rather do this in private though and prefer that others do - so that's where any furtiveness comes in. Good point that mass produced porn is not necessary and imagination should be enough. Perhaps if it was only one or two pictures that wouldn't matter , because a big part of the problem is the way the brain gets trained to quickly get bored and want an unlimited variety. Then addictive personalities get hooked and end up being exploited.
Really?
"..most of today's youth would learn about sex purely from pornographic imagery. In countries like China and India this is already the case."
We show sex in our movies...they show men and women dancing around trees in their movies. Yet one is home to the Kama sutra, and they've each hit a population of over 1 billion :)
75% of Chinese students learn sex through porn
In response to what Abbath says above:
If you consider these references
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-05/11/content_329636.htm
"75% Chinese students learn sex through porn"
and this:
http://nitawriter.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/sex-education-and-porn/
"Sex education in schools can help counter the ill effects of porn". - about India
then you can see that the western type of porn is having a negative effect there. The internet is not as widely available there as it is here, but perhaps this will affect their birth rates either through ruining relationships or further spreading STDs. These countries would benefit from a population reduction - but that's another issue.
All too true
Great article Victoria.
Porn is so degrading to the human race. And what I don't like is that it gives actual art a bad name, if artwork has any nudity in it than it's also "porn". Personally even going through puberty (Yes guys, you know you've all done it at least once) I didn't find intrest in watching someone else going at it with a random unnatural blonde. Why do so many men spend thier entire lives around shit like that?
If only there were MORE auto-erotic deaths linked to stuff like this...
Agreed
The arguments about the porn industry are terribly one-sided.... you either hate all sex, or support some absurd perversion of liberalism.
Industrializing sex, of course, leads to the mechanizing and economizing of it. It becomes just another product, and the obsession with novelty sets in - anal sex, bestiality, lesbianism, group sex, interracial sex, and many other perversions.
There's plenty of precedent for erotic art and poetry within European culture, but these are designed to praise the beatury of the human form, and the act of love, NOT to appeal merely to the sexual appetite. It's a shame that most moderns are unable to look at a nude statue without thinking of fornication or "dirtiness".
The War on Epicurus
Yet another intriguing and informative article.
It is these kind of... retardations... that make me long for the white worship of chastity of the past. On that note, I especially like the distinct impressions made by the contrast between the two images... well done!
Hedonism is the oppressor; few are the resistant.
I agree with this. Porn is
I agree with this.
Porn is also counter-evolutionary, when men use it instead of following their sex drives to find a real woman.
The porn debate
...like most debates concerning public issues for which public understanding is not profitable, has been co-opted by the media and turned into a two-sided, two-dimensional barking contest. On one side it's the anti-sex crowd who either fear porn as a direct cause of the objectivication of women and creates rapists (feminists) or that sensuality itself is the devil's work (religious nuts). On the other, the individualists argue that the porn industry at worst hurts only those who find themselves involved in it, which, as this article has touched upon, is absurd, or that you could not trust anyone to censor porn without also censoring whatever else they felt like, the presumption being that banning and bureaucratic initiatives are the only ways to approach problems. Articles like this are an important step towards opening people's minds to the full reality of the situation.