Is Porn Bad for You?

[Canadian_watcher]

ffs

[Simulist]

ffs

I'm really not understanding this. No, I understand what "ffs" means of course, but I don't understand why it's been necessary to say stuff like that in response to someone whose opinions do differ from yours, but who has nonetheless made noticeable efforts to be polite to others.

[barracuda]

I understand it as trolling, Sim, and I've warned her against continuing.

EDIT: I've suspended Canadian Watcher's account pending review by the mods.

[compared2what?]

Edited to remove the incredibly repellent meanness that didn't initially read to me as any nastier than what occasioned it, but was. On consideration.

Sorry.

But if I can think of a more appropriately and traditionally innocuous and impersonal piece of bitchery to sub in here later, I certainly will.

[compared2what?]

Sorry, didn't mean to sound like I was talking crazy talk there.

Incidentally, if anybody else had a problem with what I said or how I said it, please, please tell me. Because I certainly wasn't trying to hurt anyone, and I'd be horrified if I did. It's just that I feel very strongly about the topic generally, due to the countless people of all shapes, sizes, ages and genders have suffered through a million lifetimes of hell (still ongoing) due to sexual coercion and/or force, in one form or another. So I feel an obligation to them and to myself. So I probably fuck up trying too hard to meet it. You know how that goes.

Anyway. I wouldn't have wanted to injure or offend anyone. So yell at me, if I deserve it. Okay?

^Same goes double for blanc. There are no tricks up my sleeve. I'm sincerely sorry.

[Simulist]

Hmm. I still don't think porn is necessarily "bad for you," but I'm seriously starting to wonder if this thread might be.

I wish I'd actually followed-through on Barracuda's insight a couple of pages back, instead of merely agreeing with it.

[blanc]

compared2what I am in the middle of a confluent of crises here, and it was this, not your posts, which is the cause of exhaustion and despair, though realising how crap I was at making my points and what some posters read into it was a downer, its unlikely to make me cry. I'm not responding any more to this discussion, for the reasons I wrote above, and for time being too short here. In passing, I'm sorry that someone has been suspended for trying to express concern, not I think, in a very shocking way after all.

[compared2what?]

Thanks for your grace and candor.

[wintler2]

Its a shame when some parties in a discussion lose their rag or are otherwise emotionally impacted by what others write, but thats no reason to everyone to end or bail on the discussion. Quite the opposite: i think it emphasises the pressing need for more illumination on the subject. Real relationships are worth working on in the hard times - in fact theres no other way to have one. It is somewhat delusional to talk of relationship with anonymous strangers scattered across the globe, but nonetheless thats what i'm doing.

[Elihu]

EDIT: I've suspended Canadian Watcher's account pending review by the mods.

the body politic looks forward to cw's speedy re-instatement!

[Searcher08]

For boys in Catholic 70s Belfast, girls were often mythical creatures. You wouldnt intereact with any at school, apart from your teachers. You wouldnt tend to meet any socialising - as few people did that as folks often ended up dead... so sitting in my first Uni lecture next to an actually girl - I didnt know whether to propose marriage or ignore her

My first experience of porn was watching Debbie Does Dallas in my late teens. My abiding memory was that Debbie had really dirty toenails.

My experience of porn was that I had a lot of surprises, many unpleasent, lots educational, some funny.
I was surprised at, by and large, the racial and cultural differences in how people had sex. Each countries porn seemed quite distinct. Sometimes there was even humour - I found Sex Trek very endearing.. when I saw how many of the main male porn stars seemed to be regarded with genuine affection by the female actresses, it seemed to be with genuine affection - it seemed to remove any further enquiry from my brain... and Ron Jeremy just rocked

My favourite porn period was the big production / lavish sets / attempts at acting of the early 90s. I loved it.

Gradually though it seemed that porn was getting more and more... violent - not initially in the sex, but more in underlying attitude. This then developed into 'gonzo'. When I first saw this style, I thought it was just more intense sex, but gradulally realised it wasnt 'passion unleashed' in scenes of bed breaking abandon and noise abatement orders - this was choreographed violation-lite the TTF (time to fuck) was measured in seconds

I remember reading how a FOAF in the industry, Candide Royale, who had produced some of the only porn I know that combined both the 'making love' and 'fucking' strands whork which I loved and which was IMHO very erotic, she described it being very difficult to make a living in a gonzo climate.

The next major change I saw was when streaming video sites like porntube arrived - because it was often file sharing based - suddenly there was one site with everything from Japanese octopus hentai to desi kamasutra re-runs. There seemed to be islands of erotica - quaintly called 'female friendly', but these were like an small organic cafe in a corner of a giant McMall.
In a move which was very similar to the shift from consumed content to make your own via blogging - there has been an explosion in the availability of free 'do it yourself' - which I believe has has a major impact on 'the business'. Yet so much of what is home produced is following the previously laid down and decidedly female unfriendly gonzo parameters...

Many years ago, a friend said to me that the most subversive image in the world is that of artistically captured human lovemaking - and porn just doesnt do that.

In terms of the original post, the question posed was "Is porn bad for you?"

To me, the question requires the answer of who is the You?

There was a documentary here about a former porn star who became a Christian and felt she had a mission to work with girls in the industry. This woman discussed the backgrounds of many of the people she worked with. I had never thought about it - but was appalled to find that nearly all the girls involved had come from a background of sexual abuse or incest or hard drug use or alcohol abuse. They had developed a hard shell over a still-broken interior life. They were fucked-up metaphorically as well as literally. There was a production line that ended on a scrapheap of the mid-to late 20s. Many of the women were desperate to keep going (and be considered desirable) and became more plasticised, bigger and bigger implants etc etc. The relations between the older women and younger women were consumed with hate and fear of eclipse.
They were really unhappy for the most part.

The behind the scenes look at the men involved was deeply icky. They were constantly using terms like "she's really fresh" "we're looking for fresh meat" The degree of treating the performers like objects now is huge - male as well as female. What little affection there was between performers seems long gone. Many of the performers have chalmydia and will be infertile. Many of them have herpes. Lots of the men performers use coke and are very aggressive. Everyone in the 'value chain' presents a false front of one big family.. but it isnt.
Fluffers have gone and male performers are on viagra to keep down shooting costs. Many of the women suffer from bowel problems due to rough anal sex.

For the most part... it is broken people being used by the sort of people who most people here would walk a mile to avoid in real life.

In terms of how this has affected society - a friend who is the mother of two tween kids told me of the reality. In her kids school which is very average, virginity is looked on as a disease. Most kids discover sex online and think Rocco Sifreddi choking and spitting on someone and calling her a whore while doing assfucking her is.. the median. She said the pressure on young boys (11-12!!) to match these porn 'role models' is horrendous - but similarly for the girls.

Our society fills our heads with sexual images that to me , lack love or connection or intimacy or care and that creates a loop with the society we then create.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

Sorry for not reading this whole thread and weighing in anyway.

Times have definitely changed, and I think the potential damage factor has certainly risen. Just think about how harmless video games are. The 21st century sees folks playing them in the middle of the American desert, killing whoever happens to be at the receiving end. Now this doesn't make the games themselves inherently bad, but they sure are a great tool for those who would exploit their effectiveness at accomplishing what was at one time ostensibly mere fantasy. But that's still no reason to blame the games.

And just because the evolution of video and on-line pornography is such that every sick f**k can personally abuse someone during producing it - and every other sick f**k who deems it harmless fantasy jerks off to it - doesn't mean pornography in-and-of-itself is bad for "one".

I doubt that it is bad for me, personally; but I do think that its ever-expanding nature is a manifestation of human demise. Porn has become more dangerous, because humans are dangerous.

[Belligerent Savant]

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related to Spiro C. Thiery's comments - and this thread in general - I just happened across this article:

http://jezebel.com/5863488/the-horrifyi ... nuff-sites

The Horrifying World Of Internet Snuff Sites

Some men get erotic thrills from seeing nude young women shot, stabbed, pierced by spears and arrows, or killed in a variety of other ways. And a remarkably large Internet industry has arisen to serve this craving.

Scores of websites feature thousands of professional-grade videos and pictures of attractive women gunned down in showers, stabbed in knife fights, hanged from rafters, run through in sword duels, strangled in bed, shot by snipers while sunbathing, impaled on stakes, machine-gunned in groups, sacrificed on altars, electrocuted by wires to nipples, harpooned by spear guns, executed by firing squads, bayoneted as POWs — you name it. Computer-generated special effects make the action realistic. Cartoons, sketches and especially digital art scenes augment this "snuff" fantasy.

The woman-killing array is disseminated through sites with names like DeadSkirts, FemmeGore, FemmeFatalities, NecroBabes, Cuddly NecroBabes, Dead Sexy Women, Fatal Fantasies, KillHer Productions, Gladiatrix, Crucified Women, Psycho Thrillers, ChokeChamber, Dark Fetish Network, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Bang Bang Babes, and so forth. Others have generic names like Progressive Art Project, Eyewitness Production, PKF Studios, Alpha 7 Productions and Jafa Entertainment. (If you really want to see this crap, you can Google those names; we're not going to link.)

DeadSkirts calls itself "Your Fantasy Female Death Fetish Site." ChokeChamber boasts: "Where her pain is your pleasure." Dark Fetish advertises: "The best in horror erotic movies — over 18,000 hours of content." CineDeath is subtitled "Home of Movie and TV Female Demise." A few sites mix X-rated copulation with the murder, but killing women is the essential point. Most display free samples and previews. Some videos are recopied onto YouTube.

The volume is amazing. PKF boasts more than 800 digital videos filmed since 2006, plus a backlog of earlier works. Catharsis Video offers 698 short movies plus 746 "photo play" layouts. Gabrielle's Fighting Girls has 168 videos and 89 photo plays. Both Wicked Works Productions and Annabelle's Fantasy have 158 films. Stranglenail has 151. Bodybag Necromedia has too many to count. DeadSkirts has 28,000 registered discussion board members, many of whom send each other links to their favorite scenes.

Enormous time, effort and expense are invested in the industry. Great numbers of young female performers "play dead" before cameras. Countless artist-hours are spent creating hundreds of death drawings and computer-generated slaughter scenes. Profits evidently roll in from men who pay to see women killed. There's even a Snuffie Awards competition, in which 300 different producers enter their best gore for judging in various categories. The trophy, naturally, displays a nude woman with an arrow entering her.

I discovered this realm by accident. I'm an old newspaper editor who has written nine books, including a novel about the legendary Amazons of Ancient Greece. While promoting it, I found sites named Amazon-Warriors.com, Deadly Amazons, Sexy Amazons, Sexy Latin Amazon, etc. — all selling brief movies of half-nude Amazons killing each other, with great attention paid to their arrow-riddled, sprawled, convulsing bodies. In Ancient Greek sculptures and ceramics, and later in Renaissance paintings, Amazons always were portrayed fighting Greek soldiers — but this new genre shows Amazons killing Amazons.

The Amazon sites led me to other woman-killing outlets. None of the little movies has much plot. They're just five- or ten-minute scenes of attractive young women, usually undressed, dying violently. Overwhelmingly, the imagery displays young women as sexual objects for male entertainment — not as individuals with personalities. Obviously, there's a commercial market for this material, presumably among men who derive pleasure from watching females die (or pretend to die).

One producer of these films has been the center of Canada's longest-running obscenity trial. Donald Smith, who calls himself "Dr. Don," created death movies of his wife. Then he advertised for models in Winnipeg newspapers. He made many quickie films and posted them for sale on a Web site which said its purpose was "to show beautiful women getting killed."

Canadian police investigated in 2000. Smith and his wife were charged with obscenity. When the case came to trial in 2002, counts against the wife were dropped. The defense contended that the movies didn't fit the legal definition of obscenity because no sex occurred in them.

The defense presented an expert witness, film professor Barry Grant of Brock University, who declared that Dr. Don's videos were little different from horror scenes in modern "slasher" movies shown in theaters and sold in video stores. Dr. Grant testified that grotesque killing has been part of cinema since silent days.
Despite the professor's testimony, a jury convicted Smith. He was sentenced to probation, banned from the Internet, and fined $100,000.

The sentencing judge, Helen Pierce of Ontario Superior Court of Justice, wrote that Dr. Don's videos had "the potential to change attitudes toward women, cause psychological harm to anyone who had previously been a victim of sexual violence, and could do serious psychological harm to adolescents." She said his films imply that an attacker "can silence women with his violence, leave them on sexual display, and walk away without consequence."

Judge Pierce also noted that Dr. Don made plenty of money from his "poison." He had no occupation, yet his family lived in a lavish home and enjoyed a yacht. Testimony indicated that 2,000 people (presumably all men) paid $30 each for passwords to his Web site within a 15-month period. Many sites require recurring monthly fees.

Dr. Don appealed the conviction, and a higher court ordered a new trial. He was convicted again in 2008, appealed again, and the interminable case seems to have no end.

Britain's Parliament also made an attempt to outlaw snuff films. An "extreme pornography" amendment banned depictions of "injury to genitals or breast, or death." But in the law's first test in 2011, prosecution of a Staffordshire man who downloaded woman-killing videos from Drop Dead Gorgeous fizzled when a jury ruled him innocent.

Both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Health Organization define "sexual sadism" as a mental disorder, and the Journal of Sexual Aggression publishes specialized research on the topic. But specialists focus almost entirely on violent criminals who attack women and children — not on voyeurs who relish watching make-believe enactments.

Various scholars, such as Dr. Grant, have written about female victims in horror films. But their analyses address only full-length features presented through public theaters, television movie channels and video stores — long stories with elaborate plots and many characters. Despite concerns like Judge Pierce's, snuff sites remain largely unexamined — and legal. Fetishists can access this disturbing fringe of the internet with impunity, and the images Pierce feared could twist viewers' attitudes toward women are widely available for anyone to find.

Haught is editor of West Virginia's largest newspaper, The Charleston Gazette, and also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine. Email him or visit his website.


One of the comments below the article:

...I'm saying that the law that governs what we ban is entirely inconsistent anyway, and adding an inconsistency for sexual violence wouldn't exactly throw that out of whack. If we were being consistent, digital child porn (with no human victim) would be legal, but it's not. In some countries it's even illegal to have adult actors pretend to be children. If we're willing to be inconsistent to ban child porn, we should be willing to be inconsistent to ban sexualised violence in media against women.

[slomo]

One of the comments below the article:

...I'm saying that the law that governs what we ban is entirely inconsistent anyway, and adding an inconsistency for sexual violence wouldn't exactly throw that out of whack. If we were being consistent, digital child porn (with no human victim) would be legal, but it's not. In some countries it's even illegal to have adult actors pretend to be children. If we're willing to be inconsistent to ban child porn, we should be willing to be inconsistent to ban sexualised violence in media against women.

If there's one thing I've learned over the last decade, it's that violence is always OK in our culture (maybe with humanity in general).

Sex between consenting adults: not OK if they're the wrong adults.

[Luther Blissett]

Here's an interesting piece I just ran across in a link a friend sent to me (FYI: http://pooool.info/ is a very nice site):

http://pooool.info/uncategorized/fuck-6 ... ent-cycle/

Fuck 6 Women Per Week Guaranteed: Pornography Advertising as Mainstream Content Cycle

By Erik Stinson

In my recent essay Idea Porn and the Age of Obscure Commodity, I tried to undermine the fashionable singularity of compelling visual information. I tried to attach the valuable infographic to a condition in which an infographic might be a wonderful currency in the bargain for our psychic health.

Now, I would like to focus on a different user experience journey: pornography. In his essay “The Ecstasy of Communication,” Baudrillard writes:

“[T]oday the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and network. In place of the reflexive transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a nonreflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold-the smooth operational surface of communication.”

He speaks of media functioning, and of the obscurity of the functioning. He understands how modern media can be violent and cool and calm, all at once.

Pornography does not flow from the same origin as hyper-graphic information (hyper being the intensified, hyperlinked infographic). Here, there is a smoother purpose, something sweet and playful, though still screen-based. Pornography is the sexual tradition of moving images. It is theatrical – it pulls with a different rhetoric. The motives behind pornography are clearer, less political, maybe.

And yet, there is something very emergent in the way pornography is being digested en masse, in the form of online porn aggregation. The forum where images of sex appear, free of change and with a vast variet, is a recent construction with perhaps no precursor. These websites – xtube, redtube and youporn among others – collect and distribute clips of full length pornographic films, making revenue from advertising which appears both as content and as Flash banner ads to the side of the video frame.

Ostensibly there is a quality of amateurism in these sites. There is something tantalizing about a free exchange of smut. As Zabet Patterson writes in Going Online: Consuming Pornography In a Digital Era, “The amateur subgenre most significantly engages with the opportunities for ‘interaction’ and ‘self-production’ offered by the Internet.”

A theorist might see the opportunity to merge reality with fantasy – a typical porn user will be aware of the ways porn conventions carefully separate the two sexual poles.

The problem with this potential-of-amateur-web-porn observation: not much porn seems to be amateur. There might be instances of people uploading their own home-made porn. However, the vast majority of clips appear to be somewhat produced. Many are explicitly the work of exterior paysites. So, the separation of fantasy and reality remains intact, even in 2011 (ha poststructuarlists!). What may be deteriorating is the separation between content and corporation. Let me focus on this point.

The line between content, content creation, and advertising is becoming blurry in an unsettling new way. These porn collection sites actually replace every traditional node in a media consumption ecosystem with two fundamental locations: search and upload. Baudrillard might still try to call these functions “screen and network” but we understand he was thinking – in the widest possible sense – about media interaction. Both nodes are selling, neither nodes involve a sale. Sexually speaking, it’s an economic disaster waiting to happen. Lots of screens, lots of buttons with nice gradients, not a lot of money changing hands – but we still get off.

Behind the search function is the individuals desire for a specific content. For example, a certain fetish might impel someone to search for a specific kind of content, like green alien porn. The search is accomplished and clips appear. Most of these clips will be ads for full-length films.

The upload function has been accomplished by the makers of alien porn. We will call them professionals because they hired talent, rented cameras, and attempted to follow the porn laws in their remote municipality. They provide these images, with the hope that we will pay for others.

But what if we never pay? What if the alien porn clip does the trick? What if we never visit the paysite?

Or, more pressingly, isn’t this exactly how YouTube works?

It’s a devastating model for media, and pornography is at the forefront. The line between advertising and content disappears and we become accustomed to the free stream of images – the paywall is never crossed. The entire porn search aggregation system actually conditions us to accept the sell as the product; in the same way, the music video becomes a satisfying replacement for the vinyl album.

It’s happening in porn because our culture doesn’t value sex – or rather – banishes it to the far reaches of the deleted browser history. We don’t feel great about watching porn – so we accept this brave new media model. Will acceptance in this area fuel a total distortion of traditional media venues? Will the cinema ads at beginning of feature films begin to lengthen until the feature itself is an end to the story of consumption offered by the endless series of sponsor motiongraphics?

Probably not.

Tumblr actually ends most of the anxiety arguments concerning the degradation of media quality. And Tumblr is just a visual version of Napster. People like quality enough to steal it. They hate marketing enough to avoid it whenever they can. Tumblr solves the spiritual problem of content-as-advertising, without solving the economic one. Napster did the same thing with music, ensuring a level of quality by making everything accessible, but at the same time destroying the business model for all paid media.

Porn aggregation locates a venue for a hyperdense advertising model – a model only sustainable because the content being sought is so objectionable, so taboo. (Are you smiling as you read that? Can we really say porn is taboo anymore?) [Formerly] taboo subjects offer advertisers a window into a world where they can do whatever they want, fashion entire landscapes of fantasy and consumer conditioning. They get a pass, for now, because we haven’t completely come to terms with porn, as a culture.

Porn isn’t meaningless or marginal. It’s a modern user experience journey, like any other. We click a link and search for a term. Eventually we are satisfied. In the process, we change the way the world functions, we change our relationship to people and images.