Is Porn Bad for You?

[JackRiddler]

From the viewpoint of a child who was used in porn filming.....I'd say yes, it was bad for me.

sw, that's horrible. I'm sorry for you.

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[Project Willow]

Just the entire narrative of specific brain areas being hardwired for specific purposes -- and especially the conceit that we know what those purposes are. The most that can be said is scientists have observed correlations between a specific stimulus and specific measurements.
........
Neurology is in a pre-paradigm state, so pop sci neurology has been a steady, reliable source for dangerous metaphors....buuuut that's about it.

Here, I've got a word you might like:

“neuro-realism”
Neuro-realism reflects the uncritical way in which a fMRI investigation can be taken as validation or invalidation of our ordinary view of the world. Neuro-realism is, therefore, grounded in the belief that fMRI enables us to capture a ‘visual proof’ of brain activity, despite the enormous complexities of data acquisition and image processing.

But the... wait, did you watch the videos? Because most of the lab work on which he bases his theories is behavioral. Anyway, I didn't want to be in a position to defend them, but here I am.

I quit smoking with the help of a book that taught me to think about it in a completely different way. It was 200 or so pages that basically reviewed everything I already knew about nicotine except it emphasized a certain perspective of that knowledge. Some of the science it was based on is probably wrong, nonetheless, it worked and I no longer smoke. That's what I liked about these videos.

If you take this gentleman and the visitors to his site at face value, then there are some people in the world who experience their use of porn as a harmful addiction and those people are seeking help. This guy is offering them a new way to think about their addiction that apparently is effective for at least a few of them. I suppose I am attracted to this type of intervention because it is similar to the re-wiring processes I had to use to interfere with the conditioning I underwent as an MC vic. Perhaps the science doesn't need to be completely accurate as it is not really the central operative value being offered. I mean, it doesn't matter so much exactly which area of the cingulate cortex is involved with which neurotransmitter at any particular time, it's the idea that a more primitive part of my brain is driving some urges, and once I understand that generally it transforms into something I can begin to control. Empowerment generated by a new perspective is the value in the offering is what I'm saying.

[Wombaticus Rex]

It's true, I just babble from a strange perspective. Watching the videos my main question was why so much time was devoted to neurology and signal pathways in the brain during the second half of the presentation. I am someone who's never considered porn harmful to me although I recognize it as an extremely harmful industry, so that bias informs my interests. I don't dispute that humans form very real addiction behaviors with strong physical effects to...well, just about anything...and porn addiction is at least as real as marijuana addiction or internet addiction.

Primarily, though, my stance was shaped by the title of the thread, as it too often is. Especially when that question is phrased like this? Yes, especially then.

[Project Willow]

From the viewpoint of a child who was used in porn filming.....I'd say yes, it was bad for me.

SW, I am sorry. It was bad for me too.
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I wonder where the artifacts are, in someone's vintage collection probably. I came across the below blog entry yesterday and it made me think about our discussions here about sex work. Can it support only one frame? How do we balance tales of abuse in the "industry" with the claims of insiders who require our support in worker rights and legal issue struggles? It seems there are two camps divided even though both want ultimately to empower women.

http://rmott62.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/porn-mapped-me/

Porn Mapped Me

I am going to write from my gut, from my restlessness – I am going to write how porn is inside me, even as I spend a lifetime attempting to sick out all the poison that porn forced into me.

I say it mapped me – I say coz if I was laid my body down, I would have every inch of my body is coursing with porn I do not want.

Porn formed me, porn made me lose who I am, porn ripped into me, porn was a place I escaped by the skin of my teeth.

And now, I am in the world that is outside of porn – and everywhere porn is celebrated, is made normal, I hear everywhere that is fun and harm-free.

I am living evidence of the harm – I and thousands of other women who were lucky enough to exit, and have the strength to speak out.

Yes, we do speak out – only the din of those supporting porn drowns us out.

[blanc]

I am someone who's never considered porn harmful to me

Too bad Wombaticus Rex. Its harmful to the consumer because its harmful in a particular kind of way to the victims of the 'industry'. I don't really have to spell this out do I?

[sw]

I look into the faces to see if any are mine. When the Johnny Gosch photos were put on line, I had a panic feeling the whole time as I searched for my face.

We have home movies that are traditional home movies and you can tell that I hate to be on film. Even from the age of about five, I would be sobbing to stop filming me.

I even have the footage of me at the age of 18 in our backyard being filmed and I realized they were filming me and I got up swearing and almost decked my Dad. And, isn't it odd that a teenage girl would be sun bathing in the back yard fully clothed in jeans and tennis shoes to boot. It is one of the only times when I myself as an obviously male part coming at the camera. Hard to explain, but it was obvious.

I liked the feel of the sun but would not take my clothes off.

This was from another thread....but I have spent years searching for one of the places I worked. I knew the state and area along with the exact layout of the building and the signs and everything. The place was blown up and my female handler (who I loved) was killed. I was around four or five at the time. It was a theta part and this agent was really nice to me. I have searched for bombing etc in this timeframe in this area, with signs that had the foreign letters on them to try and find where I was. I don't know why I do it. It often makes me sick to see the finds. But, back to the porn, it was filmed in the basement of my home. At least most of it was.

[American Dream]

This article could well be triggering to some survivors of child sexual abuse, but given that caveat is, I hope, worth posting on this thread:

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultu ... her-images

The Marina Experiment: reclaiming images of child abuse

Posted by Clare Conway - 20 April 2011

Marina Lutz turned the lens in on her voyeur photographer father, but what did it achieve?

In 1996 Marina Lutz, a reformed heroin user, was tasked with cleaning out her dead parents' garage. She stumbled upon a vast archive of photographs, thousands of images taken by her photographer father Abbot Lutz which chronicled the first 16 years of her life. Some were sexually suggestive, while others hinted at an unsavoury obsession with his child. Lutz spent the following ten years sifting through the archive to compile a short film called The Marina Experiment "chronicling his view of me through my own digital video microphone," she told the Observer last weekend.

The 18-minute film has won nine awards worldwide -- everything from best documentary to best taboo film -- but it has divided opinion. Some see The Marina Experiment as compelling insight into her long-suffered abuse, others as a perversion of her father's art -- that in reversing the lens, Lutz portrays only the most controversial of images and without their context. But surely that there are so many photos is protest to Lutz's suffering.
Brutally cut, she lays bare the secrets of her abuse, denouncing her father through her own mortification. There are pictures of Lutz as child in her pants, on the toilet, and one where she's innocently touching her genitals.

The images are vulnerable, uncomfortably raw and captivating. By contrast, Lutz's edit and voiceover is brash, bordering on crude. The trailer for The Marina Experiment II -- the second installment of her film -- opens with Hollywood action movie music. "When it came to leaving behind 16 years of evidence you picked the wrong gal," Lutz intones, as though she's moments from unveiling a lethal dose of retribution -- which, of course, is her intention.

She lists a string of charges for which she believes her father is guilty: from "routine spanking" to "latent paedophilia". Lutz narrates the images with a quiet, restrained fury that makes her voice seem lethargic: Marina in the bathroom, in a bikini by the pool -- her bottom jiggling and played on a loop as she prepares to leap off a diving board. There were 10,000 photos to choose from, buried in the "rats' nest" of her parents' garage. So why does Lutz pick only a handful and show them over and over? Does she revisit the worst of her ordeal out of catharsis? Or is she trying to make the most of the archive's suggestive nature, pulling together those stray shots, captured in the indiscriminate flutter of the lens?

Lutz told the Observer she wanted to evoke the sensation of returning to the pain she felt when she began to sift through the vast archive. "I used the repetition because that's how it felt going through the archive. I kept finding the same thing and it kept hurting and hurting me. It felt right." It's a disturbing collection. It's not the images' content that build a case against a predatory father, it's the sheer number of them, sexually suggestive or otherwise. It's "the way you feel when someone's standing too close to you" as Lutz puts it: Abbot invading her space, her privacy and chalking his own daughter up to an art installation.

Lutz has been applauded for her debut film making efforts, and yet I wonder if it's enough. The work of art might be held together by her words and edit but the evidence is of his making and it comes highly acclaimed. We're not enthralled by the music or the PowerPoint fonts: it's the awful voyeurism, the concept that someone might have violated his daughter's privacy so fervently. Is it her father's cruel ambition realised?

[blanc]

sw

I have searched for bombing etc in this timeframe in this area, with signs that had the foreign letters on them to try and find where I was. I don't know why I do it.

I understand why. I spent a long time tying down as much as I could, places, time frame,people in 'my' case, and later, did some of this for other cases. At first I thought it would help to assure prosecutions (hollow laughter here),but even when I realised that didn't happen, it was empowering somehow, to get it nailed down. I still 'track' some of the perps from time to time - no special reason - its just nice to know where the pathetic apologies for humans are etc.,where they came from. I wanted to find some of the connections I knew must exist, between groups, but never did - though recently, now I've pretty much stopped this, one such connection just flew out at me. Sorry, this was a side track in the thread.

[semper occultus]

Internet pornography destroying men's ability to perform with real women, finds study

www.dailymail.co.uk
Last updated at 5:07 PM on 21st October 2011

Internet pornography is creating a generation of young men who are hopeless in the bedroom, according to research.

Exposure to lurid images and films in the new media is de-sensitising so many young people that they are increasingly unable to become excited by ordinary sexual encounters, a report said.

The result is that impotence is no longer a problem associated with middle-aged men of poor health but is afflicting men in the prime of their lives.

According to a report in Psychology Today, a respected U.S. journal, the problem is now so common that men in their 20s consider their inability to perform to be 'normal'.

The report, called 'Porn-Induced Sexual Dysfunction is a Growing Problem', explains that the loss of libido 30 years early is caused by continuous over-stimulation of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that activates the body's reaction to sexual pleasure, by repeatedly viewing pornography on the internet.

A 'paradoxical effect' is created whereby with each new thrill, or 'dopamine spike', the brain loses its ability to respond to dopamine signals, meaning that porn-users demand increasingly extreme experiences to become sexually aroused.

'Erotic words, pictures, and videos have been around a long while, but the Internet makes possible a never-ending stream of dopamine spikes,' said Marnia Robinson, the author of the report.

'Today's users can force its release by watching porn in multiple windows, searching endlessly, fast-forwarding to the bits they find hottest, switching to live sex chat, viewing constant novelty, firing up their mirror neurons with video action and cam-2-cam, or escalating to extreme genres and anxiety-producing material. 'It's all free, easy to access, available within seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,' she said.

But she added: 'In some porn users, the response to dopamine is dropping so low that they can't achieve an erection without constant hits of dopamine via the internet.' Many were initially shocked, she said, when they discovered their sensitivity was declining 'toward normal sex'.

'When they try to have actual intercourse and cannot, they understandably panic,' Robinson said.

'Most men are astonished to learn that pornography use can be a source of sexual performance problems.

'Instead, many are becoming convinced that erectile dysfunction at 20-something is normal,' she said.

'They are amazed that heavy porn use can affect them adversely, that no one told them it could affect them.'

Robinson said recovery was possible over a period of months by giving the brain a chance to 'reboot' itself by shunning pornography completely.

But she said that while recovering, addicts were likely to experience a temporary loss of libido as well as 'insomnia, irritability, panic, despair, concentration problems, and even flu-like symptoms'. The report comes just a week after David Cameron announced new measures to encourage internet providers to block access to pornography in an attempt to protect children from its harmful effects.

The findings were welcomed by Norman Wells of the Family Education Trust. 'This research gives the lie to the idea that pornography is just a bit of harmless fun,' he said.

'Not only does it depersonalise those who take part in it, but it also has the potential to damage the real-life relationships of those who use it. 'People who exercise self-control in this area and make a point of steering clear of pornography and sexual imagery in all its forms are not the repressive killjoys they are often taken to be,' he added.

'These findings suggest that prizing modesty and respecting the private nature of expressions of sexuality will bring its own rewards.'

[Hammer of Los]

..
I sometimes think porn addiction is the worst of vices.

I feel enormous pity, sympathy and compassion for all the people who are hurt and exploited by this industry.

If you feel like it is doing you harm, you ought to give it up.

Anyway, that's just my opinion. As usual you are free to take it or leave it.

[blanc]

I can recall previous discussions on RI where the idea that consumption of porn can create an escalation to the even nastier kind has been assertively denied, yet this recent article in the Daily Mail seems to confirm that this is the case. I'm more concerned about the effect that this has on victims who end up serving these dopamine hungry pervs than their eventual impotence. For me, those who buy into sites selling images of the rape and/ or torture of minors are guilty of aiding and abetting those rapes, and sentencing should be commensurate with that, not the typical 3 years which has been dished out in the past.Those who host those sites are equally guilty I think. If we were talking about images of another kind of crime, lets imagine for a moment that film of blowing up buildings full of innocent people became a money spinner, a dopamine spiker, a source of vicarious pleasure for the disconnected sociopaths with minimal capacity for empathy, netting the crime industry and its bankers a goodly pile through contributions from viewers, would we have been as blasé as we are about the flood of images of child pornography? Say it were random murders which became the turn on - would our police find the time and resources to investigate, or would there be the string of excuses the victims of the porn industry have lived with for so long? Or rent a riot, sites dedicated to allowing the armchair beast to direct the destruction of someone's neighbourhood the way some sites allow the remote direction of infliction of pain on innocents. Would that be tolerated, shrugged off as a boys will be boys affair?

[compared2what?]

I can recall previous discussions on RI where the idea that consumption of porn can create an escalation to the even nastier kind has been assertively denied, yet this recent article in the Daily Mail seems to confirm that this is the case.

Since I'm the person who assertively denied it, please allow me now to allay your concerns on that score.

It's true that the Daily Mail article seems to confirm it's the case with the following:

'Erotic words, pictures, and videos have been around a long while, but the Internet makes possible a never-ending stream of dopamine spikes,' said Marnia Robinson, the author of the report.

'Today's users can force its release by watching porn in multiple windows, searching endlessly, fast-forwarding to the bits they find hottest, switching to live sex chat, viewing constant novelty, firing up their mirror neurons with video action and cam-2-cam, or escalating to extreme genres and anxiety-producing material. 'It's all free, easy to access, available within seconds, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,' she said.

However, "seems" is the operative word there. Robinson is the author of a colloquially written little Psychology Today essay that relies heavily on anecdotal evidence gathered via the not-very-scientifically-reliable but understandably popular method of taking stuff that people say about themselves on internet discussion boards at face value for pretty much every point it makes about the growing problem of internet-porn-related sexual dysfunction.

Her remarks quoted just above -- in which she identifies a quest for either escalation of the kind to which you refer and "anxiety-producing material" as being two among eight of the named (and innumerable unnamed) options available to today's porn-consuming internet users -- are purely hypothetical, to the best of my knowledge.

By which I mean: She definitely doesn't cite any science that has either found or confirmed a correlation between internet-porn-dependent sex-addiction and an escalating taste for nastier and nastier forms of sex. And as far as I'm aware, there is none. But that certainly doesn't mean that there mightn't be, somewhere. I'd certainly be very interested in it if there were, that's for sure.

Also, I certainly wouldn't say I regard that outcome as a universal stone impossibility on scientific grounds, by any means.

On the contrary, all the evidence so strongly suggests that porn can play a role in the development of nasty (eg -- criminal) sexual tastes among people who (a) have developed those tastes; (b) had access to porn; and (c) meet a number of other criteria that, taken together, appear to be predisposing factors for nasty sex that it comes as close to proven as it's possible for something that's not well understood by science to be that it does. Play a role.

What hasn't been proven (or even come close to being proven) is that porn, alone and in and of itself, creates a desire for nastiness where none would otherwise have arisen. Nobody really understands how and why that happens, or even what the neurochemical, neurobiological or neuro-behavioral processes underlying it are. If any. People are very complex and mysterious organisms, and science isn't yet capable of comprehending them a whole lot better than crudely.

Personally, I don't think it ever will be, to be honest. So. At the risk of overclarification: I have asserted and am now re-asserting a denial that there's any compelling scientific evidence that porn leads to nasty sex. To the best of my knowledge. I object to that claim on general principle, out of concern for the very high potential for harm that attaches to bogus scientific claims about human sexuality that slither their way into the common wisdom via the popular press, for which there's abundant evidence both historically and in the present. Because -- again, to the best of my knowledge -- that kind of thing has never helped anyone. In fact, those it purports to help are typically among those most harmed by it. So I'm very wary of it.

That said, it's not like I think a sexually healthy society would be as drenched in porn as contemporary society unquestionably is. Nor do I regard the slavery, torture, abuse, oppression or trafficking of any man, woman or child, sexual or otherwise, as a relative evil that must sometimes be borne in the interests of some other freedom. Or some bullshit of that nature. I regard it as an absolute evil, to be opposed absolutely in each an every instance. I totally grant that the production of porn is rife with instances of sexual slavery, torture, abuse, oppression and trafficking. I oppose them absolutely. But that doesn't necessarily entail an equally absolute opposition to pornographic representations of sex, per se. Or....I don't know. If it does, I very much want to understand why. And I apologize in advance for what I guess would then be my dullness and insensitivity. I'm deeply ashamed to have intruded upon your feelings with either and/or both, if that's what I have done.
________________

On a very tangentially related note, I'd like to observe that Marnia Robinson has just provided me with the last indication I needed to reach the following conclusion: Referring to mirror neurons without even the most casual regard for what they are or might be is the new black. And so is gray, I noticed while doing a little window-shopping this afternoon.

[wintler2]

I can recall previous discussions on RI where the idea that consumption of porn can create an escalation to the even nastier kind has been assertively denied, yet this recent article in the Daily Mail seems to confirm that this is the case. I'm more concerned about the effect that this has on victims who end up serving these dopamine hungry pervs than their eventual impotence. For me, those who buy into sites selling images of the rape and/ or torture of minors are guilty of aiding and abetting those rapes, and sentencing should be commensurate with that, not the typical 3 years which has been dished out in the past.Those who host those sites are equally guilty I think. If we were talking about images of another kind of crime, lets imagine for a moment that film of blowing up buildings full of innocent people became a money spinner, a dopamine spiker, a source of vicarious pleasure for the disconnected sociopaths with minimal capacity for empathy, netting the crime industry and its bankers a goodly pile through contributions from viewers, would we have been as blasé as we are about the flood of images of child pornography? Say it were random murders which became the turn on - would our police find the time and resources to investigate, or would there be the string of excuses the victims of the porn industry have lived with for so long? Or rent a riot, sites dedicated to allowing the armchair beast to direct the destruction of someone's neighbourhood the way some sites allow the remote direction of infliction of pain on innocents. Would that be tolerated, shrugged off as a boys will be boys affair?

No blanc, it wouldn't, not unless the victims were similarly devalued by the dominant classes. Thanks for making the question clear.

[compared2what?]

Blanc, will you forgive me if I very mildly and tentatively remark that this...

I'm more concerned about the effect that this has on victims who end up serving these dopamine hungry pervs than their eventual impotence. For me, those who buy into sites selling images of the rape and/ or torture of minors are guilty of aiding and abetting those rapes, and sentencing should be commensurate with that, not the typical 3 years which has been dished out in the past.Those who host those sites are equally guilty I think. If we were talking about images of another kind of crime, lets imagine for a moment that film of blowing up buildings full of innocent people became a money spinner, a dopamine spiker, a source of vicarious pleasure for the disconnected sociopaths with minimal capacity for empathy, netting the crime industry and its bankers a goodly pile through contributions from viewers, would we have been as blasé as we are about the flood of images of child pornography?

...may not be the best way to think or talk about addicts whom you have no objective or conclusive reason to think are doing anything more predatory than destroying their own libidos by masturbating to internet porn? Or, for that matter, about dopamine? I mean, we're all dopamine hungry. We're born that way. And it's neither sinful, nor criminal, nor post-lapsarian, therefore. It wouldn't be stretching the point to say that it was natural.

And also:

Of course. I totally understand that you were neither thinking nor speaking from your feelings about addicts there. And I totally sympathize with your feelings regarding those of whom you were thinking and speaking. I share them, as a matter of fact.

Respectfully yours.

[compared2what?]

I can recall previous discussions on RI where the idea that consumption of porn can create an escalation to the even nastier kind has been assertively denied, yet this recent article in the Daily Mail seems to confirm that this is the case. I'm more concerned about the effect that this has on victims who end up serving these dopamine hungry pervs than their eventual impotence. For me, those who buy into sites selling images of the rape and/ or torture of minors are guilty of aiding and abetting those rapes, and sentencing should be commensurate with that, not the typical 3 years which has been dished out in the past.Those who host those sites are equally guilty I think. If we were talking about images of another kind of crime, lets imagine for a moment that film of blowing up buildings full of innocent people became a money spinner, a dopamine spiker, a source of vicarious pleasure for the disconnected sociopaths with minimal capacity for empathy, netting the crime industry and its bankers a goodly pile through contributions from viewers, would we have been as blasé as we are about the flood of images of child pornography? Say it were random murders which became the turn on - would our police find the time and resources to investigate, or would there be the string of excuses the victims of the porn industry have lived with for so long? Or rent a riot, sites dedicated to allowing the armchair beast to direct the destruction of someone's neighbourhood the way some sites allow the remote direction of infliction of pain on innocents. Would that be tolerated, shrugged off as a boys will be boys affair?

No blanc, it wouldn't, not unless the victims were similarly devalued by the dominant classes. Thanks for making the question clear.

Unless the sites were reserved for the use of drone pilots, in which case it would be. And very probably is, since there almost certainly is at least one such site, for training and indoctrination purposes, I'd say.

More generally speaking: If there was enough of a ready, renewable and effectively close-to-cost-free supply of real neighborhoods to make such sites a lucrative venture, I don't doubt for one moment that they would both exist and be tolerated. But there isn't. So we tolerate video-game sites that allow the remote direction of virtual neighborhoods instead.

IOW: I basically agree with you. I just think it's worth noting what it is that the dominant classes value and why they value it.

$$$ and associated what-have-you, and not the sanctity of neighborhoods. Is my point.