Is Porn Bad for You?

[blanc]

You don't need to pussy foot around my feelings if you disagree with my p.o.v. compared2what?. I have been hurt immeasurably by this industry, and would happily see it wiped out, but learning about the defenses put up for its continued existence is interesting. (BTW I wasn't thinking of you in referring to posts which debunk the idea that there could be any such thing as escalation, so you're not alone in those views, though I don't share them. Nor do I really think that scientific method is always the gold star when it comes to studying human nature and experience - but that's a different debate probably).
Here
".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?"
is where I take a diametrically opposed point of view, as I had hoped to illustrate with my fanciful examples of alternative crime viewing. It is not possible to be doing nothing more predatory than destroying their own libido, at least unless they have had absolute control of the production of the material which they use and so can be assured that what they see involves no crime or hurt to anyone. The act of viewing even 'free' pornography, and the act of purchasing it, implies involvement in the production of it. It doesn't just arrive like the air we breathe, its built to order like the car you drive. Just because someone doesn't choose to see or consider the harm done in its production, the criminal side of the affair, doesn't let them off the hook.

[barracuda]

Complicity is an odd thing - it seems to strike whether expected or not, in every crevice of our behaviors. I guess one could say that marijuana smokers in the US are complicit in the Mexican cartel wars that have killed unknown thousands and ruined an entire nation, or relate heroin use to directly funding the crimes of the black budget CIA wars that use drug profits for their operations. But in either case I would say the blame would be misplaced somewhat, and that any comparable complicity in the realm of human sexual desire with regards to the production of pornography is of a markedly different type. Surely there are few things more natural to the state of being human than curiosity about modes of sexual expression.

[Stephen Morgan]

I can't see why anyone would pay for porn.

[Elihu]

She had even (an infallibIe mark of good reputation) been picked out to work in Pornosec, the sub-section of the Fiction Department which turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles. It was nicknamed Muck House by the people who worked in it, she remarked. There she had remained for a year, helping to produce booklets in sealed packets with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls' School, to be bought furtively by proletarian youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.

'What are these books like?' said Winston curiously.

'Oh, ghastly rubbish. They're boring, really. They only have six plots, but they swap them round a bit. Of course I was only on the kaleidoscopes. I was never in the Rewrite Squad. I'm not literary, dear -- not even enough for that.'

He learned with astonishment that all the workers in Pornosec, except the heads of the departments, were girls. The theory was that men, whose sex instincts were less controllable than those of women, were in greater danger of being corrupted by the filth they handled.

'They don't even like having married women there,' she added. 'Girls are always supposed to be so pure. Here's one who isn't, anyway.'

She had had her first love-affair when she was sixteen, with a Party member of sixty who later committed suicide to avoid arrest. 'And a good job too,' said Julia, 'otherwise they'd have had my name out of him when he confessed.' Since then there had been various others. Life as she saw it was quite simple. You wanted a good time; 'they', meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you couId. She seemed to think it just as natural that 'they' should want to rob you of your pleasures as that you should want to avoid being caught. She hated the Party, and said so in the crudest words, but she made no general criticism of it. Except where it touched upon her own life she had no interest in Party doctrine. He noticed that she never used Newspeak words except the ones that had passed into everyday use. She had never heard of the Brotherhood, and refused to believe in its existence. Any kind of organized revolt against the Party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same. He wondered vaguely how many others like her there might be in the younger generation people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

They did not discuss the possibility of getting married. It was too remote to be worth thinking about. No imaginable committee would ever sanction such a marriage even if Katharine, Winston's wife, could somehow have been got rid of. It was hopeless even as a daydream.

'What was she like, your wife?' said Julia.

'She was -- do you know the Newspeak word goodthinkful? Meaning naturally orthodox, incapable of thinking a bad thought?'

'No, I didn't know the word, but I know the kind of person, right enough.'

He began telling her the story of his married life, but curiousIy enough she appeared to know the essential parts of it already. She described to him, almost as though she had seen or felt it, the stiffening of Katharine's body as soon as he touched her, the way in which she still seemed to be pushing him from her with all her strength, even when her arms were clasped tightly round him. With Julia he felt no difficulty in talking about such things: Katharine, in any case, had long ceased to be a painful memory and became merely a distasteful one.

'I could have stood it if it hadn't been for one thing,' he said. He toId her about the frigid little ceremony that Katharine had forced him to go through on the same night every week. 'She hated it, but nothing would make her stop doing it. She used to call it -- but you'll never guess.'

'Our duty to the Party,' said Julia promptly.

'How did you know that?'

'I've been at school too, dear. Sex talks once a month for the over-sixteens. And in the Youth Movement. They rub it into you for years. I dare say it works in a lot of cases. But of course you can never tell; peopIe are such hypocrites.'

She began to enlarge upon the subject. With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simpIy sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

Abruptly his mind went back to Katharine. Katharine would unquestionably have denounced him to the Thought Police if she had not happened to be too stupid to detect the unorthodoxy of his opinions. But what really recalled her to him at this moment was the stifling heat of the afternoon, which had brought the sweat out on his forehead. He began telling Julia of something that had happened, or rather had failed to happen, on another sweltering summer afternoon, eleven years ago.

It was three or four months after they were married. They had lost their way on a community hike somewhere in Kent. They had only lagged behind the others for a couple of minutes, but they took a wrong turning, and presently found themselves pulled up short by the edge of an old chalk quarry. It was a sheer drop of ten or twenty metres, with boulders at the bottom. There was nobody of whom they could ask the way. As soon as she realized that they were lost Katharine became very uneasy. To be away from the noisy mob of hikers even for a moment gave her a feeling of wrong-doing. She wanted to hurry back by the way they had come and start searching in the other direction. But at this moment Winston noticed some tufts of loosestrife growing in the cracks of the cliff beneath them. One tuft was of two colours, magenta and brick-red, apparently growing on the same root. He had never seen anything of the kind before, and he called to Katharine to come and look at it.

'Look, Katharine! Look at those flowers. That clump down near the bottom. Do you see they're two different colours?'

She had already turned to go, but she did rather fretfully come back for a moment. She even leaned out over the cliff face to see where he was pointing. He was standing a little behind her, and he put his hand on her waist to steady her. At this moment it suddenly occurred to him how completely alone they were. There was not a human creature anywhere, not a leaf stirring, not even a bird awake. In a place like this the danger that there would be a hidden microphone was very small, and even if there was a microphone it would only pick up sounds. It was the hottest sleepiest hour of the afternoon. The sun blazed down upon them, the sweat tickled his face. And the thought struck him...

'Why didn't you give her a good shove?' said Julia. 'I would have.'

'Yes, dear, you would have. I would, if I'd been the same person then as I am now. Or perhaps I would -- I'm not certain.'

'Are you sorry you didn't?'

'Yes. On the whole I'm sorry I didn't.'

They were sitting side by side on the dusty floor. He pulled her closer against him. Her head rested on his shoulder, the pleasant smell of her hair conquering the pigeon dung. She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

'Actually it would have made no difference,' he said.

'Then why are you sorry you didn't do it?'

'Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.'

He felt her shoulders give a wriggle of dissent. She always contradicted him when he said anything of this kind. She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. In a way she realized that she herself was doomed, that sooner or later the Thought Police would catch her and kill her, but with another part of her mind she believed that it was somehow possible to construct a secret world in which you could live as you chose. All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead, that from the moment of declaring war on the Party it was better to think of yourself as a corpse.

'We are the dead,' he said.

'We're not dead yet,' said Julia prosaically.

'Not physically. Six months, a year -- five years, conceivably. I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.'

'Oh, rubbish! Which would you sooner sleep with, me or a skeleton? Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?'

She twisted herself round and pressed her bosom against him. He could feel her breasts, ripe yet firm, through her overalls. Her body seemed to be pouring some of its youth and vigour into his.

'Yes, I like that,' he said.

'Then stop talking about dying. And now listen, dear, we've got to fix up about the next time we meet. We may as well go back to the place in the wood. We've given it a good long rest. But you must get there by a different way this time. I've got it all planned out. You take the train -- but look, I'll draw it out for you.'

And in her practical way she scraped together a small square of dust, and with a twig from a pigeon's nest began drawing a map on the floor.

[Simulist]

Pretty much everything is bad for you at a certain point — drinking too much water (even purified water) can kill you.

But I'm really not sure that porn is any worse for society than, say… MSNBC.

(Actually, MSNBC is probably worse.)

[compared2what?]

You don't need to pussy foot around my feelings if you disagree with my p.o.v. compared2what?.

I do, actually. But I certainly don't hold you responsible for it. It's my need, after all.

I have been hurt immeasurably by this industry, and would happily see it wiped out, but learning about the defenses put up for its continued existence is interesting.

I don't defend the continued existence of the porn industry, which I too would happily see wiped out.

I regard the continued existence of pornography itself -- by which I mean "graphic filmed or photographed acts or other images of licit sex" -- as a separate issue, however.

I have mixed feelings about it, but ultimately I would argue in favor of it, on much the same grounds that I would argue in favor of drug legalization although I'd happily see the drug trafficking industry wiped out.

I hope that's a clear statement of my position on the issue.

[compared2what?]

(BTW I wasn't thinking of you in referring to posts which debunk the idea that there could be any such thing as escalation, so you're not alone in those views, though I don't share them. Nor do I really think that scientific method is always the gold star when it comes to studying human nature and experience - but that's a different debate probably).

Not between us, wrt the science thing, as I've already said.

I don't think it's really fair to say that I debunked the idea that there could be any such thing as escalation, though. On the contrary, I more or less said that there could be. True, I did also say that there was no evidence of any kind that it could be attributed solely to the consumption of pornography. But there isn't, to the best of my knowledge. And I take enough of an interest in the issue to have formed a considered opinion on it.

Furthermore, it makes very little sense to me on non-scientific grounds that it could be. For one thing, most people in contemporary society are exposed to very much the same sexual imagery as one another. And yet, human sexuality is very diverse in practice. Indeed, there's not even any reason to think that years and years of a particular kind of sexual experience is capable of creating a taste for that kind of sex in people who have no naturally occurring desire for it. For example, most long-term prisoners are technically practicing homosexuals while in lock-up. But if they were practicing (or, for that matter, non-practicing and virgin) heterosexuals before they were sent up, that's also what they are when they get out.

Likewise, there are very large numbers of women who have worked in both forced and free-agent prostitution for years from a very young age without developing a desire for sex with strangers who view and treat them as commodities, although there are also a significant number of other women who are turned on by that scenario, which is, per self-report, a very common fantasy.

So. Once again. I have zero tolerance for the abuse and enslavement of men, women and children in the porn industry, because I have zero tolerance for the abuse and enslavement of men, women and children. The contemporary porn industry is largely an organized criminal enterprise, much like -- and pretty closely related to -- the contemporary drug trafficking industry, in which the abuse and enslavement of men, women and children is likewise routine. I am not globally opposed to all illicit drug consumption.

Nor do I see what purpose would be served by vilifying illicit drug consumers for their complicity in and support of an industry that's rife with crimes for which I have zero-tolerance, although I would be hard put to argue that they were not complicit or did not support it.

I grant that's not a perfect analogy in any number of ways. For one thing, regular acts of porn consumption very probably entail some exposure to images of the sexually enslaved and abused, although not -- for the most part -- to representations of abuse and enslavement. Whereas no such exposure attaches to regular acts of drug consumption. For another, however, the odds that any single act of illicit drug consumption, whether casual or regular, entails the use of a product that reached the market via a process in which real innocent people were enslaved or killed are far higher than those for any single act of porn consumption.

So the differences cut both ways. In any event. I do very much see what purpose would be served by consumer education. FWIW. In fact, I advocate for it.

Please feel free to discount my considered opinion as such. But please do not discount it as something it is not.

Thank you.

[compared2what?]

Here
".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?"
is where I take a diametrically opposed point of view, as I had hoped to illustrate with my fanciful examples of alternative crime viewing. It is not possible to be doing nothing more predatory than destroying their own libido, at least unless they have had absolute control of the production of the material which they use and so can be assured that what they see involves no crime or hurt to anyone. The act of viewing even 'free' pornography, and the act of purchasing it, implies involvement in the production of it. It doesn't just arrive like the air we breathe, its built to order like the car you drive. Just because someone doesn't choose to see or consider the harm done in its production, the criminal side of the affair, doesn't let them off the hook.

I agree. But neither does it put them on an equal footing with predators. Had you characterized them as ignorant, or selfish, or criminally and inexcusably heedless of a possibility that they had no excuse for disregarding, I would not have remarked on it. However, you did not. You described them as dopamine-hungry pervs buying images of rape and/or the torture of minors. That is not a fair and accurate characterization of the vast majority of either porn consumers or porn-addicted sex addicts. By a long chalk. It stigmatizes -- and indeed criminalizes -- all pornography and all consumers of porn in terms that I'd maintain it's dangerous to apply to adult men who masturbate while looking at pictures of naked women.

And that's mostly what you're talking about when you're talking about pornography and its consumption. FWIW, I know and have known a number of women do work or have worked in the sex industry (ie -- as prostitutes and pornographic models/actresses). Voluntarily. They aren't/weren't victims in the sense that you're using that word, or with the connotations that you're attaching to it. I certainly wouldn't say that either they or their working environments had nothing whatsoever to do with the systematic sexual oppression and/or objectification of women. In fact, I'd say that a lot of very real injustice, suffering, and other assorted ills for which I have zero-tolerance along those same general lines was foundational to both the world they work in and their choice to work in it.

That constitutes a very serious problem, by my standards. I feel obligated to do everything I can to combat its continuation, starting with a thorough and thoughtful examination of the realities from which it springs and on which it thrives. Those include the realities to which you speak. But they are not limited to them. Nobody, including the victims of rape, sexual abuse, slavery, and trafficking, gains by the wholesale conflation of their experience with that of all others whose experience is on the same continuum as theirs; whose suffering arises in part from the same or very similar social ills as theirs; and whose cause and interests should be properly joined with and not subsumed by theirs.
_____________

IOW: I agree with you on every point within the terms of what you're really talking about, which is a primary and urgent concern to me. What you're talking about does not comprehend the whole panoply of important concerns raised by the question asked in the subject line of this thread, however. Nor is it related to some of them, except by general association. Happily, none of the realities one which the concerns to which you're not speaking are based calls for any redress that's at all in conflict with redressing the one to which you are speaking.

So we have no quarrel. We're just not talking about exactly the same aspect of the topic.

[Stephen Morgan]

Poison is dosage.

I sometimes watch sexuall arousing videos on the internet. Steam engines, Indian girls in boiler suits, that sort of thing. But you can't take it too far. If your penis is sore, don't wank no more.

[compared2what?]

Poison is dosage.

I sometimes watch sexuall arousing videos on the internet. Steam engines, Indian girls in boiler suits, that sort of thing. But you can't take it too far. If your penis is sore, don't wank no more.

Hi Stephen. Thanks for prompting me to think of something that had, for some reason, drifted away from its proper moorings in the shallows of my conscious awareness in which I like to keep things I'd prefer not to lose sight of. This is the second time in a row that an associative train of thought provoked by seeing your username has done that for me.

So. Much appreciated. Now please cut it out before it starts getting creepy.

I'll be back shortly with the stuff of which you prompted me to think.

[freemason9]

(1) Do not kill.
(2) Do not steal.
(3) Do not lie.
(4) Do not misuse sex (misuse includes exploitation).
(5) Do not consume intoxicants.

[Simulist]

(1) Do not kill.
(2) Do not steal.
(3) Do not lie.
(4) Do not misuse sex (misuse includes exploitation).
(5) Do not consume intoxicants.

Looks like Jehovah had a half-off sale on commandments.

[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?

Okay. I'd like to try approaching this again, from a slightly different angle.

It troubles me to see the "consumption of porn" (first sentence) equated, without qualification or demur, with buying "images of the rape and/or torture of minors," which are produced by "the crime industry and its bankers" and then purchased by "disconnected sociopaths with minimal capacity for empathy."

And it does seem to me that they really are being equated here -- ie, being treated as one and the same thing -- in view of how closely the follow upon this much less ambiguous and concise statement of that view...

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?

...upon which they appear to be intended to expand.

And blanc -- if I'm wrong about that, please correct me. I mean, I'd still be troubled by it, pretty much equally, even if I were. As it happens. But since understanding what someone else is saying is a virtue in itself, I'd pretty much equally still want to know if I was in error. So let me know.

Here's why it troubles me:

Almost all men masturbate regularly starting in adolescence and for the whole rest of their adult lives. And that includes almost all gay men, straight men, men who hate women, men who love women, men who also regularly have sex with a long-term partner, and men who never have sex with any partner. Because it includes almost all healthy men. With the exception of men who have been so aggressively conditioned to fear and abhor the practice by religious indoctrination that the conditioning certainly amounts to a form of emotional abuse and arguably amounts to a form of sexual abuse.

Almost all men who masturbate regularly -- ie, almost all men -- sometimes use pornography as an aid to masturbation. And most of them regularly use it. I'm not totally happy with the figures I'm finding, since all of them were produced by the same far-right Christian groups with whom the basic talking points of the internet-porn-badness public awareness campaign originated. So they might not be wholly reliable. Howver, fwiw and until I have the time to come up with some better search terms, according to a survey in which I can't see any obvious flaw or bias, about seventy percent of male internet users avail themselves of online pornography at least once a month. Which strikes me as both reasonable and plausible, on a common-sense basis.

In short: Regular masturbation is nearly universal among men as is the occasional consumption of porn. Furthermore, the regular consumption of porn is very common. A very small percentage of those men become compulsive masturbators who are dependent on pornography for sexual arousal. That's problematic for them, and also for their partners and families, if they have any. I don't deny it.

However, a very small percentage of all men have been compulsive masturbators who were dependent on pornography since long before the internet. It's always been problematic for them, and also for their partners and families, if they have any. And there's never been any more evidence than there is now that frequent exposure to porn is what creates or otherwise causes the problem. Because there's an incalculably greater number of men who have been frequently exposed to porn without developing that or any other kind of sexual pathology than there are men who are pathologically sexually compulsive masturbators.

A very small percentage of all men also become vicious sexual predators, obviously. And equally obviously, there's never been and still isn't any evidence that vicious sexual predation is caused by freqent exposure to pornography. For the same reasons just stated.

In short: There's no evidence that porn consumption leads to real acts of sexual predation, and an enormous body of indirect evidence that indicates it doesn't. There is also no real correlation between sexual compulsion/addiction and sexual predation. The two groups sometimes overlap. But that's all.

Turning to pornography itself: There's a lot of it everywhere, and even more of it on the internet. Prior to the internet, most of it was commercially produced in the San Fernando Valley and a few other places by adults and with adult performers, a large number of whom came from abusive backgrounds (including but not limited to sexually abusive backgrounds) and a significant number of whom were exploited and abused by people who directly profited from keeping them personally and emotionally subjugated to themselves. And also, quite freqently, drug addicted. HIV infections were very widespread among professionial porno actors for a while there, too. Moreover, professional commercial porn production in the United States is and long has been a mob-controlled business.

In short: Serious human rights abuses for which there should be zero tolerance were endemic in the commercial porn industry before the internet and they still are. However, rape and torture are not comprehensively representative of those abuses. Nor are they exemplary instances of it in any conventional sense of the words "rape" and "torture" when broadly applied to the commercial porn industry, which is dependent on going out of its way not to use underage performers for its continued existence, cf -- Tracy Lords.

Furthermore, in view of how lucrative it is, there's little (if any) reason to think that criminalizing pornography rather than criminalizing criminal abuses would be an effective means of reducing the latter. And, if the lessons of history are granted to have any validity, there's every reason to think that it would increase them. Prohibition. Et cetera.

Let it be noted that there's also an enormous amount of non-commercially produced porn on the internet to which none of what I just said is applicable. As a matter of fact, there are whole genres of it -- eg, alt-porn, amateur porn, etcetera -- each of which lends itself to its own characteristic form of endemic abuses, all of which need to be and should be addressed on the real terms of their existence, imo. Because there's really no other effective way to address them.

And...I guess that for reasons of length, I'm just going to leave that at so-noted status and move on.
__________________

blanc --

If all pornography was child pornography, everything you say would be fully justified. But it's not.

Moreover, the overwhelming majority of the porn consumers whom you're describing as criminally perverted sociopaths, engaged in an ever-escalating quest to slake the insatiable appetite for ever-nastier forms of sex are in fact men engaged in having male sexuality as it naturally occurs for most of them.

You can see how that easily might be stigmatizing to the point of harm, can't you? Because I can. In fact, I can see how it might be among the factors that make (just for example) any attempt by women to explain to men what it feels like to live in a rape culture such an insanely charged and futile exercise. Now that I come to think of it.

Anyway. That troubles me. No fault, blame or even responsibility for anything bad attaches to you at all in connection with it, as far as I'm concerned. In fact, in my view, everything you say is important to say, assuming a small contextual adjustment that it's not very difficult to make. So I'm not calling you out for it in any way.

However, since the people who are most likely to be stigmatized by something are (by definition) the least likely to be capable of making the small contextual adjustments that would protect them from it, I am calling it to your attention.

[compared2what?]

No more long posting.

I hereby foreswear and renounce it for the greater good.

[slomo]

No more long posting.

I hereby foreswear and renounce it for the greater good.

Actually, I applaud your recent post. It says everything I wanted to say (but didn't because I've been avoiding saying anything at all in this thread).

I am troubled by the conflation of pornography with male sexuality in general (or any sexuality for that matter).

Obviously, it goes without saying that child pornography, rape, and torture are great evils. And it also goes without saying that the porn industry (particularly heterosexual porn) is rife with all kinds of abuses. However, instead of hearing about these abuses directly, we're forced to endure a spurious narrative about how pornography represents some terrible slippery slope towards a hopeless dopamine addiction. That's the real problem, not the exploited people in the videos.

How sex-negative can you get?

Don't get me wrong: sex is powerful, dangerous, and some times very fucked up. But it's also a fundamental part of our humanity, and it does great violence to the soul to distort the sexual impulse by attempting to squash it.