Is Porn Bad for You?

[brekin]

barracuda wrote:

Quote:
Have you seen the Hot Chip I Feel Better Video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaCZN2N6Q_I (You have to give it a full minute.)
I return to it because it in differing degrees attracts and repels me.

I posted it in the lounge a few months ago because I liked the beat and the crazy skinny guy. What's not to like? Surely you're not in some way shocked or dismayed by the video or song. It's pretty run of the mill, all things considered. I don't think it would be significantly repellant or outre even decades ago. Taste is funny that way. I consider your threshold of shockedness to be astonishingly low, and I would have felt the same way about it thirty five years ago.

See I love the song and video and to me its innovative and slightly creepy. But I've noticed when I show it to many people they are disturbed by it. It makes me laugh like mad but it makes me wonder like Nietzsche said if the laughing is covering a dead emotion. And you know it would have been outrageous two decades ago (or well at least pre-Married with Children) Can you imagine it coming on between Mr. Belvedere and MacGyver? Maybe late at night on MTV but definitely pre-internet it wouldn't have been on primetime.

Please stop pulling my leg. You're telling me you need more and more intense stimuli to break through the psychic numbing of society, so you turn to Justin, aka MC Progeria? That's pretty funny. He is a bit of a train wreck, but the attraction of entertainers such as he is nothing particularly new, at all, or endemic in particular to contemporary life. It's a freak show, baby, on the dance floor, and always has been.

Well he's not my number one psychic numbing solvent. I'd say he's not anything new post Jerry Springer, but for some reason I can't imagine him in the past as say a Musketeer or even Zach's sidekick on Saved By The Bell.

brekin Quote:
I remember the first time I saw a porn film as a youth and only being used to the hollywood sex scenes was actually physically nauseated at first...


Now we're getting somewhere. This confession is an important first step on the road to your recovery.

Am I'm sure with your helping hand, Inquisitor.

brekin wrote:
Porn from the 80's to me is like watching Family Ties or something. So dated. Sexuality seems tied to the new and novelty. It may even be a biological imperative to chase after the strange.

barracuda wrote:

Okay, I don't mean to continue horning in on your conversation with compared, but I couldn't resist this one. What exactly becomes dated about two people fucking? This seems like a rather eternal human condition, one way or the other, unless you mean the clothing styles before they come off. We must have been watching very different porn in the eighties, because the movies I was watching (The Devil In Miss Jones, Parts Three and Four, or John Leslie's Smoker, for example) would stand toe to toe (or something to something) with any such fare available on the intertubular highway today. I mean, even a man in a frilly dress sodomizing a pooping mule is pretty much the same in form and essence now just as it has been throughout history, whether you are reading about it or watching a mpeg file. And the availability of that mulish experience hasn't changed the fact that only very, very "special" tastes are interested in it, or ever have been. High-ho, silver.

What becomes dated? Hair styles, people. The hairstyles. In Ted Turner's infamous Playboy interview he couldn't understand why it took Playboy so long to put out their magazine compared to CNN's realtime news delivery when "Pussy is Pussy" and why can't you just run old photos of nudes? Consumers like to believe they are getting something brand new and different. Everyone believes they have a "special" refined taste not like the poor slobs out there. That is why Playboy had to constantly be getting new photos and push the envelope towards Hustler. Online Porn is doing the same thing and like CNN has to follow the market towards decadence. And the consumers follow because excepting a few people they get tired of Porn Cola's original recipe.

Related to that for the people shouting for "Studies!" "Evidence" I don't know how many times I have to plug the two books The Brain that Remakes Itself and Libido Dominandi which discuss studies and case histories that show users of online porn have a tendency to pursue more and more disturbing, violent, young, taboo, images the longer they use it with unhealthy repercussions with their relationships with their partners.

I'll try to reply to some of the other comments later.

[Simulist]

A few thoughts on that graphic...

- Since when is "adult dating" a porn search? If this is included among the results of the statistics here, the results are highly skewed.

- Considering that Google itself conducts about three hundred million searches per day, 116,000 searches for "child pornography" daily seems miniscule.

-The entire worldwide porn industry pulls in under five billion annually? I'm sorry, but isn't that less money than Johnny Depp movies alone make?

- "The average age at which a child first sees porn online is 11." This statistic is less shocking than it seems. I'm sure I was about nine when I first saw a "dirty picture".

-8% of all emails are pornographic? Does that include Viagra (etc.) spam, or are people sending each other naughty letters through the pipe? I'd consider the latter to be a very good thing, and the former to be the probable cause of this stat.

Well, sure! — if you look at the graphic critically...

The entire worldwide porn industry pulls in under five billion annually? I'm sorry, but isn't that less money than Johnny Depp movies alone make?

True. But it is interesting that over half of the money spent on porn worldwide comes from the United States — a lot of it from Utah, apparently.

(Well, to the degree that these "statistics" can be believed.)

[barracuda]

See I love the song and video and to me its innovative and slightly creepy. But I've noticed when I show it to many people they are disturbed by it. It makes me laugh like mad but it makes me wonder like Nietzsche said if the laughing is covering a dead emotion. And you know it would have been outrageous two decades ago (or well at least pre-Married with Children) Can you imagine it coming on between Mr. Belvedere and MacGyver? Maybe late at night on MTV but definitely pre-internet it wouldn't have been on primetime.

Just a minor off-topic comment here. "I Feel Better" charted out at the 115th position on the UK charts. In other words, no one is buying this record. I mean, this band has never even been on Letterman - they've only gotten as far as Carson Daly. There's a reason you have to show it to people rather than just ask them what they think. If it weren't for the wide availability of music online you would have never come into contact with it at all. Personally, I wouldn't want to return to watching King Family reruns. Talk about disturbing.

[compared2what?]

I didn't want to eat up the whole page with it, but those devastated by the porn infographic, should really spend a little time over at OnlineMBA cheering themselves up with the fondly nostalgic Truth About Barbie:



Stay away from the online-gaming infographic if you're feeling delicate, though. That industry's 4 times the size of online porn, way more violent, targets a younger demo, and actually ma or may not have some kind of deleterious effect.

Not that the infographic tells you the last part. Or that it's by any means guaranteed to cause harm, it kind of depends on highly variable stuff about the individual human material the online-gaming has to work with. Such as whether they have something remotely resembling adequate parenting. Since parenting is by far the greatest potential threat to the contemporary youth of America in the world today, if you assess it in the same undifferentiated terms as we're using for porn.

Incidentally.

Also, another minor quibble with the porn infographic:

It doesn't say anything about whether it's good, bad or neutral for the consumer. Not one blessed thing. Which does put some inherent limits on its utility to the topic under discussion, if you ask me.

**ON EDIT: D'oh! Sorry. The image said it was smaller. But it's not. Stupid lying Online MBA infographic. Grrrr.

[Nordic]

I have to admit I've been trying to keep up with this thread, but it bores the hell out of me!

I'm amazed it's gone on for this long.

It's really very simple. There's nothing complicated about it. Men have always made porn, always looked at porn, and they always will.

This is like asking "is shitting in the toilet good for you?"

Actually, come to think of it, people have shat in toilets for far viewer millenia than they've viewed and created porn.

And yeah, all those "statistics" on the last page .... I see them and think ...."so what?"

Comic books are destroying today's youth!

Let me put it this way, I'd far rather my son looked at pictures of naked beautiful women online than find out he's playing hyper-violent video games like Grand Theft Auto or this new western one where you get to rape nuns or whatever.

[Username]

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You know, that's a real piss poor argument I hear way too often, and there's probably a name for it which I'm not aware of, but it's pretty lame when someone says, for instance, "OMG, look what you've done." and the comeback will be, "Well THEY did something worse."

Does that make what you've done any less horrendous?

or for example: "THIS is fucking evil."

"Well, THAT'S more evil."

Is that really an argument at all?

Does it mean we shouldn't be discussing whatever it is being discussed, because there are worse things we can find?

No.
~

[Nordic]

~
You know, that's a real piss poor argument, I hear way too often, and there's probably a name for it which I'm not aware of, but it's pretty lame when someone says, for instance, "OMG, look what you've done." and the comeback will be, "Well THEY did something worse."

Does that make what you've done any less horrendous?

or for example: "THIS is fucking evil."

"Well, THAT'S more evil."

Is that really an argument at all?

Does it mean we shouldn't be discussing whatever it is being discussed, because there are worse things we can find?
~

You talking to me?

If so, that wasn't my argument. My argument, while I didn't really state it that clearly, is that if we're gonna SPEND TIME talking about something, why not spend it talking about something that is actually somewhat new, rather than something thousands of years old.

Playing 3D video games where you get to viscerally experience pounding someone's head in with a hammer is pretty new. Looking at pictures of naked chicks isn't.

But hey, either way, that might be the last thing I say in this thread. I really don't get it. It seems obvious to me that someone like Brekin is scared of his own viewing habits and thinks everybody else should be of theirs, too, because by god he's tumbling down that slippery slope. Other than that? What is there really to say?

[Username]

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No. I'm not only talking to you Nordic. There are examples of this occurring throughout this thread.

I guess what I'd say to you, and not meaning to sound particularly upset about it, but while I'm here, why do you bother to take the time to tell us a topic is not worth your time or consideration?

We should all think like you?
~

[JackRiddler]

~
You know, that's a real piss poor argument I hear way too often, and there's probably a name for it which I'm not aware of, but it's pretty lame when someone says, for instance, "OMG, look what you've done." and the comeback will be, "Well THEY did something worse."

Does that make what you've done any less horrendous?

or for example: "THIS is fucking evil."

"Well, THAT'S more evil."

Is that really an argument at all?

Does it mean we shouldn't be discussing whatever it is being discussed, because there are worse things we can find?

No.
~

You'd be right that "comparison of evils" is in itself a fallacious argument, if it is meant to excuse or trivialize a lesser evil. Except that this got going here following brekin's assertion that an accelerated decay in civilization began around 1995 (at the time Internet started getting big) and his apparent attribution of this rising inhumanity to the concommitant rise of Internet porn, which he is blaming for a "psychotic break" in society.

Once that thesis is advanced, it becomes logical to consider the relative significance of other variables.

And obviously no one left on page 14 of this thread thinks the subject is unworthy of discussion.

[brekin]

Nordic wrote:

But hey, either way, that might be the last thing I say in this thread. I really don't get it. It seems obvious to me that someone like Brekin is scared of his own viewing habits and thinks everybody else should be of theirs, too, because by god he's tumbling down that slippery slope. Other than that? What is there really to say?

Ahh, wonderful. I'm glad I've become an example for others.

[JackRiddler]

.

2. Gambling is not predicated on a biological drive with highly specific physical iterations.

What the hell does the last part mean?!

That last part. What it means.

Sorry! You misread me, or my unclear writing encouraged you to do so.

My "What the hell does the last part mean" does not refer to anything you wrote.

It refers to my own immediately preceding sentence, "Gambling is not predicated on a biological drive with highly specific physical iterations." I asked what the hell I meant, as a rhetorical device, acknowledging that "biological drive with highly specific physical iterations" sounds vague or pseudo-something unless I define what the hell it means.

Which I then did. I hope to your satisfaction.

Which doesn't mean your follow-up, explaining once again that the mere availability of gambling isn't in itself necessarily the cause of the kinds of extreme risk-taking behavior one might find in people diagnosed as Bipolar I or II, isn't reasonable. In fact, it fits well with my own follow-up.

Here goes:

One may have a biological drive to feel the thrill from risking one's self, or to see something come of nothing, but this can manifest in thousands of ways.

Compare it to the sex drive: no matter what objects of desire are involved, the sex drive is almost always going to aim at achieving climax via a limited set of repetitive motions. ...

(SNIPPING the stuff about my utopian plan for minimizing gambling as a social problem without restricting human freedom or advancing corruption.)

To which you reply:

No arguments here, really.

Unless we're talking about a hypothetical peron with a gambling compulsion that was classically OCD-ish. In which case, I'm standing by what I said and not budging. Until the APA drags itself into at least the last two decades of the twentieth century, scientifically speaking or I die of sheer obstinacy. Whichever comes first.

Yes. But again, that OCD might manifest in many ways. Setting up an industry specifically designed to exploit such cases and get them to throw all their money into a casino, in a moral variation of cannibalism, is still a bad thing.

Much worse than setting up an industry specifically designed to exploit such cases by getting them to throw some of their money into buying porn that, stripped of obvious PR, actually delivers on its meager promise that if you view it, it's likely to assist you in achieving the minor self-induced climax you're hoping for.

[JackRiddler]

brekin, it's fine.

At this point I feel you should not mind my saying that yours is not an empirical approach. You proceed from first principles, and you're not interested in modifying them. Apparently your God doesn't allow that.

Based on what you say and especially on the books you recommend, your principles are those of a fundamentalist Catholic doctrine that stands in violent antagonism to Vatican II, modernity and the French Revolution (and presumably the Reformation), and that demonizes Jews as the agents creating the social ills it defines (among which sexual freedom is one of the worst).

There's no reason for you not to say so. If this is your flag, why not fly it? Because this isn't an Inquisition, and no one here is going to sanction you in the real world, and probably no one here would want to sanction you if they could. In the real world, anyway.

Nor is anyone going to put you through the Ludovico technique, though it would be typical of your world-view to confuse outside criticism with torture and martyrdom.

Most of us here are simply not going to share your first principles, or even understand how anyone can seriously advance them. They will seem very remote from anything we should use as a guide to understanding.

Some of us will care just enough about your faith to reject it as irrelevant, wrong, or even pernicious. In my view, the ideas you share are more at the root of the ills you attribute to "pornography" than pornography is.

But so what? I'm just a voice here, like yourself. Your model of reason is God-given, with an unerring and unchangeable internal moral compass. You might as well be honest, and stop presenting your faith in the guise of argument from observable evidence.

Because there isn't going to be a reconciliation, or a persuasion of one or another of us by the other. In fact, there isn't going to be very much of a common perceptual ground, one with agreed-upon definitions and referrents, within which we can engage in fruitful debate.

You live in a different universe, in which the Catholic God is in a rage about the Jew manipulating His flock into engaging in fornication, sodomy and baby-killing. That's what matters to you, so say it.

http://www.culturewars.com/Reviews/Libi ... views.html

Excerpts from reviews of Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control ($28 + S&H) by E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.

"a brilliant tour de force of history and interpretation. Libido Dominandi alerts Catholics to powerful enemies of the Church who have harnessed the Enlightenment idea of sexual liberation to the manipulative power of the modern media in order to gain political force. ... this book is a monumental and compelling account of the program to dismantle the Judeo-Christian culture ... a Herculean task in terms of research and documentation ... This book sounds a warning: Until Catholics stop responding to the seductive voice of the dominant culture and instead resist its covert ways, they will continue to lose their unity and their civic and moral freedom." Rosemary Hugo Fielding, Our Sunday Visitor.

SNIP

"This reviewer values the content of this book. ... a Christian culture once directed the country - even its raw capitalism - and now this influence is no more. Michael Jones provides his own well-researched explanation of this phenomenon." Msgr. George Kelly, StAR.

"E. Michael Jones, Catholic muckraker extraordinairre, has written his most compelling book to date - the quintessential history of the sexual revolution. ... part history of sexual liberation, part history of modern psychology and part history of psychological warfare - all woven masterfully into a coherent tapestry of conspiracy, evil genius, and subtle manipulation revealing the tragic consequences of the sexual revolution in the modern world. ... not for the faint of heart or those who blush easily." Joseph O'Brien, Times Review.

http://www.staugustine.net/libido%20dominandi.html

Libido Dominandi – the term is taken from Book I of Augustine’s City of God – is the definitive history of that sexual revolution, from 1773 to the present.

Unlike the standard version of the sexual revolution, Libido Dominandi shows how sexual liberation was from its inception a form of control. Those who wished to liberate man from the moral order needed to impose social controls as soon as they succeeded because liberated libido led inevitably to anarchy. Aldous Huxley wrote in his preface to the 1946 edition of Brave New World that “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” This book is about the converse of that statement. It explains how the rhetoric of sexual freedom was used to engineer a system of covert political and social control. Over the course of the two-hundred-year span covered by this book, the development of echnologies of communication, reproduction, and psychic control – including psychotherapy, behaviorism, advertising, sensitivity training, pornography, and plain old blackmail – allowed the Enlightenment and its heirs to turn Augustine’s insight on its head and create masters out of men’s vices. Libido Dominandi is the story of how that happened.

The author, E. Michael Jones, has a site and magazine called
http://www.culturewars.com/

Is Notre Dame Still Catholic? by E. Michael Jones. Revised Second Edition. When Notre Dame President John Jenkins, CSC, announced the university would give President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate, more than 250,000 people signed a petition condemning that act, and Bishop Thomas J. Olmstead joined Bishop D'Arcy in denouncing Jenkins' decision, calling it a "public act of disobedience" and a "grave mistake." This updated and expanded book collects 25 years of investigative journalism - an extensive dossier of what went wrong at Notre Dame and, indeed, in Catholic higher education in America. Read More Read Reviews

He includes a review of his book, "The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History." The review is titled, "The Revolutionary Jew would like a word with you."

http://www.culturewars.com/Reviews/NDad.html

To do justice to this wonderful work
would take a book in itself. So packed is it with mind-numbing facts
and insightful commentary that one is tempted to embark on a trip to
a remote place and lock oneself up in a room and absorb every word.
When the excursion is over, your whole view of the world will be dramatically
changed. You will see the inner workings of life that only a
genius the likes of Dr. Jones, unclouded by the lust for power, fame
or fortune, and spurred on only by his sincere and undying love for
Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church, could give you. Not only will
it change you, but this book has the potential of changing the world.
Note well, the revelations you are about to read in Jones’ book are not
things you will ever hear in a history class at Berkeley or on the website
of the Anti-Defamation League. Be prepared to be shocked and awed.
My recommendation is: stop what you are doing, purchase the book,
and don’t come back to civilization until you’ve completed it. It is that
good. But let me also warn you. Like me, after seeing utter devastation
that has been done to our society and especially its root causes, you
may find yourself weeping by the time you get to the end, even as Jesus
once did when he wept for Jerusalem.

Dr. Sungenis is not alone in sensing that The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit is a world-changing book. Israel Shamir, author of Flowers of Galilee and Pardes: An Etude in Cabbala, writes that

The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit by the revolutionary Catholic E. Michael Jones is a long-waited-for revolt against Vatican II and Nostra Aetate with its disastrous philosemitic bias. This monumental book scoops two thousand years of troublesome relations between Christendom and the Jews, and endeavors to connect Jewish strategies of permanent revolution with the permanent Jewish rebellion against Christ (=Logos). This timely book may help to regain the lost balance between Judaic and Christian tendencies in the Western mind.

[...]

When the Jews rejected Christ, they rejected Logos in all of its forms and became, as a result, enemies of the social order. When the Jews chose Barabbas over Christ, in other words, they became revolutionaries. For 2000 years now we have been living with the consequences of their decision. For over 40 years now, a veil of silence has descended over a topic which Americans can no longer ignore. That veil has now been rent.

Internet shatters focus, as we discovered on another thread.

I already knew before about your world-view, brekin, but I'd forgotten. It might have saved me a lot of time I just wasted here trying to engage you with my merely secular, Jew-influenced, Logos-hating logic.

The template through which you view society hasn't changed since Bosch painted "The Garden of Earthly Delights."



Which is a reminder of the aesthetic greatness of traditional Christendom, really my favorite thing about it.

[Username]

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heh . . . I wondered when someone was going to notice that.

I looked up E. Michael Jones and his book Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, (2nd post, pg. 1) and found nothing useful. Only jew-hating websites.
~

[Nordic]

~

I guess what I'd say to you, and not meaning to sound particularly upset about it, but while I'm here, why do you bother to take the time to tell us a topic is not worth your time or consideration?
?
~

Because! I am the center of my own universe!

And yes, of course everyone should think exactly like me! (except for those who are actually more brilliant than I) The world would be a far greater place, although it would be pretty fucking boring.

(who doesn't feel that way?)

Okay, the subject annoys me because, honestly, in my own life I have issues. There. I think porn is harmless, other people in my life disagree. Actually I should say "another person" in my life ....

[JackRiddler]

I advocate an empirical approach. Let's look at some porn and then decide.