Is Porn Bad for You?

[Simulist]

But the very, very last thing I need in my life at the moment is a disagreement which brings discomfort to people who I consider, at this time in my life, my very good friends, really, especially over something as inexplicable and idiosyncratic as my ironic personal preferences of sexual fantasies and their presentation in pornography. If we have to argue to antipathy and irritation, I insist that it be about something else. Entirely. If you must form a poor opinion of me, there are much more pertinent avenues of approach than this one, I hope.

Right on Barracuda. Your words are so often what I wish I could have said.

[Project Willow]

^
I had not read that, I did not read your whole post b. I thought you were talking to Hammer.

You're on your own, old man.

was meant to be flirtatious, not dismissive of your concerns.

[blanc]

I'm very tired, having spent the last few days trying my crappy and inadequate best to help 2 victims through some part of difficulties resulting from the years of abuse, feel like crying, haven't read everything here since I signalled to C2W that I didn't get her characterization of me as insensitive to drug addicted people, which apparently I got wrong, it wasn't that, its something else I still don't get. This:-
"...I might ask him or her to consider whether that was really the best way to think and talk about addicts to whose possible implication in acts of rape they had given no serious consideration and about which they were wholly uninformed."

WTF? That paragraph I wrote with, I confess, not much picking over, started off about the fact that I put the concern for the victim (of pornography, and so, as victim, clearly NOT the primary instigator or producer of either home grown individual joint or club based material) before that of the consumer, whom I wrote of in direct and uncompromisingly unflattering terms, because I believe that someone who aids and abets rape is,( and in fact legally may be in UK law), guilty of that same crime. Now I'm really unsure whether the person whose feelings I'm being castigated for not considering does or does not come in this category - I'm too dense to work through your prose and understand where addicts fit in, but in passing can't help but noticing that what seems to be mixing up addiction or recovering addiction with propensity to rape is pretty unfair on that group of individuals, in a similar way to the abused-child-becomes -abuser-adult parade is unfair to a whole group. That's how it reads - surely you didn't mean this?
Frankly, you lost me.

Barracuda, I was going to say back then, that I didn't get your posts either, but I gave up trying to trawl back. I never advocated Lysistrata style action, just don't think that pornography as it now is is as essential as some people do. In that post you seemed to endorse my point whilst denying it in some strange way, agreeing it would seem, that consumers of porn don't read labels - that is, have not troubled themselves to know how its made. It different from other products btw, more about this when my brain works again. Unlike many posters here I don't think that we can smugly assume that there is a huge amount of basically harmless victimless free range porn, and only a teeny teeny bit of the nasty stuff, and that we can easily distinguish between them. Your vignette, Barracuda, about freedom loving friends filming romps and public spiritedly putting them out there reminded me that the lead woman in the abuser group responsible for the problems I alluded to at the start of this post took a job in a health club, which advertised for just such home movies, at least according to the research done by a respected journalist who worked on this case. There's a cross over between victimed and victimless, amateur and criminal, and one serves the other very well. Its not just one case this happens with, any case which surfaces comes up with the same processes, similar operating methods.
Sorry this is such a disorganised ramble.

[Project Willow]

^ Hang in there blanc, and I want to just say, if I may, thank you for your work on the front lines.

[Simulist]

So, yeah… It's pretty amazing the stuff that turns us humans on — and it's often scary! "Whoa! If that turns me on, then I must be a freak!" Well, maybe, I guess… but not necessarily. You may just be like the rest of us human-animals, and that's all. And it's amazing really just how little control we human-animals have over what we find sexually arousing sometimes. "But I'm 'supposed' to be turned on only by _________, _________, and _________!" ("Hey, I'm allowed those last two on the list 'cause I'm a liberal Protestant now…") Well, it doesn't work that way. Sorry.

Porn can be an in-your-face reminder of the very, very humbling fact that we're not really masters of much of anything, including our genitals sometimes. ("Ha! Ha!")

FWIW.

Thanks Sim.

I am tempted to wonder, along those same lines, that perhaps at base a preponderance of individual sexual impulses, as they exist in this culture and at this point in our evolutionary history, inherently entail a certain amount of what we might commonly label abuse. Dare I wonder about this out loud? I don't know, the atmosphere in here is fairly incendiary already.

I wrote (what turned out to be) a ridiculously long post about this yesterday — because I think what you've just said here is THE very crux of the problem this thread is struggling to identify (you do have a way of doing that, you know…) — but I haven't posted it for the reasons you've highlighted in your last couple of sentences, just above. Eventually, I'll probably do that though. Eventually. But at the moment, I didn't want to just let this go without acknowledging your insight on this which, in my opinion, is considerable.

Suffice for now to say: I think you're dead-on-right in identifying this (usually unacknowledged) constant in the equation, PW.

[compared2what?]

I'm very tired, having spent the last few days trying my crappy and inadequate best to help 2 victims through some part of difficulties resulting from the years of abuse, feel like crying, haven't read everything here since I signalled to C2W that I didn't get her characterization of me as insensitive to drug addicted people, which apparently I got wrong, it wasn't that, its something else I still don't get. This:-
"...I might ask him or her to consider whether that was really the best way to think and talk about addicts to whose possible implication in acts of rape they had given no serious consideration and about which they were wholly uninformed."

WTF? That paragraph I wrote with, I confess, not much picking over, started off about the fact that I put the concern for the victim (of pornography, and so, as victim, clearly NOT the primary instigator or producer of either home grown individual joint or club based material) before that of the consumer, whom I wrote of in direct and uncompromisingly unflattering terms,

The paragraph that you wrote started like this:

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.

So, yeah. You are expressing a concern for victims greater than that you feel for the addicts in The Daily Mail article, whom you characterize as "dopamine hungry pervs" and -- a little later -- "disconnected sociopaths with minimal capacity for empathy" in search of "a dopamine spiker," whom you had (at that point) already stated should go to jail for three years.

Not to put too fine a point on it: The disconnected sociopathic dopamine hungry pervs with a minimal capacity for empathy of whom you speak are figments of your imagination. Entirely. Sex addicts are not like that. Their condition calls for help, treatment and understanding, not stigmatization and benighted ignorance, both of which they've got plenty of already.

Further, if you wish to go around calling out other people for being insufficiently concerned whether the products they consume were made by an industry that uses child slaves from a position of absolutely unimpeachable superiority, you might either want (a) to think twice before saying you use a brand of hand lotion that was made by a company that uses them; or (b) give others a break for being as human as you are.

I admire your passionate concern for those who concern you. Your passionate censoriousness towards random others to the possibility of whose humanity you appear to be incapable of giving a passing thought, though? Not so much.

I'm sorry to speak so harshly. And fwiw, please allow me to make it clear that I don't really think you are incapable of giving the humanity of others who are unrelated to your concerns a passing thought. I think you're making yourself appear that way. And I think that's a shame. Because you're much better than that.

because I believe that someone who aids and abets rape is,( and in fact legally may be in UK law), guilty of that same crime. Now I'm really unsure whether the person whose feelings I'm being castigated for not considering does or does not come in this category - I'm too dense to work through your prose and understand where addicts fit in,

They fit in right here, in the sentence that immediately follows the part of the paragraph you wrote that I quoted above:

...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.

See how that "dopamine hungry pervs" in the sentence before that one (to say nothing of the "dopamine spiker" in the sentence following that one, as well as the paragraph;s introductory or as they say "topic" sentence) all make it clear that you are talking about addicts throughout, as you seemed to have no trouble understanding when I first asked you to consider whether that was the best way to talk about them way back here?

Well, that's where they fit in!

Incidentally, if you follow that link, it'll take you back to the days when your indifference to their reality was still young and your unreasoned convictions regarding their predatory habits was less equivocal. Remember?

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.

And by "less equivocal" I mean "less equivocal than it seems to have become now that you've decided to accuse me of thoughtlessly conflating their addiction with a propensity for rape, without citing one single word of anything that I wrote that does so":

but in passing can't help but noticing that what seems to be mixing up addiction or recovering addiction with propensity to rape is pretty unfair on that group of individuals, in a similar way to the abused-child-becomes -abuser-adult parade is unfair to a whole group. That's how it reads - surely you didn't mean this?

No. I didn't. That's why I didn't say anything of the kind.

Frankly, you lost me.

I take your word for it.

I really do have to stop posting now. Really. It's not good for my health, sadly.

[Canadian_watcher]

blanc, you're doing good work & I appreciate it.
nevermind the above... the nearly unintelligible sanctimony which seems to be trying to attach itself to you (as it is nearly unintelligible perhaps I'm wrong about the sanctimoniousness). just forget about that, let it not bore into your heart.

[barracuda]

Compared2what?, I hope you'll be feeling well enough to join us again soon. It's certainly got to be frustrating when your consistently brilliant, lucid writing is continually misunderstood and misrepresented by some of your readers. Please continue to challenge the median here. Your advocacy for the civil treatment of everyone is much appreciated.

Barracuda ... I didn't get your posts either...

That's an understatement. And one I totally sympathise with: I often go back and read old posts of mine and realise I have no more idea what I was talking about now than I did when I wrote it. Oh well.

I ... just don't think that pornography as it now is is as essential as some people do.

I couldn't agree more. Somehow it seemed far more essential when it was harder to come by. Ahh, the good old days. Absence and the heart, you know.

But I suppose everyone has their own level of necessity in this regard - as in human sexuality generally, there is a continuum of interest level which is probably described statistically as a bell curve in one form or another extending from the ravenous sex-addicted at one end to the completely uninterested and indifferent at the other, the vast majority of persons falling in the range of the perfectly normal. The OP states, "40 million Americans visit Internet porn sites at least once a month. Some porn users visit sites for only a few minutes at a time." Some rough math shows that this population of core users represents about one in seven adults. Considering that of these one-in-seven adults, some of them are visiting only once a month and some of them are visiting for only a few minutes at a time, it has to be noted that porn viewing habits (are you a porn "user" if you merely view the porn without acting?) also clearly exist on a bell-curved continuum. This hardly seems to constitute an epidemic, or to demonstrate as significant obsession in our culture with pornography as the length of this thread or the concern in many circles might suggest.

In that post you seemed to endorse my point whilst denying it in some strange way, agreeing it would seem, that consumers of porn don't read labels - that is, have not troubled themselves to know how its made. It different from other products btw, more about this when my brain works again.

Well, you have to admit that if you begin to take the time to perform the due diligence required to vet every piece of erotica which strikes your fancy in order to be certain that no one was really harmed in the making of that work, it's going to take a bit of the edge off the sexiness. That's no excuse, but a pragmatic reality, I think, that encompasses the porn-browsing habits of most of your average porn browsers. And again, I'd suggest to you that it is doubtful that such human-rights vetting is carried out in most areas of consumer activities, and that if it were morally and assiduously acted upon, no one but the most craven and corrupt would be driving cars or using petroleum-based plastic products, for example, or coltan-based tech products. And I do advocate just such vigilence.

I'm interested in your view on how porn differs in this regard from other products, though.

Unlike many posters here I don't think that we can smugly assume that there is a huge amount of basically harmless victimless free range porn, and only a teeny teeny bit of the nasty stuff, and that we can easily distinguish between them.

I may have smugly made a variety of assumptions on this thread, but that is not one of them. I only wished to point out that homemade, consensual porn does indeed exist in large quantities. I'm usure how much of this production would fall into the category of loving and mutually satisfying sexuality, but I do know that interest exists for such porn.

A dear, dear friend of mine (really more than just a friend) once pointed me to a website which cataloged, among other things of nominal interest, a collection of several hundred pornographic drawings, all by different artists, clearly unknown to each other, drawn over the course of the last seventy or so years, all of the Seven Dwarves engaged in profusive variety of all manner of sodomies with Snow White. My own self, I would have never guessed that such a speciality existed, yet it does, along with, apparently, thousands of other areas of pornographic drawings, painting, poems and literature, much of which, as far as I can tell, is at essence as bad or worse in terms of content than what you might find on your average porn site, probably due to the ability of the human mind to basically surpass in imagination most of what can created in reality.

This, too, is porn:



In all lkelyhood, it may be considered child pornography, as Marie-Louise O'Murphy was almost certainly about thirteen years of age when it was painted for the licentious purposes of Giacomo Casanova.

Your vignette, Barracuda, about freedom loving friends filming romps and public spiritedly putting them out there reminded me that the lead woman in the abuser group responsible for the problems I alluded to at the start of this post took a job in a health club, which advertised for just such home movies, at least according to the research done by a respected journalist who worked on this case. There's a cross over between victimed and victimless, amateur and criminal, and one serves the other very well. Its not just one case this happens with, any case which surfaces comes up with the same processes, similar operating methods.

Bad people want porn too, is that your point? It seems that bad people are capable of exploiting just about any situation, or area of commerce or interest for nefarious purposes, and in each case the activities of well-meaning individuals may be colored by that the machinations of the worst. However, society cannot be organised around moral principles that cater to confining licit activities in order to circumvent the iniquitous. Or at least, it shouldn't.

No one was exploited in the making of this video:

[RobinDaHood]

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2100428,00.html?xid=gonewsedit&google_editors_picks=true
After the DSK Affair, France Discovers Sex Addiction

(PARIS) — Since the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn in New York City last May, psychoanalyst Jean-Benoît Dumonteix's practice is always packed. "The DSK affair was revelatory," says this sex-addiction specialist. "Male patients tell me that when they saw DSK hauled into court, they had the impression they were being judged instead of him."

Dumonteix says the tribulations of the former International Monetary Fund managing director, who was charged with sexual assault after an encounter with a hotel maid and later released, has been cathartic for many of his patients. "They assumed that [Strauss-Kahn] had the same kind of pathology they did, and that broke through the denial."

Until recently in France, sex addiction was considered more of a pseudo pathology, reserved for American stars like Tiger Woods, David Duchovny and Michael Douglas, who made bizarrely public apologies and went to special centers for treatment. "There's greater awareness of the problem now," says Dumonteix, "but the phenomenon is not on the increase." (See photos of the case of Domique Strauss-Kahn.)

Sexual dependence is classified as a dysfunction in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders published by the American Psychiatric Association. The concept made its first appearance in the 1970s, prior to becoming the subject of a book, Out of the Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction, by Patrick Carnes. American psychiatrist Aviel Goodman also produced breakthrough research on sexual dependence. "And we mustn't forget Freud," says psychiatrist Marc Valleur. "He described masturbation as the original addiction."

Between 3% and 6% of the sexually active population, mainly men, suffers from sex addiction, according to a 2011 study by Professor Florence Thibaut of the psychiatric service of Rouen's CHU hospital and France's national health-and-medical-research institute Inserm. "There is relatively little interest in sex addiction in France because there are still a lot of taboos about it," says Thibaut.

In life, sex addiction can play out in various ways — multiple conquests or partners, regular visits to prostitutes, or compulsively visiting sex websites or watching pornographic movies. (See what makes powerful men behave so badly.)

Just Can't Stop
But how can we distinguish between an active sex life and frenetic need for seduction, and pathological dependence? "This addiction means that the addict will prefer sexual behavior to any other form of social behavior or other activity. As with addictions to alcohol or cigarettes, an addict can't stop," Thibaut explains.

Every time the addict is overcome with anxiety or stress, he or she will try to escape the feeling by engaging in a sexual act. After the initial relief, the addict suffers feelings of negative self-esteem — which start the cycle over again. It's a vicious circle, and behavior usually intensifies into frenetic attempts to find ever more elusive relief.

Sex addicts end up cutting themselves off from the world. "Some of them can spend the day masturbating as they watch movies, or get fired because they couldn't help checking out sex sites while they were at work. Others go broke paying for call girls, their wives leave them ...," says Dumonteix.

What do the different types of addicts have in common? Progressive isolation, depression and a very low sense of self-worth. In the view of French sexologist Dr. Catherine Solano, "emotionless sex produces addiction." (See if sex addiction is a disease or convenient excuse.)

According to Dumonteix, whose patients are 95% male, "the behavior is almost always due to some childhood trauma." This may have been rape or groping, but it is often some kind of intrusion into the child's intimate sphere. The child may also have been subjected to inappropriate behavior or images.

Dumonteix says most of his patients are ages between 25 and 35, discovered porn on the Internet and cannot stay away from it. "Some of them got addicted at age 15 and have at least 10 years of addiction behind them," he says.

"Some of my clients are lawyers, surgeons and businessmen who become addicted because of the huge stress they are under. But they too mainly suffer from some kind of trauma," says Dumonteix.

"The corridors of power are propitious terrain for hypersexuality because they make seduction and conquest much easier," Solano says. According to Thibaut, celebrity is not a determining factor. "Sex addiction among celebrities is played up by the media, but you don't have to be famous to go through exactly the same thing. Like drug addiction, it's the same, famous or not famous."

[seemslikeadream]

I blame sharks....no offense cuda

and they were the first wife beaters

[Project Willow]

Compared2what?, I hope you'll be feeling well enough to join us again soon. It's certainly got to be frustrating when your consistently brilliant, lucid writing is continually misunderstood and misrepresented by some of your readers. Please continue to challenge the median here. Your advocacy for the civil treatment of everyone is much appreciated.

And of course it's absolutely impossible to see how such understandings might arise, or to express compassion for the people who have them too given the subject matter, and it's also necessary to grind your heel into the heart of people whom you say you care about.

I'm sorry I ever said anythin in this thread. I stopped. Please stop hurting ech other. stop it.

[barracuda]

Huh? I'm expressing my support for compared2what? who has been severely and unecessarily disrespected by Canadian_Watcher in her post above. Everyone else on the thread seems to be sincerely interested in a conversation, but it seemed to me that C_W was simply turning the knife for the sheer pleasure of it in the back of a poster who had just expressed that the conversation had become too painful to continue. Just to clarify, my comment wasn't directed at yourself, or blanc, or anyone else involved in this particular exchange.

[Sounder]

Well porn was certainly bad for this person.

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Woman- ... 28-85.html

Project Willow wrote…

I am tempted to wonder, along those same lines, that perhaps at base a preponderance of individual sexual impulses, as they exist in this culture and at this point in our evolutionary history, inherently entail a certain amount of what we might commonly label abuse. Dare I wonder about this out loud?

I think you are right PW. Nearly everything about our society is based on coercion and abuse of one sort or another. Porn is swimming in manipulation. The artificiality of modern porn reminds me of the Hellfire Club. These libertines felt the need for extreme displays because otherwise it seems that they had difficulties getting an erection.

These scum were the leaders of the ‘free’ world, ya sure all porn is not bad for you.

But a lot of it is bad for a lot of people.

[Canadian_watcher]

... it seemed to me that C_W was simply turning the knife for the sheer pleasure of it in the back of a poster who had just expressed that the conversation had become too painful to continue.

wrong, I was speaking up in support of blanc, who pretty much began her last post by saying that she was finding it very emotionally challenging and draining to continue but who was nevertheless mercilessly picked apart and then left without opportunity to defend herself as the poster doing the picking apart decided to throw herself a pity party upon declaring her exit (again)

PW, I hope I'm not doing any hurting. I'm certainly not being hurt. that wouldn't be possible in this place, for this cat, at this time.

[barracuda]

I was speaking up in support of blanc, who pretty much began her last post by saying that she was finding it very emotionally challenging and draining to continue but who was nevertheless mercilessly picked apart and then left without opportunity to defend herself as the poster doing the picking apart decided to throw herself a pity party upon declaring her exit (again)

blanc has every opportunity to "defend herself" and seems perfectly capable of holding up her end of the argument, as far as I can see, without the aid of your insulting comments about c2w which you've decided to continue in this post.

Let's return to the topic, shall we?