Pornification: how bad is it?
Pornification: the prevalence or normalization of sexual themes and explicit sexual imagery in popular or mainstream culture. (Google Translate)
Statistics say that 25 percent of all internet searches are related to porn. Pornography laws differ from region to region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
Growing up in the Netherlands, pornography was fairly normal. Both offline and online. But teenagers sending each other pictures of their genitals became a national debate. Since it violates child pornography laws. And when a celebrity sex tape got leaked, people were openly sharing it in public transport. All this unwanted sexual imagery was one of the (many) reasons I quit social media.
I have watched a lot of porn in my life. Recently I'm far more interested in the phenomenon itself and its implications for humanity.
What do you think. Is porn bad for us?
Statistics say that 25 percent of all internet searches are related to porn. Pornography laws differ from region to region. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
Growing up in the Netherlands, pornography was fairly normal. Both offline and online. But teenagers sending each other pictures of their genitals became a national debate. Since it violates child pornography laws. And when a celebrity sex tape got leaked, people were openly sharing it in public transport. All this unwanted sexual imagery was one of the (many) reasons I quit social media.
I have watched a lot of porn in my life. Recently I'm far more interested in the phenomenon itself and its implications for humanity.
What do you think. Is porn bad for us?
Comments (91)
I think they are bad because shows a fiction that does not happen in reality. I guess porn, like most of social media (Instagram or Facebook), tend to overacting fantasies of normal people. It depends of the age of the audience. I am nearly 24 and when I see porn I understand they are just actors.
But the problem begins when is seen by 14 or 15 years old boys. Scenes where the actress makes a role where she ia cheating her boyfriend or she is having sex with the teacher can impact badly in their brains. Probably this is why somehow has increased these two aspects:
1. Use of prostitution when they get older. 2. Sexism in more of the actions towards women (for example when they see a pretty girl with a top they tend to think she is easy as porn videos)
To eliminate this taboo topic we should improve our sex educational system.
I think so many people see porn as a way of exploiting people, but I am not sure that the people who are involved feel exploited. I do believe that many people who are against it see it as a way of fuelling unhealthy sexual fantasies. However, that attitude seems a bit outdated now. I am inclined to think that most people who use porn may be using it as an outlet because they have so little in life.
I have never bought any porn and my funny experience was going into a local shop and asking if the shop had a music magazine called 'Uncut' and the shopkeeper became really angry and indignant towards me. I think that he thought that the magazine was was some kind of gay porn of uncut penises. However, aside from actual porn there is the whole spectrum of the erotica and the erotic in the arts.
Quoting TaySan
Quoting TaySan
Perhaps you and I are a small minority. But I notice a related phenomenon that might be called "food porn". Here in the UK at least, fast food and ready meals have come to dominate. Cookery used to be taught in school as 'domestic science', but no longer. people do not cook very much, or make jams and pickles or pies or cakes. At the same time the number of cookery programs on the media multiply endlessly. Every house has to have an enormous new kitchen full of gadgets and cupboards and surfaces. And it never gets used, because people live on delivered pizzas.
Thing about food-porn is it is completely tasteless and has no nutritional value. It does not satisfy, and so people stuff themselves with junk food and become obese.
Pornography is similarly unsatisfying and sensually impoverished, and it similarly arises in conjunction with a decline in physical relationships, of which it is a mere image. Because there is no touch, no smell, no actual stimulation of another body, it has to be more extravagant and extreme than reality. Every contact must be orgasmic because it is only the image and there is no actual contact. Extreme images of various kinds and crude mechanical stimulation substitute poorly for the complexities of a real relationship, and become an unsatisfying addiction exactly like junk food.
How would we know if it was bad for us?
Most fiction does not happen in reality. To show that porn is bad because of that, first you must show that fiction is bad. I think.
I think the main use of pornography is its facility to generate an ambience of autoerotica. So what would be a miss use of it? Using it as a basis of God worship? Using it as a guide to build nuclear silos? Using it as an instruction set to put to gether IKEA furniture? Using it as a basis for creating tax laws on international trade of electric bicycles? What? Using it as a pattern for funeral arrangements?
Like your generous examples
Could be but porn still be a taboo fiction topic because most of the people are not ready to see two (or even more) persons completely naked making obscene scenes.. It this true in most of the films it appears sex scenes but it is just regular. Porn is there to satisfy people’s fantasies
My take on this is the same as my take on any “thing” being good/bad. No thing is inherently good/bad. That said, it certainly can lead to problems with addiction, and can contribute to sexism, objectification, etc. But the fix, in my opinion, has more to do with fixing society as a whole. The US is largely a country of overstimulated, instant gratification addicts who have no semblance of self-control or discipline. It is also a sexually repressed country where sexual feelings, fantasies, etc. are encouraged to be kept secret. I think it takes a certain amount of maturity, for example, to understand that just because you’re turned on by over-sexualized women being objectified, doesn’t mean it’s ok to objectify women in general, or treat them as sex objects. I think a large percentage of people who consume porn lack this maturity, but better education could maybe help in this regard.
One statistic that helps us understand pornography is that porn video rentals in hotels are rarely played longer than 5 minutes. They come for the climax, then turn it off. On the other hand, authoritative web sites like CinamaBlend (somebody said they were authoritative) say that people are watching more Netflix than porn. They perceptively observe that more people are getting porn on the Internet (customizable) rather than from video rentals.
People watch porn as fuel for their erotic fantasies. Let's face it: in reality, our experience is that many sex partners are not wildly exciting over the long run. Some people are a lasting turn on, but most are not. This isn't due to any deficiency -- it's just the lack of novelty. (This from a gay male point of view.)
One problem with porn is that a lot of it isn't very good -- I am not referencing the camera work, lighting, sound, or--god forbid--plot. It's just not engaging most of the time. That's true of a lot of movies, produced for the broad population. It's bad art. It's a rush job.
Just for historical context, porn has been around for a long time but in the US it was hard to get until the late 1960s, thanks to Supreme Court rulings. Here is a satiric piece by Tom Lehrer (the Harvard mathematician turned humorist) on SMUT (ah, the adventures of a slut; I don't know what compares with smut...). This piece predates the ruling that opened "the flood gates".
These are the reasons porn could be bad in a religious sense.
Changing perspectives, a key factor to note is that visual porn, which I assume to be the primary topic here, is primarily consumed by men, as compared to romantic porn by women. You can imagine the former to be in the form of videos and pictures and the latter to be in story telling (50 Shades). As long as we are targeting porn for men specifically, it's reasonable to assume that the root problem of this conversation is male behavior.
I need a fact check on this but one idea is that porn was a driving factor in the development of the internet today. The reason the internet and its surrounding technologies was developed to this point today is because of men's desire for porn. The point being, porn is a viable substitute for men's biological desires for women, which should be men's ultimate biological goal. This desire, is what pushes men to work and develop so that society can progress.
So readily available porn that eliminates the need for men to work hard and develop things for women is problematic, though how much is debatable. It seems that a real relationship is preferred over purely porn, but is largely subjective and depends on you and your partner.
Some statistics show that countries that allow porn seems to have much lower rape crimes than countries that don't. This makes sense, as men can blow off steam more easily, there is less need to commit crimes for it. This seems like objective data that shows porn is good (Again fact check is good).
At this point I'm just throwing out ideas, but I want to finish with a heavy personal concern I have for porn. Namely, that people who are indulging in porn frequently seems to have a need to pursue more and more extreme and specific porn, seemingly getting radicalized in the process. Many of these are harmless but some are unsettling. Porn can be facilitating people to enjoy murder and torture sexually. Then the question becomes: can there be a point where porn is not enough, and they'll act on it in real life? I'll link a picture of a meme with a bunch of terrible porn tags and you can choose to look up these tags at your own risk.
A counterargument is that these people would've derived pleasure from it without porn but I'm not so sure. I hate thinking about it but I'm curious what people have to say about it.
Meanwhile many women have come forward alleging harassment both inside and outside politics. A young activist put out an appeal and thousands of girls came forward saying they had been raped while drunk or had been forced into acts or had had explicit videos posted against their will by school-age boys.
Many say that porn is a factor in these behaviours. Porn depicts women engaging in all kinds of performative sex acts. Performers undertake these acts willingly - or so we are told. But it normalises these behaviours, it conveys the understanding that this is how girls like to behave. And men are highly suggestible, especially when driven by their dicks. As a man, I've always found porn irresistable, since I first encountered in travelling in Europe in the 70's (back in the day when it was firewalled into red-light districts and sold in plastic sleeves.) I do my best to resist it, as basically I think it's immoral, no matter how pleasurable, but it's a struggle.
Porn is causing untold problems in modern culture, but liberalism has to defend porn as 'freedom of expression' - you barely hear a word of criticism about in the media. There's no greater insult in Australian popular culture than being labelled a 'wowser' (puritanical or censorious). Porn is freedom, and censorship is Hitler. That's the message.
And porn is everywhere - every school child with a smart device can presumably gain access to endless porn. It deeply conditions the mind, burns neural pathways that can't easily be over-written, and gives a thoroughly unrealistic, but endlessly seductive, view of what sex is. One of the anti-porn movements that has sprung up says that porn destroys the capacity for sexual intimacy, and I think that's true. There needs to be more awareness of it, a discussion of how pervasive it is, and how destructive it can be, especially on the forming of intimate relationships.
I reflected on this last week. First there were the Grammys, which people complained were raunchy. Then a few days later a sexually repressed guy in Atlanta killed 8 people because he was visiting massage parlors for sex but was a Baptist and he was wracked with guilt.
And I thought to myself, well maybe the raunchification of society is a bad thing. Bad example for the kids and so forth. But extreme sexual repression leads to murder. Often. The guy in Boulder didn't have a girlfriend either.
So I would say that if the choice is between too much sexual license and too much sexual repression; I'll take license every time. God gave us sexuality and when you repress it, bad things happen. Worse things than when you flaunt it all over the culture.
This has been on my mind so thanks for asking.
Do you think that this idea is something inherited from Freud?
I think the consequences of sexual repression are perfectly obvious. But perhaps you're asking if these consequences are only perfectly obvious because of a century of Freudian thinking permeating culture. Perhaps. But I don't think he invented our powerful unconscious drives. He described and made us all more aware of them.
You haven't really made any connection to porn. You could just have easily made a connection to conservative governments and how they construct female identity and treat women. Or how politics leads to abuses of male power or whatever. I suspect the real explanation for this is a very old problem men have with how they treat women and it is found everywhere, from politics to retail supermarkets. It greatly predates internet porn. As someone in late middle age I can confidently say that women were far more likely to be harassed and coerced by male predators 30 years ago.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's not a message I hear this much in Australia (it's where I am from) I hear this point sometimes about attempts to curb gambling or drinking, but porn rarely comes up (so to speak) in Australian public discourse. Porn has hardly been mentioned since the current examples of political misogyny were uncovered.
For the record, I suspect that porn does distort some people's behavior but this is an intuition I hold that is not supported by evidence I am aware of.
One place I have found informed commentary on it, is on the ABC Religion & Ethics site, for example, this article on the meaning of consent.
//also the work of Melinda Tankard Reist.//
If it's good, why is there an outcry against it? If it's bad how did it become a multi-billion dollar franchise?
Truth be told, sex can be viewed as a very strategic move by nature to keep the game alive so to speak. Nature must keep the torch of life burning against nigh impossible odds.
This reminds me of a Richard Feynman video on how AI tackles problems. The story goes that there's a naval battle video game and the choices offered to players are an assortment of ships, small, medium, big, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Human players tended to build navies that had a mix of ship types and whoever had the best combinations of warships won the PVP battles.
An AI was given the opportunity to play with the specific command to win as many games as possible. What did the AI do? It simply created a navy with thousands upon thousands of tiny gunboats and, as directed, it won all the games against even the best human players.
Nature, much like the AI in the story above, has come up with a similar approach. Obstacles to life are innumerable and also unpredictable. How does nature ensure a win in a battle between life and everything that wants to end it? Sheer numbers and that can only be had through sex, sex, and more sex.
Basically, sex is a very simple but highly effective long-term strategem to ensure life can overcome obstacles in its path with overwhelming numbers.
Am I off-topic?
This article is very good and I recommend anyone to read it. Thanks for sharing it
I, for one, welcome the end of moral coercion (as Mill called it), but without a corresponding decline in economic coercion, I think the only direction we can go is towards a libertine rather than libertarian society.
This is a global dis-grace. If you want any further proof that the world is being run by adult-children, here it is. Allowing porn access to all ages is a horrendous idea that nobody seems to care about in the least.
History, when applied in the human cultural context, proves that, in moments of great decadence and stagnation, both moral and cultural, the sexual objectification of humanity becomes prevalent in the most diverse forms of society, such as linguistics, perspective, iconographic and even economical - in its most profound moments -.
Pornography itself is not "bad" for humanity, humanity is bad for itself, as it descends from an earlier context of humanity that developed the space for such a vision and action to become the norm of such civilization.
Therefore, "pornography is a consequence of the inversion of values ??caused by the set of factors that enable such "relaxation" to be achieved".
In short, such normalization can be found in periods that contain the following characteristics:
[i]- Economic prosperity;
- Political stability - aka, political peace -;
- Secularization;
- Multiculturalism - or, currently known as "globalism" -;
- Freedom of individual expression;
- Intellectual prosperity.[/i]
What feels good to you might not feel good to someone else
Indeed, another proof of the subjective experience of existence.
Hidden in plain sight!
The internet has facilitated the distribution of porn, in the same way it has facilitated the distribution of all sorts of information. Prior to the arrival of the web, browsers, search engines, and plentiful bandwidth, pornography was physically situated in magazines and videos (and before video, film). One had to go somewhere to purchase porn. In the same way, before the internet and WWW, one had to go to the library or book store to acquire information.
Technological innovation often leads to expansion. Access to information was hugely expanded once Gutenberg's press (mid-1400s) started turning out books. Better presses, more information.
There is also an 'institutional factor': State and federal court rulings do not give blanket endorsements to pornography--they don't say, "anything goes". Instead, there is a set of conditions and terminology which generally allows, if not everything, quite a lot. Charges of obscenity are still brought--take the Cincinnati case:
The art director was acquitted of the charges. Some of Mapplethorpe's photos could be considered mildly pornographic--most would not. They certainly turned the crank of the local district attorney!
https://www.healthcareglobal.com/technology-and-ai-3/porn-fuels-increasing-demand-designer-vaginas
https://www.marieclaire.co.uk/life/health-fitness/pornography-linked-to-rise-in-surgery-for-women-163614
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3081936?seq=1
I noticed a while back that the needs of the camera for a clear view had bled into the general aesthetic for shaving pubic hair, - an unhygienic and infantilising fashion, but A little chat with google indicates that things have moved on, alas.
This sentiment is precisely what I wanted to express earlier. The issue of pornography - how the demand for it sustains a large-scale industry and how, simultaneously, there are many are against it - brings to the fore a very intriguing facet to hedonism-based morality which is, if you haven't guessed already, that not all pleasurable things are good. The puzzle of pornography - how well it runs and how bad we feel because of that - is just one of the many ways in which the marriage between hedonism and morality falls apart.
Conversely, if masochists have anything to say about it, not all painful things are bad.
Not really, I have this sneaking suspicion that masochism is a myth.
I have seen people play rugby of their own free will.
I've seen rugby players wearing helmets :lol:
There was a social phenomena during the mid 20th century, called ‘the sexual revolution’. As I’m born in the fifties, I’m aware of it, but many born in the 70’s and afterwards aren’t aware of it, because it’s become the new normal. But at the time, the sexual revolution was seen as a complete upheaval and overthrowing of prior mores regarding sexuality, marriage, procreation, family, and so on. One of the major factors was the introduction of contraceptives, of course, which severed the link between sexual intercourse and procreation. Another was sexual liberation, which basically declared that sexual pleasure and sexual identity were fundamental human rights, on par with ethnicity or religion.
Among the antecedents, I think Freud’s theories were a major factor. He introduced the notion that libido is the basic drive of all life, and that to repress it or deny it was the cause of neuroses and other ills. I think everyone now believes that. Even though much of Freud has now been forgotten, that element became well and truly embedded in the collective culture. Other elements were the Alfred Kinsey and Masters & Johnson studies of ‘sexology’. Conservatives say that Kinsey was an advocate of deviant sexuality saying that, for instance, he documented what it took to induce orgasms in children and observing the sexual activities of co-workers and peers.
Nowadays, most of the media regard the new normal as, well, normal. The only people who really talk about the sexual revolution in other-than-approving terms tend to be religious or social conservatives who are easily depicted as oppressors and enemies of freedom.
Remember how Alduous Huxley depicted sexuality in Brave New World. Women were ‘pneumatic’ and sex a form of recreational activity with no implied moral bond or parental obligation. Well, we’re living the brave, new dream. Internet porn is an aspect of it, and an incubator for it.
Never underestimate the super-charged sexuality of many evangelical Christians. They may profess faith in marriage, but they are a highly sexed, glamour obsessed genus often making extraordinary carnal demands on their women in terms that would embarrass Huxley's cute dystopia. An interesting look at this culture from last year is Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation - Kristin Kobes Du Mez
Buddhist and Yoga groups I was involved with back in the 1980's were full of highly sexed folk romping about with each other despite an ostensible focus on celibacy and contemplation. I found it hard to forget the 1991 book Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti which uncovers the story of Krishnamurti's long-term extra marital affair with Rosalind Edith Rajagopal, along with the abortions he is said to have asked her to have. Well, I guess Mr K was friendly with Mr Huxley....
My suspicion is that spirituality or religion is so often just one of two sets of books people keep for themselves. Human behaviour has its irresistible attractions regardless of transcendent ostentations. You'll find that porn appeals as much to Catholic priest (no surprises there) as it does to the secretary of the Buddhist Youth Club. They just won't talk about it publicly.
I know there's a lot of sexual misbehaviour that's associated with repression, you only have to look at the terrible scandals in religious institutions. No contest there.
The way that I see it, the sexual drive is so obviously a manifestation of will, in Schopenhauer's sense - it is an expression of all life's longing. But I still believe that there are those who escape the pull (sorry for the double entrendre.) They reach 'escape velocity'. ;-)
I still think the only feasible philosophical view is to put sex under the command of real love, which is pretty well what Christianity says. Apparently a very difficult thing to achieve, but I can't think of a better alternative.
Interesting.
I've skimmed through the Wikipedia entries on Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and sexology. Informative but only to extent that it held my attention which, oddly, wasn't for too long. I suppose when you make sex into a science as sexology attempts to it puts some distance between our sex drive and sex itself, making sexology not in the least bit arousing for the nether regions; nevertheless sexology is a subject in its own right - complete with doctoral degrees and serious research - and should, hopefully, provide us not only tips and tricks on how to get the best out of coitus but also vital information on sex within a much broader context such as society, disease (STD, infertility, impotence, rape, etc.), economy, family, age groups, and in religion. I'm sure sexologist researchers have done all of that but I'm going out on a limb here and say they forgot to investigate the religion angle. This is surprising since religions, at least the ones I have some idea of, make what goes on in our bedrooms their sacred business.
How does pronography fit into all of that? Well, for my money, I'd say that all that's happened is the previous opaque walls that enclosed our sexual appetites have now been replaced with transparent, see-through glass. In other words, there's nothing that wasn't already there before; it's just that with the sexual revolution, it can all be seen now. This applies to pornography too; pornography is, all said and done, fantasizing and there's no doubt at all that people could fantasize, have pornographic thoughts, well before the advent of film. This throws a spanner in the works of researchers who want to study the effect of pornography because sexual fantasizing (cheap pornography) was already on the scene much before what now passes as porn. There's no way there can be any difference that can be described in terms of before porn and after porn because the distinction doesn't exist.
And a camera!
Quoting TheMadFool
What wasn’t, was a means of transmitting it seamlessly to billions of screens simultaneously.
Generalization of it being good or bad isn't the best way to think of this. Far better is to make more specific questions about it. There are negative aspects to it and porn is a sad industry, yet how the society deals with pornography differs. Banning it isn't a good idea, just as the idea of prohibition of the use alcohol or drugs is bad, even if their use has far more obvious negative impacts and there is far more justification for the prohibition of the recreational use of them.
Is it good or bad depends quite a lot on the society and how the society deals with sexuality in general. I've noticed that the most conservative and non-permissive societies where porn is totally banned can have also the most serious sexual harassment and there women and girls are treated as sexual objects even more. It's not a simple question, just like violence in movies, games etc. don't simply make us or our society more violent: kids that have just played first person shooter games for all of their childhood and not exercised outside make lousy soldiers.
Great analysis.
That process has, in my eyes, way more to do with the way sex is used to market products and to get attention, than it has to do with pornography.
Interesting you say that - I feel this is where American culture was maybe....10-15 years ago? You know, around the time of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc.
Anti-porn is still largely associated with the right here in the US, but you can also sometimes see it in feminist circles, but I don't think it's the prevailing feminist view. I think for the time being in the US racial issues and trans issues are front and center and porn has taken kind of a back seat. I wouldn't be surprised to see a strong anti-porn movement gain traction here in the US in the next 5-10 years. It would see support from mainstream right-leaning movements like the Joe Rogan crowd as well as some chunk of the feminist movement.
For me personally I'm trying to take a break from it but it's not easy.
You don’t say! No, seriously, I understand. There’s disputes over whether ‘addiction’ is the right word, but there can’t be any dispute that it’s strongly habit-forming.
For some it's bad. I've read stories of those who claim addiction and and poor relationships because of it. For others, it has no long term sorts of effects. It's obviously here to stay though.
I do believe sexual behavior has changed due to porn, just in the sense that people are now better educated/corrupted into new varieties/perversions they'd have never otherwise thought of. For example, it's fairly commonplace for young women to go to the corner strip mall to have their pubic hairs ripped out. I think that's the result of porn. I don't know that's a bad thing in any moral sort of way, and if it adds to someone's intimacy/pleasure/excitement, then I'm not one to stand in the way of someone's good time.
On the other hand, if someone feels pressured by these new norms to do something they're uncomfortable with, then it's probably a bad thing. You just have to hope people know what best belongs to fantasy and what belongs to reality.
Debate porn.
I can't for the life of me find the article that talked about effects of sexual arousal on decision making in men and women. Specifically, men spent more money if they were dealing with an attractive female sales person whereas women spent less money if they were dealing with an attractive male.
Found this one though. Research is linked in the article
https://awario.com/blog/does-sex-sell-advertising/
Finding that men have a higher tendency for unusual sexual behavior and morally questionable when they are sexually aroused compared to how much they expected to be when unaroused. In other words, we are more irrational than we think we will be when aroused.
Anyway, I bring this up to show that sex porn is a powerful tool in affecting male attitudes and behavior. As long as it is, it will be used as such by those that benefit from them. IE by women, marketing, etc.
Ironically, the Power of Porn is being revealed today (3/31/2021) on the internet. We're experiencing a worldwide (mostly US & Europe) Denial-of-Service blockage of net sites. Whenever I point my browser to a favorite website, I get "timed-out" error messages, and no email in my boxes. (note : TPF is an odd-but-welcome exception) Apparently, this is another skirmish in a long-running battle between spammers & porn-purveyors of various kinds, and the watchdogs that try to limit clogging of mailboxes with unwanted solicitations and sexploitation.
A major player in this cyber-warfare is CyberBunker, located in actual underground bunkers in Holland and Germany. In 2013, when a spamblocker site put them on their blacklist, they viciously retaliated with a global targeted denial-of-service attack (flooding email servers with spam). Some individuals were later arrested, but often got off, due to "lack of evidence", and probably to lawyers-on-retainer.
This sorry state of cyber-affairs reminds me of the US crime-wars in the US after Prohibition laws (1920s & 30s) suddenly made alcoholic beverages illegal. Since a large segment of the population had a strong desire for alcohol (for self medication of emotional problems?), some formerly small-time neighborhood thugs, quickly became multimillionaires, and semi-respectable businessmen. They capitalized on a vacated niche of legal drugs, by supplying an illegal product on the black-market. In our anything-goes modern society, is it a crime to violate "community" moral standards? Do we still have ethical communities in that medieval sense?
The "self-righteous" tee-totaling moralizers lost that "moral equivalent of war" big-time. I grew-up in a dry county, where alcohol was seldom seen in "respectable" society. But now, in the 2020s, almost 25% of grocery stores are devoted to various flavors of alcoholic beverages. And formerly illegal Marijuana is about to become legalized, after many years as the drug du jour of rougishly-romanticized devil-may-care hipsters. Now, it may become just another mundane market item -- readily available to pre-teens. Unregulated Capitalism dutifully serves its paying customers, without irrelevant moralizing. Apparently, the nanny-state can't "just say NO!" to deep-seated desires.
Will Junkmail and Pornography follow the same path to semi-legitimacy? How much longer will black-market purveyors be relegated to the ethical underworld? Not too many years ago, Cosmopolitan women's magazines, with occasional nip-slips, were covered-up on grocer store checkout counters. Now, almost anything goes. It seems that whatever is morally condemn-able, soon becomes monetarily profit-able. Just goes to show that you can't hold animal urges & desires down for long. So, your best option to deal with the spam flood is to just get a bigger mailbox. :cool:
Global Down Detector : Pingdom
https://livemap.pingdom.com/
what is the connection with the subject matter? How do you know it's not your ISP or a config issue with your home internet?
(According to commentary, Kristof's OP was associated with an activist group called Trafficking Hub, which according to a critique by the Daily Beast is a conservative, anti-porn activist organisation that 'wants to drive the sex industry out of business.')
I subscribe to the Daily Beast, and I'm fan of their political coverage and general journalism. I notice their attitude towards porn: that it's simply another form of entertainment, that it is no different in kind from, say, computer games or cinema. As it's a matter of choice whether to view it or not, there's no real question of morality concerned; what individuals choose to perform, and others to view, is simply a matter for them. That I take to be the liberal view.
The religious view: 'Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials.'
(From the Catholic Catechism, Wikipedia 'religious views on porn'.)
I'm sure alcohol dependency was a significant contributor to the backlash against the prohibition laws. Alcohol is also known to be a catalyst for violence and rape, inhibiting rational decision making. However in my circle and many people I know, it's an important social tool. This is in contrast to porn, which by nature seems to discourage the development of social connections.
With that said, my thoughts on it may change quickly because there are actors using outlets like Onlyfans among others that provide a feeling of intimacy along with porn. It's not just a random woman on the screen anymore. It is someone who you can contact and will converse with you (for money of course). Someone who can provide you social satisfaction as well as a sexual one. A part of me screams that this is even more dangerous than normal porn, but my main point that I want to get across is that porn seems to be evolving along with the technology that propel its distribution.
Fun fact: Boys who starts to drink in his preteens develop larger prefrontal cortexes than boys who don't. Ironically the prefrontal cortex is the section of the brain that's associated with decision making. However girls who starts drinking in their preteen develop a much small prefrontal cortex than girls who don't and they generally lead a much less successful life. While it acts like a poison to girls, it makes boys smarter.
From Why Gender Matters by Leonard Sax
Is that your view as well? For what it’s worth, I think both perspectives can be true, which is to say the “truth” is probably somewhere in the middle. The difference in perspective seems to come down to how one prioritizes there values. Liberals prioritize freedom of choice over all else, whereas religious conservatives prioritize things like sanctity over everything else. I don’t see a way to determine, objectively, which prioritization system is better.
Quoting Wayfarer
This seems nearly impossible to implement effectively, or fairly. What counts as pornography? There is a very wide spectrum of things that people find sexually arousing. And what of the right to freedom of expression? If I want to express myself hypersexually shouldn’t I be allowed to do so?
Actually I tend more to the conservative view although I don't dictate it.
Quoting Pinprick
Morality can't be reduced to merely objective judgement, as objective judgment can only include what can be quantified, whereas this is a qualitative judgement. This is the dilemma of morality in liberal theory - everyone is their own arbiter of value and the individual conscience is the ultimate judge, with only science as the yardstick, and science is not relevant to such matters of moral judgement. Classical liberal theorists, e.g. John Stuart Mill, Jeremy Bentham, etc I think still assumed a modicum of Christian morality would prevail in liberal societies, but in its absence, there is no such constraint.
In religions, even Buddhism - which doesn't have a judging God - there is a moral commandment, 'thou shalt not' which one is obliged to obey. In Buddhism one of the five basic precepts is not to engage in sexual misconduct. (Modern westernised Buddhism tends towards being much more liberal than traditional, and so many Western Buddhists will not regard porn as sexual misconduct, but I'm pretty sure that traditional Buddhists wouldn't agree.)
I can see how it would be impossible and impractical to now try and control the dissemination of internet porn - the genie is well and truly out of the bottle. But I honestly think it's immoral, even while I admit to not being above it. There are huge masses of people strugging with the urge to consume it, who know they really ought not to (google the topic on Amazon.) Of course, there also might be milliions who feel no such pangs. But it has to be remembered that this phenomenon of hyper-real pornography being available to entire populations through hi-tech devices which they carry with them, really is a completely novel situation in society. That's why I don't buy the notion that 'porn has always been around'. We're not talking about sculptures on temple walls or pencil sketches. This is novel, and it's global. A whole new thing.
I suppose this thread is talking about how bad Porn is morally. But that's not the point of my post. It was motivated mostly by frustration, because TPF is one of the few websites I can log onto tonight. Most of my regulars are timed-out, due to denial-of-service attacks. Apparently, liberal-minded philosophical sites are not considered an enemy of the free-speech porn sites. Personally, I don't concern myself with porn, because I don't have young children to be corrupted by its graphic depiction of what shameless naked animals (e.g. dogs) do in public all the time.
My post was only connected to the topic of this thread because CyberBunker is a host for a variety of illicit spammers, black-marketers, and political-secret sites. Porn sites merely happen to be some of their biggest cash-flow customers. In their favor though, they have scruples against child porn. But, like the mafia, they have no qualms about violently attacking their adversaries, by shutting-down half the world's websites, as collateral damage. "How bad is it?" Black-Market & Dark Web Providers like Cyberbunker may be like the Mafia, in that they opportunistically move into any money-making business that is somewhat illicit, and regulated by uptight nanny governments. At least they're not using Thompson submachine guns to massacre their opponents . . . yet. .
Even in liberal Western societies, Porn is still not good for the "clean" image of mainstream internet providers, so they resort to back-channel providers like CB. But it was the fact that a purveyor of porn, among other annoying or illicit or illegal black-market goods & services, that suggested to me a comparison with the rise of the Mafia from immigrant neighborhood gangsters to nationwide semi-legit businessmen. Is that situation morally bad, or just bad for competing legal businesses?
BTW, I know it's not just my local provider because I checked with services that keep tabs on internet outages. The link in the post above gives a graphic global image of how pervasive the problem is. :gasp:
Global Down Detector : Pingdom
https://livemap.pingdom.com/
https://insuretrust.com/worldwide-internet-slowdown-due-to-largest-cyber-attack-in-history/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
This site is not available at this time, due to "time out" error :
Major Internet Outage Cripples the United States ...
https://www.bectechconsultants.com › major-internet-o...
We are issuing a warning to businesses that there is a major internet outage being reported across the United States today.
PS__Just in case you accidentally stumble upon a porn site :
" The NSA gathers evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a plan ..." :joke:
https://www.businessinsider.com › Tech Insider › Politics
Actually, dogs, unlike humans, only copulate when the female is in heat. Without those pheremones, dogs are not the least interested. Humans are unique in that respect. (I learned that from Desmond Morris, aged about 12.)
Other than that, I have not the least idea what you're talking about.
That's never been my experience. The only times I have resorted to porn were times when I had no sexual partners or was in an unsatisfactory relationship, and even then I did so sparingly, like only about 5-7 times a week, on account of its utterly unsatisfying nature.
Quoting Wayfarer
According to my experience of dogs that's not true, or at least not always true.
A change in behavior averaging once a day seems like a significant change in habit.
Well said, I like the connection you made with food and sexual porn. It’s this bite sized notion of something that used to be a much more quintessential part of our lives. Something that used to be sustenance and maintenance became merely performative. Without being too cynical, how many relationships these days are based on genuine and or authentic connections. Hopefully it’s merely our position in the cycle of human existence and the notion of silk slippers and wooden shoes (thank you Carlin) but it would seem like even the necessity of this discussion spells the truth of a somewhat miserable situation.
As it is pretty much staged with a paid actor and actress who try to appeal to as many fetishes as possible. This could create an addiction of the said teenager, and for many others like him or her it can cause physical and emotional intimacy to be eroded.
Some people also grow self-conscious due to how the people in the videos are portrayed, i.e the “perfect” bodies which further add to the unrealistic expectations.
Are there studies that show that those with larger prefrontal cortexes make better decisions or do the studies just show that decision making occurs in the prefrontal cortex? Thinking generally takes place in the brain, but those with larger brains aren't statistically smarter than those with smaller brains, so I don't see why an enlarged prefrontal cortex should correlate with it working better.
The real message it would seem is that alcohol consumption affects a developing brain, so maybe hold off drinking until you're a little older.
I need to come to terms with myself. Take care
Morris may have meant that dogs actually copulate (inseminate) only when in heat. But both male & female dogs will playfully simulate sexual intercourse almost anytime. Much like human petting and pornography. :cool:
Regarding my rambling remarks about Denial of Service Attacks : please Disregard. Apparently I didn't know what I was talking about. The stuff about CyberBunker was correct, but as it turned out, didn't have anything to do with my inability to connect to some of my regular websites. Various unhelpful diagnostics & troubleshooters led me in a spiraling circle, right back to my own erratic router. After a reboot, I'm again able to copulate, er connect, with all my favorite webpages, such as TPF, which was one of the few that worked during the 2-day downtime. :yikes:
Do Male Dogs Mate With Females Not in Heat? :
Of course a female dog in heat will attract suitors, but male dogs -- neutered or intact -- may attempt to mate with a female who's not in heat. And female dogs aren't the only potential targets of an interested dog. People, other animals and inanimate objects such as toys, pillows and stuffed animals may be on the receiving end a dog's mounting behavior. Mounting isn't just boys being boys; female dogs engage in mounting behavior as well.
https://www.cuteness.com/blog/content/do-male-dogs-mate-with-females-not-in-heat
Morris' book was amongst the various erotic treasures selected from my parents very 1960's bookshelf, alongside John Updike and Bruno Partridge. It was actually pretty graphic, in a pseudo-pop-science kind of way.
Glad you sorted your network issues.
Apropos of anti-porn sites:
https://www.yourbrainonporn.com/
The basic message is: habitual porn users are easily triggered by images or real-life encounters. To the habituated user, a triggering event fires up the neural pathway which carries an almost irrestible tendency to be acted out, thereby releasing the payload of endorphins to which s/he has become habituated. The force of that habituated response, after being burned in by repeated actions, easily overcomes the prior good intention not to engage. The usual cycle is: regret, rinse, and repeat - ad infinitum.
'… Now you swear and kick and beg us that you're not a gamblin' man
Then you find you're back in Vegas with a handle in your hand....' Steely Dan, Do It Again.
Yes, I remember it well a few years later here in Australia. At our place it sat alongside the Female Eunuch, An Invitation to Sociology and Future Shock. An early blockbuster book along the lines of the recent Sapiens.
Did you read The Human Sexes, by DM? Lots of nudity. :yikes:
No, but it looks interesting. He was a breakthrough writer, Morris.
Yes. I'm not an expert but my understanding is that there are a lot of evidence to believe that the ability to make rational decisions is heavily associated with the prefrontal cortex. The experiments I've read were on people who had seriously impaired or missing prefrontal cortex function though, not people with bigger/smaller normal prefrontal cortexes. The data I mentioned about how the girls who developed smaller prefrontal cortexes being less successful in life suggests that though.
Quoting Hanover
I think you're confusing how differences in the brain sizes between people doesn't necessarily dictate IQ, which is true. But that's because the differences are relatively small. In the animal kingdom a bigger brain is indicative of higher intelligence. Also better (bigger) functioning prefrontal cortex does not necessarily make you better at taking an IQ test, for example, but can provide you with higher impulse control which is still plenty useful.
Quoting Hanover
Girls definitely should be held off of drinking statistically, while boys might be improved by it even.