Regarding that site of the ones that are peddling a book about the dangers of porn addiction, even I can say that addiction is indeed harmful. The point though is that the approach the ones from that site use is the same as the ones denouncing drug addiction. And many actually also propose similar solutions to those issues. Unfortunately more harmful than the addiction is to the whole of society. The solution is not to ban an item that can be addictive to a number of the population, when addiction actually has other reasons for popping up in the first place.
On the surface, over the past decades there’s been trends such as women waxing or shaving off their pubic hair; women seeking cosmetic surgery for their breasts and labia; the normalization of acts like deep throating, facials, and anal sex; the popularization of creepy tropes like young school girls; and the increasing sexualization of women and girls in non-porn media.
An entire generation of boys and young men have learned about sex from internet porn, which is more degrading and extreme than before. Visit an online community of young men and read what they have to say about women, relationships, and sex. It’s toxic. Have pity for their girlfriends, who have to deprogram their partners to find any sort of actual intimacy, and that’s assuming they don’t fall into the pressure to accept it with a “boys will be boys” attitude or made to feel like a prude.
Try searching for “pornified culture” or “pornsick men.”
Liberal feminist women will rightly critique misogyny in mass media like TV shows, movies, and video games and discuss how this has a negative effect on the wider culture, but porn is off limits, even though it’s far more insidious. Radical feminist have a lot more to say, but they’re in the wilderness.
Most left leaning men turn into libertarians when someone criticizes porn. Conservative men who oppose it usually do so for religious reasons, often stuck in an unhelpful Madonna/whore framework.
There aren’t a lot of prominent anti-porn men from the left now that I think about it. Chris Hedges isn’t a household name, but fairly well known in lefty circles. I vaguely remember Robert Jensen’s book Getting Off making some waves years ago. Chomsky has harshly criticized porn, but it’s not the focus of his work and I don’t think even most of his own fans know he holds that opinion, and I suspect if they found out they’d chalk it up to him being old.
I agree with some of that though not as interested in which particular (few) figures on the left speak out against porn and I think the swipe at conservatives is gratuitous. Conservatives dislike porn* for very easy to explain reasons consistent with the general philosophy, and it doesn’t have to be religiously based. And there need be no ‘madonna/whore hang up’ because one is a conservative.
However the basic problem for either general side is the lack of any plausible answer that’s not authoritarian. A lot of conservatives also ‘turn libertarian’ on practical policy about porn, because what else would one actually do that wasn’t authoritarian (please don’t say ‘more education’ )? Then on top, would that even work? I think practical people of differing political philosophy can agree on how intractable a problem internet porn now is, assuming they agree it’s a problem, which people of otherwise differing political views might actually agree.
*I don’t buy into the idea that hypocrisy tracks much with political philosophy. I’m sure plenty of conservatives who dislike porn philosophically watch it, I’m sure the same is true for people who subscribe to particular (less conventional) left leaning views against porn. That’s human nature.
You may be right abut the online forums. What what about real life?
I know lots of twenty-something students…and every single one of them is normal.
Yeah, I know anecdotes are not data…but I assume your data set is similar to mine.
Don’t you get invited to weddings?
When the internet appeared in the 1990’s I was genuinely worried about how it would affect children.
Unlike the classic porn from the good ol’ days when I was a kid (a Playboy!!! Wow!!!). this was uncharted territory.
But now we have an entire generation raised on the internet, and they seem to be as well adjusted as , say, their cousins who are 10 years older.*
My guess is that the changes in medical issues (of libido, etc) are not due to internet porn, but due to more detailed reporting of problems that existed before but nobody talked about.
*Why do I use 10 years as a comparison?–because Youtube was created in 2005. And at the same time–access to porn in the form of videos on broadband, as opposed to still photos on a dial-up modem. So a 25 year old has developed his sexual identity with the help of porn videos ever since puberty. A poor 35 year old had to suffer with using his imagination looking at a still photo .
Now based on what do you say this doesn’t apply to the generation before that one? “Grab 'em by the pussy” didn’t come from a culture of free and open access to “Bukakke Schoolgirl Sluts 8”. Neither did Bill O’Reilly’s harassment, or Roger Ailes’s, or Bill Cosby’s, and I could keep going. Meanwhile, actual rates of sexual assault are down substantially since the advent of the internet. This latest generation, the one that grew up with massive amounts of internet porn, may be more publicly and openly misogynistic… on anonymous forums. But what’s to say this is any worse than attitudes were decades ago, when it was out of public view?
Yes, the radicalization of people on forums like TheRedPill is a problem. How do we know this is in any way connected to porn? It’s not like NoFap and NoPorn are bastions of feminist thought. That said, it’s hard to argue that the previous, pre-internet-porn generations were more feminist and more in tune with women’s issues than the current generation. In fact, I’d go so far as to call that claim absurd.
Yeah, fair enough. People probably feel that way about a lot of the stuff out there. And probably seek out people who are into it. And hopefully don’t feel like they have to force it on others or repress it?
Looking at porn as some kind of causal factor may be problematic. I have looked at internet porn for just about 20 years, from back when it was a bunch of slowly loading thumbnails, till now, and I can’t say that I’m a worse person for it. (I like to think I’m generally a better person than I was 20 years ago, but who knows.) If porn does promote misogyny (and lots of heterosexual porn, if not most of it, does), that message must be received. I know that I turn off stuff that I find offensive (unless I feel like mocking it, which is another story). I think an avenue for investigation would be how porn exacerbates preexisting views of some people but I don’t know that mere exposure to it (even continuous exposure to it over decades) is going to turn a male such as myself into one of these women-hating blowhards. If the viewer is coming from a less misogynistic place, I think it’s likely that mere exposure to the stupidity of the misogyny on display is not going to change that person in and of itself. Other factors must play a role.
I guess that many (most?) of the people posting here were not young men in the 50’s. I was and I can tell you that were were a lot more misogynistic (and homophobic) back then that young people are now. There was a good deal of hardcore porn about - admittedly not as ubiquitous, but it was certainly there, as well as the airbrushed nudes in top shelf magazines.
A few years ago, I was clearing out the attic and came across some mags that I acquired in the early 60s. The front page of one of them featured a naked young girl and would certainly have led to my arrest these days, had I not shredded it straight away. I would have probably bought this at a sex shop - one of those with blacked out windows - but generally only selling legay (back then) stuff.
As for attitudes to girls - mine back then would horrify any of my current circle.
Whack-a-mole wrote: “Because the rape rate has been steadily going down and it dovetails well with the rise of the internet and, by extension, access to pornography.”
Also, this occurs against a backdrop of the least hostile climate for rape reporting ever so it would be hard to make the argument that just as many rapes are occurring but fewer victims are coming forward.
Right, no way to disentangle report rate and rape rate, and reasonable cause to believe report rate varies enough to invalidate comparisons of raw stats either over time or between different places (eg. Sweden with highest reported rape rate among developed countries, what does it actually mean?).
And in general you can use falling crime of all kinds on the US, nationally on average, as an argument for social progress. If things are going to hell socially in the US, why is crime falling? But even where the reporting issue is less important crime is only a subset of social problems. And changes in crime are often driven by changes in rates among fairly small sectors of the population, whose crimes might not even affect a large segment of the population. Falling crime is good, but isn’t the all purpose refutation of any other evidence of social decay.
Back to porn in particular, I don’t get why there’s so much emphasis on the impact on crime. OK if it doesn’t increase crime, it’s harmless! It’s even harder to gauge the impact on stuff like the nature of romantic relationships or family structures, but that stuff could be more important. Although again IMO practical liberals and conservatives are likely to come up against the same barrier of what you’d actually do about readily available internet porn if you decide it’s seriously socially corrosive. Unless one or other side just wants to have fun painting the other as eager to adopt obviously or even deliberately destructive policies, I don’t know what the actual solution be.
The porn world vs. Real world boxes are great. Probably can’t be taught in schools, but probably should be, especially to kids who’ve been exposed to porn.
I’m totally against censorship of porn of and for consenting adults. People need to realize most porn is just fantasy, usually some man’s fantasy, and has little to say about the real world. Exposed for what it is, I suspect porn loses much of its mystery and attractiveness.
Youtube came about when a certain critical percentage of people had access to fast enough internet to stream videos. The same period saw the change from most porn sites showing still pictures, to most of them showing videos.
The Cindy Gallop talk framed the issue well, especially the problem of women having to re-educate men raised on porn. People have been talking about so called feminist porn or women’s porn for decades and it’s remained niche. Going by their viewing habits, men seem to want to see women humiliated and put in subordinate positions, so I’m skeptical that kumbaya porn will ever gain traction absent a sustained movement to shift public opinion. It’s a good idea, though.
I’ve also seen people try to make a distinction between the corporate porn industry, which is cast as vile exploitation, versus amateur porn that couples make, which is supposedly wholesome, organic free range sex. I’m not sure if that’s a meaningful distinction, but it might be interesting to see what would happen if the old porn industry imploded.
I don’t see how it was a swipe at conservatives. If it was then I also took a swipe at liberals. I doubt anti-porn views will be taken seriously unless there are more prominent porn critical men on the left.
Feel free to explain them.
The only groups I’m aware of that try to censor porn are radfems and conservative religious organizations like Concerned Women for America. Here is their reasoning:
I’ve visited atheist right wing communities and though they may complain about the slackening of morality or the increasing distrust between men and women they tend to view porn as a free speech/free market issue, at least IME. Maybe because atheist communities trend younger.
Why not education and consciousness raising? That would be the ideal solution. It’s worked for lots of other issues. When feminists criticize Hollywood movies or advertisements they don’t generally want movies or commercials to be banned. They want the producers to change how they’re made, or to change the thinking of the public to demand something better.
The state banning porn probably wouldn’t even help, if anything it would probably make the problem worse as it would activate resistance among men who would start groups with obnoxious names like “Fappin’ For Freedom.”
This is an article arguing that BDSM sex is better than vanilla sex. It doesn’t have anything to do with porn.
Like most social science, research into correlation between men’s attitudes towards women and porn viewing habits is murky due to so many entangled factors. Third wavers like to say that studies show porn has few or no ill effects, but that’s not true. For example:
I’m not sure what your opinion is, but I don’t see how one could conclude that Hollywood movies can change how people view women but deny that porn does. Seems like a package deal to me.
I think propaganda and media representation has an effect on people, especially over the long haul. It can be for ill, like Fox News, or for good, like how I suspect one reason why public opinion shifted so quickly about gay people was in part due to an influx of positive gay characters in popular TV shows, such as Will & Grace,Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Queer as Folk.
They’re not misogynistic, per se, but porn has warped their view of relationships and sex. “Pornsick” is a popular way to describe them. I did not have Reddit in mind, though I’m sure it applies there too, but I’ve seen it in forums/blogs about music, video games, and basketball, the sorts of places that tend to draw a younger crowd (16-30 or so).
The ‘madonna/whore’ thing is basically made up by you AFAICT. I’m sure on the internet of every crazy thing you can find some ‘cite’ as for almost anything else, but still in your imagination mainly IMO.
It’s obvious and already included even in your ‘cites’ supposedly refuting my statement it doesn’t have to be religiously oriented by finding some cases where it is. It undermines traditional family structure, it might reasonably be believed, that doesn’t depend on being religious, just conservative (as opposed to a view that doesn’t favor, or even is tilted against, tradition social structure in favor of whatever new thing we can come up with on the fly by ‘education’ and ‘consciousness raising’ of the ‘right’ kind).
And I wasn’t speaking only of people who proposed the govt censoring porn. I was referring, clearly I believe, to people who think porn is socially corrosive. Unless one holds the view that a happy talk case must be made for everything in the world one doesn’t propose to ‘fix’ by govt action, there’s no contradiction there. Which you seem to accept with the ‘consciousness raising’ solution.
Which also doesn’t refute anything I said. Even generally religious people might be conservative, believe porn is corrosive, and believe govt censorship or porn would be ineffective and/or do more harm than good.
)? Then on top, would that even work? I think practical people of differing political philosophy can agree on how intractable a problem internet porn now is, assuming they agree it’s a problem, which people of otherwise differing political views might actually agree.