As I said above, I find this a difficult question to answer. But I also think you’re taking a rather extreme view. The question is about “seeing internet porn”. Not about children being forced to see it. Not about viewing scat, snuff, or whatever images exclusively. Sure, that stuff is out there; but try answering the question from a more moderate stance: assume every child has open access to an older brother’s playboy / penthouse / hustler / etc. collection. Would you still proclaim “Hell, YES!”?
Perhaps you would; that’s fine. My recollection of my own formative years leads me to say “no, it’s not really a worry”, assuming the parent(s) are actually parenting.
Discarding, for a moment, the fact that many of your assertions are not backed up by solid evidence, I could make many of the same accusations about movies or TV programming in general. “Distortion of reality…Absurd expectations…Distortion of schemas…etc.” pretty much defines movies/TV as we know them, yet only the most extreme radicals want to prohibit exposure to it.
Desensitization? What do you think repeated exposure to violence (cartoon and Ahnold) does to tolerance of extreme violence, if anything?
And a similar case might be made for most books, especially romance novels and most fiction. DaVinci Code, anyone? Is “distortion of reality” a good reason to keep them away from kids? What do you think Dr. Seuss books about wisecracking, weirdo mythical characters do to a child’s perception of “reality”?
Yes, but you may have lost the point I was trying to make, which is multi-fold: (1) that images can effect us negatively; (2) that images can indeed damage us in ways we do not recognize, whether our parents did/do or not; and (3) we have no other choice but to rely on the scientific data from either children viewing violent imagery or young adults viewing hard-core porn (which is where I got those points of damage I raised in my earlier post) to guide us in deciding these issues since there simply is no directly on-point research. And that given these facts, we have no other rational decision than to predict and assume that hard-core porn – even more or less conventional hard-core porn – is damaging to children and adolescents.
With respect, I don’t think I did. How can anyone have misunderstood his repeated harping on “cultural relativism” to allegedly normalize extreme imagery? That “cultural relativism” can make pornographic images of intercourse with live human organs or the dead blasé or normal? Alex_Dubinsky’s (and Lissa’s, to a lesser extent) claims fly in the face of modern knowledge about the extremely narrow limits of human nature.
I certainly didn’t see any such acknowledgement in his reply to my response to Argent Towers extreme and extremely ridiculous post (I mean, speaking of Towers, turning to R. Crumb as an authority in philosophy, psychology, and ethics? WTF?)
And if Alex_Dubinsky had said that, I would not have disagreed with him so profoundly! Or perhaps at all! But the fact is that human nature is far too narrow and concordant for such extreme cultural relativism. The mind doesn’t work that way, which is my point in that regard.
I’m afraid you are mistaken. This thread is about “how much should parents worry about our kids seeing internet porn.” And since once the door is open they can see anything, we must consider that as part of the context of the question, surely.
In that comment, you are apparently replying to a deliberately exaggerated, sarcastic reply I wrote to Argent Towers, not to my actual position as given in Post 58. Please read that and ask again if you have more questions or problems with what I wrote.
First, you are changing the question to fit your preferred answer. But I’ll let that pass for just a moment…
I would have no problems with even a child (let alone an adolescent) “seeing” the images in a Playboy or even a Penthouse from the sixties or seventies. Nudity, even nudity in suggestive poses, is in no way a problem for me. Hustler was always out, primarily because I can’t help thinking that all those hideously lit, “slashed open” beaver shots made a lot of potentially straight boys into homosexuals It certainly had an influence on me! I can’t think of an uglier, more hellaciously disgusting thing in the entire universe than a picture of an open pussy. Autopsy photos are tremendously more soothing and attractive!
But we return again to the fact that anything and everything goes on the Internet. If you open the door just a crack, it’s opened wide (as wide as those beaver shots in Hustler!) And allowing that is simply something that no responsible parent can allow. Hell, I’m a middle-aged man and I sometimes wish my parents would put a filter on my browser! :eek: Don’t you?
You could, but you would be quite mistaken to do so. You do not see those elements on my list from general TV and movies. You see them, especially together, only from porn and primarily from porn to young people (these results were seen in direct experiments with hard-core porn viewing by college-age students; they certainly cannot be better with Internet-age child and adolescent viewers).
No, they don’t. Perhaps you don’t fully understand what the terms mean. Furthermore, these results are on top of what kids already experience, and if it can be damaging to college-age adults, it can be damaging to children and adolescents.
Just what I said it can in post 58, to which you are replying. It can be quite devastating, again, just as I already said.
I see you mean to be ridiculous by pulling out one element from an entire set and focusing on it as if it’s the only thing I wrote. That’s your prerogative, of course, but do you think you’re bringing anything valuable into the debate?
ambushed, real life is a naughty thing. Sooner or later we all find this out. I found it out at a very young age. As soon as I was old enough to understand the world around me, I read and looked at everything I could find, from R. Crumb comics to books about the Holocaust to anatomical dissection photographs. I saw this shit as early as five years old. When I was eight, I read a book belonging to my father (a political science professor) called “The Politics of Cruelty,” which was about government-scantioned rape, murder and torture. Did it scare me? Yeah.
But I got a healthy respect for the fragility of human life from it. I never, NEVER, went through the teenage “I am invincible” 90-mile-an-hour-joyride bullshit.
I also saw a great deal of graphic sex as a child. Growing up, my mother was a freelance writer who wrote for women’s magazines, and therefore had a great deal of sexual literature. She had so many books about sex, and I read so many of them, that I was bored during my elementary school sex ed class instead of secretly excited like all the other kiddies. These books about sex ranged from scholarly and technical discussions of arousal and orgasm to what amounts to masturbation manuals and pornographic material. And I read it all. And I’m not a sexual pervert.
I’m thankful that I wasn’t shielded as a child.
Oh, and about R. Crumb - go read his entire body of work, plus the writings of his brothers Charles and Maxon, and actually read it, as I have, don’t just look at the pictures, and then tell me there’s not real philosophy and intelligence there. Sorry if he grosses you out, but the man is a genius.
First let me say that I appreciate your more reflective tone in this post. It is noted and appreciated.
I’m genuinely extremely sad for you. The adult world impinges far too early as it is to force it into children’s mouths even earlier. Sex with my peers when I was a child wouldn’t have bothered me (but they were very different times, particularly health-wise). However, if I had been exposed to hard-core porn at that age it would have doomed me utterly. It would have destroyed the fun and simple naughtiness of it all! To have the extreme ugliness of the world thrust upon a child (and I don’t mean literally forced, I mean having access to it, since that is enough) is perhaps the saddest, most poignantly unsettling thing I can think of. That kind of “education” can wait.
Fortunately for your psyche, your comments make it clear it affected you badly, else why call it “shit”? I, myself, would have abandoned parents like that as soon as I was psychologically and financially able! And sued them for good measure if I could have.
Again, I’m afraid that my genuine emotional reaction is pity. I don’t by any means want to insult, but that’s my honest reaction. What’s wrong with titillation and naughtiness, especially when you’re an adolescent? It strikes me as extremely healthy! Why kill it so early? Why stamp out such wonders prematurely? Don’t we get jaded early enough as we age?
Then we’re back to my initial, sarcastic reply to your earlier post. If you’re glad you weren’t shielded, how much more depraved and ugly would’ve been just fine to expose you to? Baby-fucking? Sexual evisceration? What?? And once you open the door to the Internet, how do you allow some porn but not the worst porn imaginable?
R. Crumb is an extremely fucked-up man who led an extremely fucked-up life who happened to have produced some interesting and somewhat worthwhile – but decidedly extremely low-rent – art. I could say the exact same thing about William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski (which I’ve also read), but philosophers? Intelligence? Genius? No fucking way. Compare them to, say, Nietzsche or even Douglas Adams, then we’ll talk!
I’m a psychologist, and I gotta agree with the way Alex_Dubinsky formulates here. Let me give an example outside the realm of sex.
Although most kids like the taste of meat, many kids are deeply shocked when they first realize some doe-eyed little calf has got to be killed for their hamburger. That shock is the kids natural attitude, right? Yet most parents will override this attitude. Because they want the kid to eat healthy, or because they don’t want to cook double meals for years, or because they don’t want to be outmoralled by the kid…
ambushed, you picked the wrong example. Nietsche never married, although he wanted to; he was severely ill most of his life; and his philosophy paved the way for Hitlers Untermensch -theories. Crumb, on the other hand, was married with a family, and had some great success in his lifetime, and his biggest fans weren’t among the depraved and lowbrow, but with folks who see the irony in his work. I thought Crumb was depraved too, but that was when I was 18 and at the height of my fierce and unfounded feminism phase.
Whatever, ambushed, I’m who I am and I am fine (colloquial use of the word “shit” does not prove something wrong with my “psyche”) and you’re just going to have to accept that it’s possible for someone to turn out okay after all this.
And I recognize that context, which is why I acknowledge that it’s a difficult question. Surely you’ll concede that the extreme is, by definition, not the norm. Hence, my comment about kids being “forced” to see it. To which you replied:
In that post, you make the jump from pointing out the error of assuming porn categorically “cannot” cause harm; you point out that it “can”. As in, “it’s possible”. You then jump from “it’s possible” to “There’s genuine harm involved in many, if not most, cases.” That’s where I call bullshit. And exactly why I said to try adopting a more moderate stance. To which you replied:
First, I did no such thing as to change the question; rather, I expressed my point quite well, thank you. And your last paragraph illustrates that point; you refuse to recognize the vast difference between the possibility that a kid may view some extreme images and that they’ll go batshit insane and become a drooling, uncontrollable, psychopath.
Beyond this one brief comment, I’ll not even mention your deeply troubling opinion of the female body. Autopsy photos, indeed.
I suggest that you read the posts made before you joined the debate, in particular post #40, in which Alexdefends the need for cultural standards. Certainly I agree with you that there are limits to how far culture can push human predispositions and how far culture itself would go, given that it is made of humans with predispositions. But that is another thread: Nature vs. Nurture.
If yuo say so; I certainly don’t agree. Note that I was giving an example of genius, and no one who has read Nietzsche or modern philosophy could possibly deny he was a genius of the first water. In my view, he is unequalled since the days of the ancient Greeks.
Huh? So what??? What the hell does that have to do with anything? Are you telling us that the tiny little insect R. Crumb is greater than Nietzsche because Crumb got married???
And that’s one of the things that helped to make him so great; his ability to overcome that. It taught him many things and he, in turn, taught them to us, his readers.
THE HELL YOU SAY!! What vicious and ugly slander you’re repeating! Nietzsche hated Germany (he wanted to be known as a Pole), he hated nationalism, he hated anti-Semitism, he would have burned Hitler’s world to the ground if his mind had survived long enough! It was his evil, poisonous sister who contemptibly re-wrote and re-cast Nietzsche’s great and noble ideas and words into grist for Hitler’s mill! To paraphrase, if Nietzsche had lived into those days, he would have never stopped puking.
It’s clear that you’ve either never actually read Nietzsche and/or are going on the ugly smears about him dispensed by the ignorant and those who do not know how to read him. His was perhaps the greatest mind in modern history. Alas, he knew he would be misunderstood; in fact, he did not want to be too readily understood, especially by baboons like his sister and Adolf Hitler.
bfd
bfd
I never said Crumb was depraved, I said he was a tiny, tiny, low-rent figure who made some minimally interesting art.
And he’s no Nietzsche.
IANAP, but his description just doesn’t mesh at all with what I know about evolutionary psychology. Nothing in human nature is ever over-ridden, as Alex claims. We simply dress universal human nature in different clothing. Culture is but a thin gloss civilizations apply on top of human nature; the underlying nature always comes through.
Take, for example, marriage. Culture applies the gloss of all the various different types of ceremonies, but it is human nature to marry or formalize pair-bonds in the first place. And porn directly affects human nature, not just the cultural gloss! The list of damages from porn I listed earlier represents the damaging effects of porn on nervous systems, not the mere products of culture! No, Mr. Dubinsky is mistaken on every possible ground in his discussion of porn.
My parents had nothing whatsoever to do with any of that. Why do you think they do in the majority of cases? It seems to me that kids are so incredibly far removed from seeing cattle butchered that there’s absolutely no real, emotional connection between those events and what they’re eating. It’s far, far too abstract and distant. So I’m afraid your point just doesn’t seem to apply.
Crumb is as much a writer as an artist. He is a philosopher and a social critic who captures the gritty soul of America. Your dismissal of him reveals only your lack of understanding of his work.
Digital Stimulus, you’ve made so many, many errors in comprehension of my words that I’ve concluded it’s pointless trying to correct them all. But why not try to address at least a few of them? I don’t mind typing, which is all it will be I expect because you don’t seem to be interested in an honest debate.
On the Internet, there is no such thing as the “norm” except, perhaps, to say it’s nothing at all like your ludicrous example of Playboy etc. as a model for Internet porn. I’ve seldom seen anything so mild on the net! So the presumed data set you’re working from simply does not reflect reality in the slightest. You’re just making shit up to suit your own, fundamentally off-base arguments. You’re just whistling past the graveyard.
Yes, and don’t you wish you never made it? Aren’t you embarrassed by it? Didn’t you see where I explicitly repudiated that as deliberately exaggerated sarcasm?
Perhaps you’re not as familiar with writing as you could be. The phrases meaning the inverse of cannot, equals “can”. “Can” equals “it’s possible”. “it’s possible” is the inverse of “it’s impossible”. Repeating the same words over and over again is boring to the reader. Repeating the same words over and over again is boring to the reader. Repeating the same words over and over again is boring to the reader. There is no shift in the logic as you falsely imply. That’s what I call bullshit. As for stating the scientific fact that exposure to hard-core porn does cause harm, that’s a scientific fact and it’s a fact brought out later in the post and expanded in subsequent posts. You have no basis for your silly complaint.
My stance is moderate, far more so than yours. Your position is extreme, as well as extremely naive, unrealistic, and under-informed.
I call bullshit again! You most emphatically did change the question, sir, and to deny it is to deny reality. The question is whether or not parents should be worried about kids being exposed to Internet porn, whereas you asked if I (not parents of a child or adolescent) Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler were ok. That, sir, is an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FUCKING QUESTION! Out of courtesy, I answered it anyway, and you attacked me for it. You expressed your “point” (as silly as it was) quite poorly, thank you.
That, sir, is fucking batshit insane and strikes me as something I would expect from a drooling, uncontrollable, psychopath. What I wrote was:
Why does that somewhat ironic-leaning paragraph merit such strutting, prancing, drama-queen huffing and puffing from you? Get a hold of yourself already!
More drama-queen bullshit from you. How pathetic. I made it clear that I have no problem with nudity and Playboy/Penthouse, but when I remark (with a goddamn smiley in the same paragraph for Bob’s sake!) that the hideous, garish lighting of forced-open pussy shots in Hustler are nauseating, all of a sudden I have a “deeply troubling opinion of the female body”! As if your slavering over them shows how deeply you respect women and the female body!! Jesus! :smack:
Your definitions of the words “philosopher”, “social critic”, and “capture” need a lot of brushing up, I’m afraid. They do not mean what you seem to think they mean.
I did read some of his work, and I regret (but not too deeply) the time I wasted on him. I’m sorry I don’t agree with your opinion of him, but that’s hardly my fault.
Then what the hell do you think they mean? Have you read Crumb’s America? Have you read his writings on the human attraction to power, his insightful analysis of the 60s hippie culture and its shortcomings, his astute commentary on the pitfalls of fame and the dangers of egotism? You clearly don’t know anything about Robert Crumb or his body of work. If you “wasted your time” on him, then that’s your fault, not his.
Perhaps. I’m willing to concede that; a message board isn’t the best vehicle for sarcasm / absurdity / etc.
Whoops. Looks like I might’ve hit a nerve. Ruh-roh, Raggy. Let’s see how this goes; I’m not hopeful it’ll go well…
Well, of course I was referring to the “norm” as a social construct. But nevertheless, of course there is a “norm” concerning porn on the internet. I’d suggest picking some random sample of what’s available, classifying it according to broad criteria (e.g., hetero, gay, S&M, etc.), and then saying the category with the largest percentage is the “norm”. And you’ll notice that I said “playboy, penthouse, hustler, etc.”; they go from the most mild to more pornographic. The “etc.” was meant to indicate that there’s a scale (of sorts). If you’d like to criticize the inclusion of playboy, OK. Some people would call it pornography and I was trying to be inclusive.
I can’t comment on your porn-surfing habits. For all I know, you only look at images of men shitting on other men.
Embarrassed? Why? Even if your post was exaggerated sarcasm, I’m still making a point. Which is that the availability of porn doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily be viewed. For instance, as a teen, I’d have had no desire to view extreme forms of porn. It doesn’t matter if it’s out there, nor how much of it is out there, I’d not have pursued it.
Perhaps you should look into an elementary logic course. Particularly the notion of universals, possibility, necessity, and quantification.
Hmm. I’m not even sure what you think my stance is.
Hoo, boy. The unravelling is getting worse. That’s what you consider “attacking you”? I didn’t realize you were quite so tightly wrapped. As an aside, for someone who complains about my perceived repetition of words, you sure seem to regurgitate a broad swath of mine.
Yow. And on that note, I think I’m just about done.
It seems to me that a smiley doesn’t excuse making the comparison between images of female genitalia and autopsy photos. The idea never would’ve occurred to me; I can’t conceive of the mindset necessary to find an image of a pussy nauseating, under any lighting conditions. I mean, holy crap–you said, “I can’t think of an uglier, more hellaciously disgusting thing in the entire universe than a picture of an open pussy.” That implies something about your view of women. And it’s not good.
It certainly had an influence on me! I can’t think of an uglier, more hellaciously disgusting thing in the entire universe than a picture of an open pussy. Autopsy photos are tremendously more soothing and attractive!