Is Porn Bad for You?

[compared2what?]

~
Where to start. What to say. How to say it.

C2W?,

Let me start by saying it wasn’t my intention to turn this thread into an argument for or against porn, though in a perfect world, perhaps, we would find little use for it. I don’t think it was the intention of Wendy Maltz, either, in the OP, to be calling for censorship or anything of the sort. But that was the topic you raised with the article by Ellen Willis.

Maltz only seems to be saying, more people are having problems with porn addiction, and she no longer suggests pornographic material as a viable means to better relationships for struggling couples.



Sorry I got cheeky with the “you think” bit. And I don't really care if you like smut. Some of my best friends like smut.

Thank you for your insightful contributions to this thread.

First of all, please forgive me for the belated reply. I actually did write one much earlier, before my rant about Maltz, and thought that I'd succeeded in posting it, too. But since it's not there, apparently I thought wrong.

Second of all, there's no need to apologize, you were well within the fair boundaries for expressing a little personal snark when posting in irritation or in reponse to perceived opposition. So I can't accept your apology, in all fairness. But I do appreciate it very much. And I appreciate you even more than that for offering it. Thank you.

Third (after which I'm going to try to escape from this enumerating corner into which I've backed myself):

You're right that Maltz is saying that. And also that she seems to be saying that. It's just not the only (or even the primary) thing that she both is and seems to be saying, as I read it. Which is subjectively, of course.

But fwiw, per my subjective reading, the most prominent feature of her essay is the odd and inappropriate serenity of the tone in which she chattily regrets stuff like having spent more than a decade using her position of authority to persuade people who didn't share their sexual partners' liking for pornography and didn't want to participate in the use of it to find some way to get over themselves. Especially since she both is and seems to be saying that she knew perfectly well that commercial pornography was generally crude, poorly produced work that was at best an unrealistic and at worst a false representation of female sexual needs and desires all along.

Except when she seems to be saying that it wasn't. Back in the good, old days of Deep Throat, a movie in which the make-up covering the enormous bruises Linda Lovelace apparently got while being beaten black and blue all over doesn't totally do its job in some scenes. Which is one of the things that leads me to believe that the breezy and (to me) unnerving lack of evident emotion with which she writes about issues that touch on very profound and powerful feelings in just about everyone is less ascribable to calm professional self-confidence than it is either to the lies she tells herself without knowing it or to her fundamental insincerity. Although I honestly have no idea, opinion or feeling about which. Because she does seem to mean well. On the other hand, she also not only seems to be but is an unreliable and inaccurate witness to history that it's kind of hard to believe she could be mistaken about, given her area of professional expertise.

For one example, if you had the slightest passing interest in cultural issues pertaining to gender and sex during Playgirl's non-heyday, the one thing you'd be certain to know was that it didn't and couldn't ever feature men with full erections, because if it had, vendors and distributors would have been busted in droves for selling it alongside mainstream adult magazines for men. Which was where and how it was sold, because it didn't depict full or even (technically) semi-erect dicks. Thus occasioning much discussion and jaw-wagging among the chattering classes of the day.

And for another, she approvingly name-checks David Reuben -- the author of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask) -- as if he hadn't written a book that asserts authoritatively that all women who become prostitutes are, without exception, constitutionally frigid and that gay men commonly have sex with cantaloupes. (I'm not making that up, btw. He goes into detail about it.) That book would have been a bad joke if it hadn't been so influential, is what I'm saying.

In addition to which, per her own account, she continued to recommend/prescribe pornography to couples long after she started working with the incest survivors who flatly told her that porn triggered PTSD flashbacks for them. And so on. Part of my main take-away was that she was not a person whose sensitivity, candor and good judgment I'd feel safe making much of an investment in if those were the only wares she was peddling.

And while it wouldn't really be fair to her to say that they were, she does use so many more column inches on the sizzle than she does on the steak that by my standards, she exceeds the ratio you can realistically chalk up to a pragmatic acceptance of the compromises that authors and advocates of all kinds have to make to get some decent play in the major media.

Finally (and I don't know....Sixthly?), while I also don't think that it's her intention to call for censorship, I do think she's careless enough to call for it anyway. And that was why I brought up Ellen Willis. I already gave the quote, but I'll give it again:

The only way to prevent the spread of porn-related problems is for people to be informed and to get help early, and for society to be alert to the problems. I'm not in favor of censorship, but with other professionals and health advocates, I support honest, age-appropriate discussions of pornography and its potential repercussions in public forums and health education classes. I believe we need a government body devoted specifically to researching the effects of pornography and developing policies, prevention campaigns, and treatment resources. I see a great need for parents, teachers, employers, clergy, healthcare workers, law enforcers, and therapists to start addressing pornography problems with the same kind of shame-free directness with which we've learned to tackle other public health concerns, such as cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, domestic violence, and drug abuse.

Anyone who thinks that a government body researching the effects of pornography and developing policies and prevention campaigns (with the input of the clergy and law enforcement, among others) wouldn't practice selective and probably preemptively punitive censorship is just asleep at the wheel, imo. I'm open to hearing arguments to the contrary, but I personally can't imagine any other outcome, no matter how hard I concentrate on trying.

To say nothing of the political, clerical, and law-enforcement corruption and/or hypocrisy and/or ineffectiveness that are the practically the only common characteristic of the episodic bouts of shame-free directness with which we've tackled other health concerns, such as cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, domestic violence, and drug abuse from time to time over the last century or so.

Notwithstanding all of which, I'm very grateful to you for posting. I misspoke in saying that I agreed with all of the above at the top of my first response to smiths. Because I don't think it's stupid to ask if porn is bad for you. It's a provocative question and a complicated one. I personally find Wendy Maltz's answer to it inadequate. But that's an incentive to further discussion, not a disincentive, afaic.

Besides, a whole lot of room for honestly felt disagreement comes with the territory whenever sex + health (or sex + the public good, or sex + morality) is central to the subject under consideration.

Like you said (and taking you up on the invitation to jump in):

But porn, imo, is the manifestation of a frustrated sex drive, and that's major. We only have societal mores to blame for that, imprisoning our sexuality in the darkness and isolation of guilt, shame, inhibition, pain, confusion...jump in anytime...

...to the point that we don't even fully agree with ourselves all the time, we're that damn conflicted about it.
___________

Sorry again for not managing to post the better version of this post that I failed to post earlier.

[norton ash]

THAT conflict...

being the difference between pleasure and happiness, the line between personal autonomy and respect for others, fantasy and reality, healthy-animal sex and soulful mature love... innocence and experience.

That conflict... being that the seven deadly sins of wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony which are BAD things for anyone, however atheist or libertine ... are normal human drives and appetites which have crossed the line into what is dangerous for the self and others.

Ay chihuahua, THAT conflict. Want to ban Lolita? That conflict. If I Google looking for reviews of Nabokov-Lolita and wind up on an RCMP (or god knows who the fuck else) watch list.

Man, the porn discussions just keep goin' because it all rests on a series of human hinges.

I watched the AVN awards in Vegas on cable, and was freaked out by what an idiotic culture it is. (Also what a LARGE culture it is.) The porn industry is sustained and run by venal, stupid, damaged, addicted and criminal people by all signs.

Someone I look at and say 'pervert'? Not the old men looking at the girls in their summer dresses. Dave Navarro at the AVN awards. I mean, any rock star can have all the gorgeous flesh he/she wants. Why does he want to look like a whoremaster, fool, and whore himself? Does he BELIEVE in this stuff-- is all this moronic flash somehow important or beautiful to him?

I'm a cultural conservative. I'm intrigued and engaged by Lady Gaga, Madonna and hypersexed dance stuff ... but y'know, it does make me sad for the kids.

I'd like to say kids, there is so much more. So much BETTER. And sound like a boring old scold and snob. That conflict.

My sweetie gave me a really gaudy towel with puppies all over it (they're known as the Jimi Hendrix puppies, because they're party-coloured in a ring that reminds me of psychedelic cover art.) It's crazy-cute... made in China.

A long chain of overworked people have to look at those puppies week in, week out. Cute toys and puppies become something sad and awful if I make that leap. That conflict.

[barracuda]

PLEASE NOTE

I say again, and emphatically, that the above is neither a complaint about being a woman nor an indictment of male sexual desire as it naturally occurs, nor a demand that anyone change to make anyone else happy, nor any conceivable other type of rabble-rousing, carping, trouble-making, or nagging along those general lines.

Because it's not.

It's just a considered statement from a perspective that's natural to me, though not normative in the culture. And I offer it solely in the spirit of making the component parts of one of the real issues associated with the subject visible enough to everyone that the mutually respectful group focus will be able to perceive them if its gaze happens to turn in that direction.

I think it's useful in the context of this topic to examine the reciprocal experiences of young men in the similar age group of your anecdote, around fourteen years or so, and come to realistic terms as to why the introduction of pornography into the awareness of boys this age is a near inevitability.

For one thing, the passage from child to adult for a male commonly entails a period during which his sexual maturity is rapidly outstripped by the girls of his age group. A boy of twelve to fourteen years of age is just that - a boy, and is presented with a social setting in which, by and large, the girls he has known all his life of comparable age and social stature are now no longer within his grasp romantically. The girls begin to be interested in older boys at that stage, and the boy in the process of becoming a man is left behind. This is, to an extent, a perfectly typical biological course of events.

It is at this moment in many young men's lives when, confronted by the ipresence of sexuality surrounding him in real life and the images of the same in the media, these young men are forced to come to terms with one of the first adult realisations of their lives: that they will simply not ever get what it is they desire from their interactions with women. It may be even more fundamental than this. It may be the realisation that they simply will never get what they truly desire at all, and that their needs of the moment will never be met, thwarted as they are in the earliest awakenings of maturity.

This realisation is endemic of the condition of being a man. It may, for many men, be the kernal of the drives and motivations which produce effects much later in the course of their mature lives. It may have a great deal to do with the reason those construction workers ogle the fourteen year old girls: it is precisely an interaction which was proabably out of the question when they were the same age, the interaction in a sexual way with girls of their own age.

The sexual realities of being a twelve to fourteen-year old male are difficult in the extreme. You can literally get a hard-on out of thin air, in virtually any setting, without any accompanying appropriate stimulus whatsoever. The appropriate response to this insane intrusion into your formerly normal childlike existence is something that you are unprepared for in any way by society. Realistically, there is simply no outlet whatsoever for what are essentially the most intensely overwhelming and unforseen urges you may encounter in your entire life, ever. And this is the age when pictures of naked women, pornography, begins to be passed around as a substitute for the unattainable, and probably, for most men, becomes normalised within the scope of their experience and understanding of sex.

The disparity between the ages of maturity between the sexes is undoubtably one of the primary mechanisms by which vastly differing attitudes toward sex are formed in the genders.

[JackRiddler]

barracuda, you said it brother! Keep doing that.

A couple of questions following directly from your paragraph (among many more) :
1) What was the case before pictures?
2) What is the case now, with an industry that dwarfs Belgium producing a comparatively infinite abundance of media catering to every taste and fetish, not only constantly available but also rather aggressively pushed, and with a pornographic style evident in advertising and non-pornographic media, and with technologies gradually coming to be viewed by many poor souls as superior to the real thing? Is this a critical mass that creates a qualitative difference, or are we fooling ourselves and really it's just the same thing as before?
3) Was there a time when society, or community, prepared boys for this insane intrusion into formerly childlike existence? What would you imagine this would look like in a better future?

I get the impression you can put this subject to words better than I, so please do!

[Simulist]

PLEASE NOTE

I say again, and emphatically, that the above is neither a complaint about being a woman nor an indictment of male sexual desire as it naturally occurs, nor a demand that anyone change to make anyone else happy, nor any conceivable other type of rabble-rousing, carping, trouble-making, or nagging along those general lines.

Because it's not.

It's just a considered statement from a perspective that's natural to me, though not normative in the culture. And I offer it solely in the spirit of making the component parts of one of the real issues associated with the subject visible enough to everyone that the mutually respectful group focus will be able to perceive them if its gaze happens to turn in that direction.

I think it's useful in the context of this topic to examine the reciprocal experiences of young men in the similar age group of your anecdote, around fourteen years or so, and come to realistic terms as to why the introduction of pornography into the awareness of boys this age is a near inevitability.

For one thing, the passage from child to adult for a male commonly entails a period during which his sexual maturity is rapidly outstripped by the girls of his age group. A boy of twelve to fourteen years of age is just that - a boy, and is presented with a social setting in which, by and large, the girls he has known all his life of comparable age and social stature are now no longer within his grasp romantically. The girls begin to be interested in older boys at that stage, and the boy in the process of becoming a man is left behind. This is, to an extent, a perfectly typical biological course of events.

It is at this moment in a young men's lives when, confronted by the ipresence of sexuality surrounding him in real life and the images of the same in the media, many of these young men are forced to come to terms with one of the first adult realisations of their lives: that they will simply not ever get what it is they desire from their interactions with women. It may be even more fundamental than this. It may be the realisation that they simply will never get what they truly desire at all, and that their needs of the moment will never be met, thwarted as they are in the earliest awakenings of maturity.

This realisation is endemic of the condition of being a man. It may, for many men, be the kernal of the drives and motivations which produces effects much later in the course of their mature lives. It may have a great deal to do with the reason those construction workers ogle the fourteen year old girls: it is precisely an interaction which was proabably out of the question when they were the same age, the interaction in a sexual way with girls of their own age.

The sexual realities of being a twelve to fourteen-year old male are difficult in the extreme. You can literally get a hard-on out of thin air, in virtually any setting, without any accompanying appropriate stimulus whatsoever. The appropriate response to this insane intrusion into your formerly normal childlike existence is something that you are unprepared for in any way by society. Realistically, there is simply no outlet whatsoever for what are essentially the most intensely overwhelming and unforseen urges you may encounter in your entire life, ever. And this is the age when pictures of naked women, pornography, begins to be passed around as a substitute for the unattainable, and probably, for most men, becomes normalised within the scope of their experience and understanding of sex.

The disparity between the ages of maturity between the sexes is undoubtably one of the primary mechanisms by which vastly differing attitudes toward sex are formed in the genders.

This is extremely insightful, important, and concise. You should consider publishing it, or something like it, to a larger audience. Seriously.

[barracuda]

1) What was the case before pictures?

It's an interesting question, mostly because there is unlikely to be any information in this realm as a result of the lack of documentation, or interest, or confessions found in the literature written with regard to this in pre-image reproductive eras. There does exist the cliche of the father, or uncle, etc., escorting the boy coming of age to his first encounter with sex in the context of prostitution: "It's high time, young man!", or some such frightening and absurd situation. I'm sure a bit of homosexual romping may enter into the equation as well, as has been the case among British boarding school accounts of this age, with the attendant repercussions one might postulate from such an introduction to sex as a substitute for the same with a female.

2) What is the case now, with an industry that dwarfs Belgium producing a comparatively infinite abundance of media catering to every taste and fetish, not only constantly available but also rather aggressively pushed, and with a pornographic style evident in advertising and non-pornographic media, and with technologies gradually coming to be viewed by many poor souls as superior to the real thing? Is this a critical mass that creates a qualitative difference, or are we fooling ourselves and really it's just the same thing as before?

Generally speaking, fetishes are by definition aquired tastes. I don't worry too much about our youth being corrupted by the availability of SMBD or extreme scat porn on the web. My experience (and that's all I have to offer on most of this subject) is that you have to be somewhat predisposed to really enjoy or require such things for sexual satisfaction.

I guess I'd have to see some real statistics regarding sexual behaviour that correllated an onset of extreme masturbation in the the general populace with the web-availability of porn for me to consider that what we see now is anything other than a continuation of attitudes which have always existed. "General populace" meaning in this case persons other than those for whom a adiagnosis of sex addict is appropriate. And a good question might be whether or not our relatively new labelling of certain behaviours as "addiction" has had any impact on the statistical prevalence of those attributes.

3) Was there a time when society, or community, prepared boys for this insane intrusion into formerly childlike existence? What would you imagine this would look like in a better future?

I don't know. As I said above, male sexual frustration at the onset of puberty may have been evolutionarily selected for certain survival benefits to the species. There may have been social groups better equipped to bring the young men of the community into adulthood while engaging and channelling these emotions into positive behaviours and outlets, rather than creating the blocked and incomplete individuals we commonly encounter today. But these communtiies probably relied upon tradition, ritual, formal conferral of status, useful codified male group activities, etc. to mitigate what I think is a biologcal response to a biological condition.

[stefano]

There may have been social groups better equipped to bring the young men of the community into adulthood while engaging and channelling these emotions into positive behaviours and outlets, rather than creating the blocked and incomplete individuals we commonly encounter today. But these communtiies probably relied upon tradition, ritual, formal conferral of status, useful coidified male group activities, etc. to mitigate what I think is a biologcal response to a biological condition.

Yes yes. I'm big on ritual, despite being very anti-superstition... Don't quite know how to resolve that but there you have it. This transition is the tension that a Bar Mitzvah or a Xhosa initiation tries to resolve; it's the community formally telling the boy "your body's changing, you have to change with it". I seriously think the absence of rituals like that is what led to the "blocked and incomplete individuals we commonly encounter today".

I spent part of this last weekend writing, trying to find the right words for an idea I have that we are now so concerned with self-actualisation that we endlessly ruminate on our possible futures, we keep imagining life as a vista of tomorrows, and so fail to have the immensely important perspective of life as a whole, and fail to act in service of a good overall life. We especially fail, I think, to prepare for good old ages, or good last days, because even at 40 we're still thinking in terms of "one day I'd like to", before playing a Playstation game and having a wank over a threesome with two 20-year-olds. I still can't find the words to say what I mean, as the incoherence of this paragraph probably makes clear... but those formalised milestones along the road from cradle to grave make a big difference to one's ability to evaluate one's life as a single narrative and to honestly weigh the options at any given fork in the road. People who lie about their age, or dye their hair, or get plastic surgery, miss the point pathetically. I even take issue with people who don't celebrate their birthdays.

[Username]

You're right that Maltz is saying that. And also that she seems to be saying that. It's just not the only (or even the primary) thing that she both is and seems to be saying, as I read it. Which is subjectively, of course.

But fwiw, per my subjective reading, the most prominent feature of her essay is the odd and inappropriate serenity of the tone in which she chattily regrets stuff like having spent more than a decade using her position of authority to persuade people who didn't share their sexual partners' liking for pornography and didn't want to participate in the use of it to find some way to get over themselves. Especially since she both is and seems to be saying that she knew perfectly well that commercial pornography was generally crude, poorly produced work that was at best an unrealistic and at worst a false representation of female sexual needs and desires all along.

Anyone who thinks that a government body researching the effects of pornography and developing policies and prevention campaigns (with the input of the clergy and law enforcement, among others) wouldn't practice selective and probably preemptively punitive censorship is just asleep at the wheel, imo. I'm open to hearing arguments to the contrary, but I personally can't imagine any other outcome, no matter how hard I concentrate on trying.

From the comment section following the OP:

goldmarx [Moderator] 1 day ago

On her own website, Wendy Maltz is listed as a featured speaker at the Stop Porn Culture Conference on Saturday, June 12th at Wheelock College in Boston. This is a group of disciples of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, diehard supporters of censorship. Maltz cites above as a reliable source of information Patrick Carnes, an openly right-wing supporter of censorship. Now do folks understand why she cannot be trusted?

What can I say?
_______

...to the point that we don't even fully agree with ourselves all the time, we're that damn conflicted about it.

Word.
~

[JackRiddler]

Yes yes. I'm big on ritual, despite being very anti-superstition... Don't quite know how to resolve that but there you have it. This transition is the tension that a Bar Mitzvah or a Xhosa initiation tries to resolve; it's the community formally telling the boy "your body's changing, you have to change with it". I seriously think the absence of rituals like that is what led to the "blocked and incomplete individuals we commonly encounter today".

I spent part of this last weekend writing, trying to find the right words for an idea I have that we are now so concerned with self-actualisation that we endlessly ruminate on our possible futures, we keep imagining life as a vista of tomorrows, and so fail to have the immensely important perspective of life as a whole, and fail to act in service of a good overall life. We especially fail, I think, to prepare for good old ages, or good last days, because even at 40 we're still thinking in terms of "one day I'd like to", before playing a Playstation game and having a wank over a threesome with two 20-year-olds. I still can't find the words to say what I mean, as the incoherence of this paragraph probably makes clear... but those formalised milestones along the road from cradle to grave make a big difference to one's ability to evaluate one's life as a single narrative and to honestly weigh the options at any given fork in the road. People who lie about their age, or dye their hair, or get plastic surgery, miss the point pathetically. I even take issue with people who don't celebrate their birthdays.

You're doing very very well.

Fuck.

Is this you too, or only me? (For Playstation, substitute RI.)

[Alaya]

c2 said:

definitely very bad for you, and yet at certain times for certain people very good, and it's definitely a drug in the real, chemical sense with enormous potential both for addiction

I'm not through reading the thread yet but I this point is one of the more important in this discussion.

[Alaya]

Among many other things porn is another form of Soma.

[JackRiddler]

As I said above, male sexual frustration at the onset of puberty may have been evolutionarily selected for certain survival benefits to the species.

May I doubt that! Enormous sex drive was evolutionarily selected. Frustration is just the near-universal, daily, life-long consequence that in some is never stilled for more than a few hours. You can never have enough, and it's so good you always want more. In a species that long ago moved past the stage where we all slept in a pile and weren't too sure who we were related to (everyone) or what part was supposed to go where, and then in a society that lacked a way to deal with the onset of puberty realistically, frustration would predictably be most pronounced at puberty, when the youth still lacks for power and experience and is confused by the unexpected intensities. At that point daddy's still getting the action. Evolution's not a sadist, just an indifferent bitch.


















(Is this heading for a men's group?)

[Pele'sDaughter]

Yes yes. I'm big on ritual, despite being very anti-superstition... Don't quite know how to resolve that but there you have it. This transition is the tension that a Bar Mitzvah or a Xhosa initiation tries to resolve; it's the community formally telling the boy "your body's changing, you have to change with it". I seriously think the absence of rituals like that is what led to the "blocked and incomplete individuals we commonly encounter today".

Oh, absolutely! It's not ritual for the sake of ritual; it's that the symbolic acts help induce a certain state of mind to achieve a goal. That's the best way I can explain it. Meaningful rituals performed in a loving community/family ease the various transitions of life and help understand what it means to be human. This is missing in our "civilized" societies. I've experienced it in a small way by making a ritual of my quitting cigs afew years ago. It made all the difference, too. No cravings; no withdrawals; but a sense of empowerment that I wish everyone could feel.

[Nordic]

Such a ritual would be a wonderful thing for young men. Instead, what we get instead is dragged off to church, where we're made to feel guilty about any sexual longings, told that masturbation will have you sent to hell, and that "to lust in your heart" is the same as cheating on your wife. We're basically told that any sexual longing outside of MARRIAGE is a sin, and we're telling this to people who aren't expected to get married for YEARS.

Yet God gave us our balls, and presumably our sex drives.

God is a sadist if this is the case.

I was quite the little hippie jesus freak up until I hit puberty. And then I began to have "lustful thoughts" that i couldn't control -- hell, nobody's brought up the whole subject of wet dreams (now THERE'S some porn!) -- and realized that I was just gonna have to put my Christianity on hold until ..... god only knew when, right?

So we keep everything in the closet, keep it repressed, hide the porn from our parents (and in my case that was fairly easy since the best porn stash was my own father's, which I discovered and would borrow whenever my parents were both out of the house), and left feeling ashamed and embarrassed about myself for freaking ever.

[Nordic]

Okay, Alaya, I had to go look up what you meant by Soma.

Western reception

In Western fiction, soma often refers to some form of intoxicating drug. It is also the brand name of the prescription muscle relaxant Carisoprodol.
In Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World, soma is a popular dream-inducing drug. It provides an easy escape from the hassles of daily life and is employed by the government as a method of control through pleasure. It is ubiquitous and ordinary among the culture of the novel and everyone is shown to use it at some point, in various situations: sex, relaxation, concentration, confidence. It is seemingly a single-chemical combination of many of today's drugs' effects, giving its users the full hedonistic spectrum depending on dosage.

Soma is the central theme of the poem The Brewing of Soma by the American Quaker poet, John Whittier (1807–1892) from which the well-known Christian hymn "Dear Lord and Father of Mankind" is derived. Whittier here portrays the drinking of soma as distracting the mind from the proper worship of God.

In the books Junkie and Naked Lunch, author William S. Burroughs refers to soma as a non-addictive, high-quality form of opium said to exist in ancient India.

The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM-Sidhi Program involves a notion of "Soma", allegedly based on the Rigveda.[8][9][10]

The song "Soma" appears on The Strokes 2001 album Is This It? The lyrics include references to the Indo-Iranian ritual drink: "Soma is what they would take when hard times opened their eyes/Saw pain in a new way."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma