# What exactly is harmful about pornography? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [November 29, 2001, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031 "2001-11-29T23:12:38Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![SuaSponte](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/67e7ee/32.png) [@SuaSponte](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SuaSponte)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2001, 3:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031/81 "2001-12-03T15:41:12Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by tracer \* > \*\*SuaSponte wrote: > > > [@](#): > > > > > [@](#): > > > > > > \*Originally posted by Enuma Elish \* > > > When you are on a porn site, just for a moment look away from the various body parts and **look into the eyes** of the women in the thumbnails. > > > > Hmmm, they all have precisely the same look in their eyes that every woman who has had sex with me had. > > Every woman you’ve had sex with looked bored? 😉 \*\* Wait a minute … that look is _boredom_?!! I thought it was awe. > [@](#): > > _from Enuma Elish_ SuaSponte You state that I need more evidence before seeing women in porn thumbnails as small, powerless, worthless, and at the mercy of others. > > I was considering that I might agree with you, until (on the evidence of two posts in this thread) you declare that I have “considerably more experience with pornography” than you and that I may be projecting! > > And you get all that from two posts? I think you need to take your own advice and not judge based on minimal evidence It is very simple, sir - you look at internet porn; I don’t (I do my surfing from work). I admit that I assume you look at internet porn. However, I believe that it is a valid assumption - how else were you able to reach your conclusions about the hopelessness, helplessness, etc. of the women who are in the thumbnail photos on porn sites? Quite simply, I don’t have enough pornography experience to be able to make the sweeping generalizations that you have. Either you have that experience, or you were making your observations up. Which one is it? As for “projecting,” I was not using it in the psychological sense, and I apologize for the confusion. I think I meant “reading into.” Sua ---
**Author:** ![Stoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/stoid/32/272_2.png) [@Stoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stoid)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2001, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031/82 "2001-12-03T18:00:37Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Enuma Elish \* > \*\* > **Stoid** Since I did not bring up the subject of actresses ( **RickJay** did) and since I have not made any claims concerning them, what is your point? > > If you have something to add based on ‘inside knowledge’ then by all means, add it. (Put the pin back in your grenade and play nice. ) \*\* Models, then. Just asking if you actually \* know \* anything at all, or if you are just assuming and projecting and expecting everyone else to sit at your knee absorbing your wisdom based on that alone. > [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Rickjay \* \*\* > (sorry, Stoid, but ESP doesn’t exist, unless you have evidence to the contrary) > \*\* I imagine you would have said the same thing about bacteria, plankton, and the critters that live in your eyebrows if you lived prior to the invention of the microscope. It exists or doesn’t exist, independent of anyone’s ability to provide proof you would accept. If you choose to limit what you believe in to things which can be scientifically proven with existing methods, that’s fine and I won’t attempt to argue against your choice. (And I \* would \* argue that you should acknowledge the fact that it is a choice.) But many people, myself among them, have had experiences which make the statement “ESP doesn’t exist” meaningless. My original statement stands, along with this one: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosphy.” And I can’t imagine more of a hijack than this! From porn to ESP… stoid ---
**Author:** ![rjung](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/45deac/32.png) [@rjung](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjung)\ **Post date:** [December 3, 2001, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031/83 "2001-12-03T21:10:37Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Enuma Elish \* > **rjung** An honest answer, but then you diss religion? I didn’t see anything about religion in the OP, and I didn’t mention it, so where did that come from? It’s an example of something else that’s offensive (IMO), yet there are no efforts made to shield children from it. And yes, I do consider religion to be offensive and dangerous. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [December 4, 2001, 8:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031/84 "2001-12-04T08:17:06Z")
Let me start by saying that i’ve never had a particular problem with the idea of being able to watch people have sex on video, the internet or whatever. Although i can’t say that much of what is available is all that exciting. I’m also opposed to attempts to censor this stuff, although i do support efforts to keep it from minors. Some people on this thread have asserted that porn probably does little or no harm to children. I agree that this could well be true, but it seems to me that those who advocate restricting the availability of porn to children do so largely out of a concern to prevent children’s **unauthorized** and/or **unsupervised** access to pornography. This is certainly my position. I support any effort to keep porn out of the hands of children acting by themselves. But if you, as a parent, believe that your children should have access to porn, and you want to buy them porn videos or set up an internet porn account for them, then go ahead. They may end up with a fairly slanted sense of what constitutes “typical” sex, however. Now, before anyone starts railing at me and saying that there is no such thing as “typical” sex, i will say that i agree. In fact, the problem with much porn, IMHO, is that to a considerable extent it portrays a very narrow and limited version of what sex is. What i’m talking about here is the more standard devices that seem to be vastly over-represented in modern pornography. Some examples include (WARNING - sexually explicit content ahead): 1. The women’s bodies, especially the size of their (obviously enhanced) breasts, which are often out of all proportion to their body shape. Curiously, the obsession with enhanced breasts appears to be much more prevalent in American than European porn. 2. The frequency with which the women have shaved genital areas. Some people ascribe this to a male desire for women to be very young, with a shaved pussy substituting for the fact that the actors are required by law to be over 18. I’m not sure i totally subscribe to this hypothesis, but it doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility. (By the way, does anyone else find the word “pussy” vaguely weird? I moved to the US last year, and it seems to be a fairly American term) 1. The size of the men’s penises. Cecil has done a couple of columns on penis size, and i’m sure i don’t need to cite a mountain of statistics to get you all to agree that the dicks on male porn stars exceed the average by a good couple of inches. 2. More important, perhaps, than these physical attributes is the way in which sex is initiated and carried out. I don’t believe that all porn watchers expect their everyday sex lives to be the same as what they see on screen, but any man who does must surely expect just about every woman he meets to immediately unzip his fly and start giving him a head job. 3. I may be revealing a bit too much about myself here, but i have not slept with too many women who, at the instant of penetration, are **immediately** screaming and thrashing around in the throes of wild orgasm. It is, of course, possible that i’m just useless in bed, but in my experience the female orgasm manifests itself differently in each woman, and there are many women who take time to build up to the level of excitement that the average porn actress seems to muster at the mere sight of a hard dick. 4. Again, my experience may not be typical, but for what it’s worth i have not encountered too many women whose greatest wish is to have me withdraw at the moment of orgasm and ejaculate all over their face. Yet this is the way that about 90% (probably more) or porn encounters end. 5. And nor have the majority of my sexual partners begged: “fuck me in the ass”. A desire for anal sex is another aspect of women’s sexuality that seems over-represented in pornography. Let me say clearly and unequivocally that i am not passing judgment on women or men who do enjoy anal sex, facial cumshots etc. I firmly believe that any sex act between consenting adults is absolutely fine. I just wanted to point out that much modern pornography seems to conform to a narrative stereotype that vastly under-represents the true diversity of sexual practices. Some on this thread have pointed to the fact that many women in pornography look less than happy to be there. I’m sure that this is often the case. There have, i believe, been studies conducted showing that quite a lot of porn actresses were abused as children, and that some of them are still abused, drugged etc. by the porn film-makers. But i believe that if this is the case, the way to deal with this should be to target the abusers, rather than simply to decide that all portrayals of sex should be banned. I may be wrong, but it seems to me that pornographers might actually expand their potential adult market if they branched out a bit and portrayed a wider variety of sexual practices that more people could relate to their own sexual experiences. The success of some “new age” and self-identifying feminist purveyors of erotica show that there is a market out there. But i suppose that the multi-billion dollar success of the mainstream porn industry also shows that sticking to a cliched formula can make you plenty of money. ---
**Author:** ![capacitor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/e47774/32.png) [@capacitor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/capacitor)\ **Post date:** [December 5, 2001, 3:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031/85 "2001-12-05T03:35:40Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by zoony \* > \*\* > > > [@](#): > > > > _Originally posted by capacitor_\*\* > > The problems with pornography are: > > > > 1. that it can potentially take time away from developing real intimate relationships, if one is not careful. > > 2. pornography content contains, generally, the wrongest approach to foster an intimate relationship, and depicts sexual activities that should not be done between strangers. In many adult films, there is a disclaimer reflecting that. No man should approach a woman like Max Steiner does in his films. > > 3. and probably most important, although the films are labeled ‘adult’, the characters depicted do not behave like adults do, or as adults should do. > > > > A general change in adult content is way, way overdue.\*\* > > Whoa there, young Meese. > > Your first point is valid, as far as it goes. The important issue is that one be careful. And you can’t be careful where legislative authority has pre-determined that you don’t have the capacity to make that kind of decision in the first place. That is precisely what censorship does. > > Having no knowledge of Max Steiner. > z \*\* I do have knowledge of him. That I am a fan of his, despite his very creepy on-camera methods, is a very good indicator that I am no Meese, whose commission report on pornography contains the most orignal porographic material in the history of all literature. Think of 500 pages of material as explicit as Kenneth Starr’s report concerning Lewinsky and Clinton’s escapades. I cannot post adult links, but using Max’s namesake as part of a search will give you a good introduction to who he is. Be warned, he is **the** bad boy in an industry of bad boys. I didn’t get the information from my previous post from Edwin Meese (who cynically used the spectre of child pornography as a pretense to try to ban all porn and erotica). I got it from the porn actors and actresses themselves. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-exactly-is-harmful-about-pornography/96031.md?page=4)