Did porn warp me forever?
salon.com
salon.com
Supposedly, Kinsey's wife said something like "I never see my husband since he took such an interest in sex". In other words, he spent so much time studying sex in an intellectual, analytical way that he stopped bothering to make time for actual sex and relating with his wife. People interested in studying human psychology frequently strike me as seriously hung up. Therapy was useful to me for a time in trying to get over my own hang ups. More useful was spending time with men who liked having actual sex with actual women rather than talking about it in some abstract, analytical fashion.
"Forever" is a really long time. Sexual preferences can change. Pavlovian response is learned behavior. If you don't like the stimulus that makes you drool currently, you can retrain yourself. I am glad the author is actually trying to do that instead of merely blaming his issue on porn/the internet as I have seen other articles do.
* (Not intending to slam all psychologists or psych majors. My observation is anecdotal and admits to bias.)
Edit: Reminds me I read somewhere once that there is as much drug addiction and child neglect in upperclass two career families as in the ghetto. It sounds like he grew up in a two career family where no one was paying much attention to anything he did.
What if his parents stopped paying attention because he wanted absolutely nothing to do with them and made it known?
That's how I started treating my parents (one career household: pop worked; mom did everything else) at twelve years old and it wore them down after four years. I still feel quite guilty about it, as they were and are excellent parents.
But I seem to have crazy good parenting instincts. So my high expectations are probably a tad unreasonable in some sense.
I don't think you can attribute this specifically to psychology, it's sort of applicable to every science. You have someone like Neil Degrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan to every emotionless, numbers-only physicist who doesn't sleep with his wife.
It's a personal choice, whether to accept life as a mystery and study it as such or consider it a problem that needs to be solved analytically and without emotion.
That said, yes, when I worked in a psychiatry department I worked around the most miserly, insane people I've ever met. They were more cold and soulless than the homeless people we were treating. I got out of there right quick.
My personal experience can only be limited, but I haven't found the statement to be true. Of the dozens and dozens of mental health professionals I've studied with or worked with, most are totally typical, adjusted people.
Since most humans are messed up in one way or another, you're probably as likely to find as many 'crazy' lawyers or programmers as you are therapists. When you meet a counsellor who's off the confirmation bias kicks in.
The difference between internet porn and porn from the past is just the abundance of new material that there is. Each time you view something new, your brain gives a hit of dopamine. In fact, porn addicts are not really addicted to porn, they're addicted to the chemical sensations that their brain provides. At the basic level, it really is not much different from any other addiction. Old, offline porn is different in that it gets stale pretty quickly. There are only so many times you can look at a magazine or video without it getting boring.
The problem with this is that your dopamine levels get out of whack. You need a higher and higher amount to feel satisfied. This is how people get roped in. This also caused normal, life things that were once enjoyable to become less so, such as hanging out with friends or programming. Life just becomes more dull. In fact, now that I have learned about this, whenever I see a post on HN about how someone has lost their interest in programming or other activities, the first thing I think of is probably this person has a porn addiction. It's not a far stretch seeing as how most of HN is young men. Having drastically reduced the amount I see, I have noticed many benefits in my life including better health and ability to focus better.
Porn, like other addictions, are also a way of masking stress and a way of distracting yourself from negative emotions. Dr. Gabor Mate has done great research linking addictions of any kind to stresses in the body. Porn gives a way to temporarily release the stress but puts the person in a vicious cycle of causing more long-term stress.
Personally, I use the recovery information from http://www.feedtherightwolf.org. It has been the only thing I have across which can really break the cycle.
As someone else pointed out the videos from http://yourbrainonporn.com/your-brain-on-porn-series will really help you understand what is going on in your brain.
It seems odd to me that being addicted to porn would go with only looking "about once per week". I think I understand how this could still be technically an addiction, but compared to other addictions and - I imagine - especially porn addictions, it seems rather bizarre. Certainly if pornography was only being consumed once a week then the rate of let's call it "stimulation inflation" can't have been that high, or can it? Could you elaborate?
This definitely fit with my experience. It was definitely a cycle for me. Alcoholics do not have to have a drink every day to be an alcoholic. In fact, one of the points of the AA program that people need to learn is they are always an alcoholic.
In my experience, I would just feel an uncontrollable urge which would lead me to view porn. Once I started, I would be in a trance-like state which is common from other experience I have read about. What kind of really hit home is hearing a non-addict say something like he would view porn for 15-20 minutes and then it would get boring and he would stop. That is the complete opposite of me, and other addicts. Once we start, it becomes almost impossible to stop until we are completely "drunk." In my experience, I would notice that I would put so much stress on my body, that it would really take me about a week to recover and feel normal, and then the cycle would start again.
"I would notice that I would put so much stress on my body, that it would really take me about a week to recover and feel normal, and then the cycle would start again" sounds, well, pretty wild and probably jolly good fun to be honest, but I can see how that could be problematic as a regular and difficult-to-resist habit rearing its head every week or so.
Edit: I can't respond to your comment below but thanks for your follow up.
I don't know how I feel yet about the idea that someone is always an addict. I do know the fact that AA believes and teaches it is absolutely no reason to consider it to be factual.
Some examples of a Higher Power can include: a sponsor, the group in general, a (big G or little g) god, a door knob. The principle is about believing in something greater than yourself.
edit: AA has its roots in Christianity, however being in AA doesn't mean you have to be a Christian or a theist.
I suppose all this stuff varies from group to group, and no doubt the "official" stance is more neutral and well-considered. Still, after that experience, I'd feel a bit leery about recommending AA to someone who was vulnerable.
As far as my experience goes in going to meetings with friends and watching their progress (or not), they are made to know that completing the steps is essential to their recovery/stability, even if "suggestions". It is a cultural process. Perhaps ones that can be completed at their leisure and ability, but it's still a ritual considered more require d than suggested.
In practice, there is shockingly little authority exercised in AA there is literally no person or group who can kick someone out or impose sanctions on anyone.
I'm not saying it's not a weird group, it is, but it was founded by and populated by people who are in dire straights. It's not for everyone. I think it's an unfortunate development that attendance to AA is often compulsory by the legal system, social service system, and the treatment industry. But this is out of the control of AA, all are welcome who have a desire to stop drinking.
>Some examples of a Higher Power can include: a sponsor, the group in general, a (big G or little g) god, a door knob. The principle is about believing in something greater than yourself.
No, it is not. Four of the steps use the word use the word "God", 1 uses only the word "Him" (and that obviously refers to the same thing), and 1 uses the word "Power" (notice the upper case).
The claim that these are intended to be anything "greater" than yourself such as a sponsor or the group clearly is not what is intended (and, from what I have heard, not what is taught). I don't know what the hell your door knob comment is about - I assume it was for comic effect.
http://www.aa.org/en_pdfs/smf-121_en.pdf Read the steps. A sponsor is not going to remove our shortcoming or character defects. We don't pray to the group so that we might know their will. You're either ignorant of the actual teachings or being extremely disingenuous.
One's own conception of God could be any of those things I listed. Personally, I have spent nearly 4 years in an AA group. So rest assured, I have read the steps.
As to what is taught - God referring to Allah, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Jesus, Mohammed, etc. - depends on the group/person/persons you've received your information from. There is no governing body for AA, and every group is completely self sustaining. Individual traditions, teachings, and cultures grow naturally in each group providing slight variance from group to group. However the core will always come back to God being whatever you choose God to be.
The definition and teachings leave it open to your interepretation of God... to some extent. It still must comply with many Western concept of a god - loving, benevolent, intervening. You cannot follow those steps as they are laid out and pretend that substituting a sponsor, group, or door knob means the same thing. It just doesn't.
Why would one continue to watch it afterwards? One can't be addicted to porn under my definition, but just to doing "that". This can of course be addictive and negatively affect one's life. Also the stimulus surely can get weaker and weaker thus leading to "harder" porn each time which looks like a bad cycle
http://summaries.cochrane.org/CD005032/alcoholics-anonymous-....
I would encourage you to see a psychologist and possibly get a referral for a psychiatrist to get a real diagnosis. The deceptive thing about these mangled pop-sci porn addiction tropes is that they try to get people with these problems to believe that their issues are a normal reaction to the evils of pornography (and if you did deeper Maria and Gary in general believe this about orgasms, even during sex), when it reality they could be a symptom of a host of psychological issues and disorders.
If it truly is an addiction, you should be not self-treating it on the internet.
I don't understand: this seems incongruous. Watching pornography once a week doesn't come across as an uncontrolled, impulse behaviour. How does one suffer from an addiction and satisfy it but once a week?
Do forgive me if I come across as doubting your word. That is not my intention in the least.
This is America: if you like something, it's probably bad for you.
(Less sarcastically: I remember reading that addicts don't enjoy their addiction anymore; they do it because they have to keep doing it. Kind of like me and "someone is wrong on the Internet".)
> I remember reading that addicts don't enjoy their addiction anymore; they do it because they have to keep doing it.
Yes, I can relate to this. At the beginning it may not have been an addiction but it did morph into one over several years.
> I am addicted to porn. ... I would look about once per week...
Might as well have said:
> I am addicted to heroin. ... I would shoot up about once per week...
I guess the point is simply that you did something that harmed your life, but you couldn't stop, eh?
It's strange that the word "addict" conjured up so many images of drugs and alcohol that I unconsciously threw the proper definition of the term right out the window.
hmmmm no. It is an addiction if you cannot do WITHOUT it and you cannot stop doing/taking it; and you feel terrible one way or the other without it and the only release is having/taking it. And when you start typical toxic behaviors like making excuses "one last time" and the likes.
Just because you enjoy something a lot doesn't make it an addiction. From all mattm said, he probably isn't addicted but put the label "addiction" on some other thing he is suffering from.
But if I didn't get to the pub on Sunday evening it ate me up inside - I NEEDED those 3 cigarettes and I couldn't cope without them.
It wasn't the quantity, it was how I dealt with being denied that was the issue.
You have oversimplified the function of dopamine to the point that you have said something misleading. It isn't a drug. You also get a "hit" of dopamine when there is a loud, surprising noise, and any number of similar situations. Including good, natural situations. Including normal sex. This doesn't mean that "your dopamine levels get out of whack".
When you say that 'life just becomes more dull' and 'distracting yourself from negative emotions' it sounds like you are describing dysthymia or depression more than anything specific to porn. The link between monoamines (like dopamine) and depression has been known at least since MAOIs were first prescribed for depression. Of course, if you feel terrible about yourself for looking at porn once a week then that won't help any ongoing problem you have with negative self-image and depression.
Edit: in other words, I suspect (though I can't at all prove) that you have the arrow of causality reversed, and it wasn't porn causing your depression
Yes, I am also aware of how I got involved with this. It goes back many years and this realization has helped me to identify reasons why I have sought this out as a solution.
As I mentioned, Dr. Gabor Mate's research and books have been helpful to me. He has worked with drug addicts in Vancouver and has, in many cases, linked addiction to ongoing stress in a person's life especially when they are young. In a way of dealing with the stress, the person turns to an addictive substance which provides a temporary relief which the person can get hooked on quite easily.
The orgasms gotten through pornography aren't any stronger than those found 'in nature'---this isn't heroine.
You have missed the entire point.
Orgasm lasts a few seconds.
Porn addiction is not about orgasms its about porn. The viewing, searching, clicking from tab to tab on tube sites. Starting in early adolescence, training ones brain to need a certain level of stimulation. For some - hours a day.
Dopamine responds to novelty and anticipation, and is elevated to near orgasmic levels during sexual excitement.
Read the start here article on that site, and you will see that all addictions involve the same fundamental brain changes which are caused by a specific set of genes, all activated by the accumulation one molecule deltafosb. This is indisputable.
You will also see about 300 links to citations on that one page.
This is more obsessive-compulsive behavior than porn-specific.
OCD and addiction each have unique set of brain changes.
Again, its already been established that both behavioral addiction ad drug addictions involves the same basic mechanisms, same brain changes: downregulation of dopamine & D2 receptors, sensitization, hypofronatlity, altered cerebral white matter, altered CRF and stress response, etc. These do not occur in OCD.
Accumulation of One molecule activates the addition process - deltafosb. This does not occur in OCD
Read the START here article on yourbrainonporn and follow all the links. You will find links to articles covering the new DSM-5 which created a behavioral addictions category and to The American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). America’s top addiction experts at ASAM released their sweeping new definition of addiction which states that sexual behavior addictions exist and involve the same basic mechanisms as substance addiction.
Commendations should be made for his acknowledgement of the addiction, and making it public so others might realize too. I don't think identity has anything to do with this.
Actually, it might. From the original comment: "I won't post anonymously in case anyone wants to contact me" which means that if someone is struggling with a similar addiction, or wants to learn more about it, they can contact him and benefit from the additional information or context.
It might impact him negatively, but it might help others. That's what I mean by saying he's brave.
Oh dear god. That is not how dopamine works. Dopamine is a chemical that your brain secretes when you are trying to get something, not once you get it - so when you're hungry, for example, you'll have higher dopamine levels. Then when you eat, they go back down. The actual sensation of higher dopamine levels is stress and anxiousness - it actually doesn't feel good at all.
Here's an NYT article talking about the common misconception: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/27/science/27angier.html?_r=0
> they're addicted to the chemical sensations that their brain provides.
EVERY experience is a "chemical sensation" in the brain. Good. Bad. Whatever.
> In fact, now that I have learned about this, whenever I see a post on HN about how someone has lost their interest in programming or other activities, the first thing I think of is probably this person has a porn addiction.
What the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while. There could be a million things that cause a loss of interest in programming. Maybe they got girlfriends or started families? Maybe they suck at it, and just realized that?
It sounds like you used to be obsessed with porn, and now you're obsessed with "porn addiction"
"I'm a content creator. My content is criticizing other people's content."
In my opinion, he was right to criticize. If he hadn't, I'd be going around telling people about how my brain is becoming dopamine tolerant due to the bursts of it I get every time I watch porn. I'm glad I know that's not true.
What VigUi7vv8G2 is saying about dopamine might be correct but his tone is anti-social.
He could have left "Oh dear god." and "What the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've read in a while." out of it and it would have been a perfect helpful response.
Tone.
Oh, you would? How dare everyone on the internet not cater to your expectations.
Someone from the community shared a story of personal struggle. They didn't hide behind a pseudonym, and it was probably a hard decision for them. They also, did in hopes it would help someone else.
They might not have used precise definitions or scientifically correct terms but they were honest and civil and even after you insulted them.
No matter how hard their struggle is, it's akin to linking vaccines to autism - no amount of personal pain overrides factual inaccuracy.
It's an extremely important part of public discourse that incorrectness be called out, in a polite way, but clearly and forcefully.
This is akin to 'balancing' a debate about evolution by having an evolutionary biologist there and a doctor of theology there. Just because there is debate does not mean that there is not a clearly correct answer.
One of the things I love about HN is that incorrect opinions are quickly corrected by people in the know, often with providing proper citations. However, what is quite often missing, is civility. Moreover, in this case one should be exceptionally polite, given the very personal nature of the OP's post and the courage to attach his name to his writing.
I recommend everyone (myself included) to re-read "How to Win Friends and Influence People", even if they don't think they have a problem with being polite. I keep re-reading this book and everytime I do I see something more to correct (it has already heavily influenced the way I write e-mails to people).
> Just because there is debate does not mean that there is not a clearly correct answer.
The correct answer in this case doesn't really matter for the main point if we are talking about the dopamine. Which, from what I see is the clearly factually incorrect statement. Latching unnecessarily unto inconsequential details and derailing the conversion is also called trolling and bullying and will get the message downvoted or flagged.
> They were incorrect on a side detail (...)
[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grahams_Hierarchy_of_Disag...
And nobody claimed that it does. They simply pointed out that it's kinda weak to be an asshole in response; the fact the the asshole had a point doesn't make them not an asshole "Yeah but he's right". That's great, but not the point, and was also mentioned by the very people criticizing the asshole for being one. All further responses to that just went in circles, attacking strawmen like you just did.
Also, politeness and civility isn't the same as false amiability. You can (and should) give firm rebuttals in a civil way. There's nothing false about it.
I don't want to hang out at a place where people are yelling, even if they aren't yelling at me.
Every minute spent trying to get anything back is a minute you will never have back.
Hmm, maybe that explains why whenever I get this rush of anticipation whenever I think about playing Starcraft, but when I actually play it I just end up stressed and anxious.
The rush of fiero when you kick ass, or the amazement when you lose, washes over this at the end and gives you an emotional exclamation point to remember for the next time you think about playing: you're anticipating the end of the game.
Your content was helpful and your points are important; you could have done the same without being mean.
From the guidelines for this forum:
"That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Even if someone is incorrect, I think they deserve a more respectful and constructive response than that. We can do better than that here.
> The difference between internet porn and porn from the past is just the abundance of new material that there is. (...) At the basic level, it really is not much different from any other addiction. Old, offline porn is different in that it gets stale pretty quickly. There are only so many times you can look at a magazine or video without it getting boring.
I think this is the key point (and dopamine-related discussions only distract from it). I also came to the realization that the big part of the problem is the same thing that keeps many addicted to Hacker News or Reddit - it's that whenever you look, there's always fresh new content, so it never gets boring.
For a better perspective on issues relating to having an addictive personality, I recommend The Compass of Pleasure by neuroscientist David J. Linden for understanding reward-theory that dominates the psychology research now.
I don't doubt that some people have legitimate problems worsened by pornography use, but I would say that they would benefit highly from seeing a therapist rather than following some of these more shaky theories. I've known young men who are thinking they have issues with dopamine, when in reality many of them have issues with shame, anxiety, and communication. I do believe porn addicts exist, but I think it is worth getting diagnosed by a professional who can rule out other causes.
This is probably worth your read. Even if you disagree, your "addiction" is being shoehorned into the disease model and the unhealthy patterns don't necessarily meet the same standard.
I looked at porn on the Internet as a teenager. I'm gay and back then I was deep in the closet. And I grew up when Section 28 was still in force. It was a law passed in the 80s that said schools "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality... [or] promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship".
In practice, that meant the sex education we got in schools didn't cover those of us with a preference for what the law called unacceptable "pretended" relationships.
Back then, it it was still dialup and early broadband. No high-quality video, so it was almost all pictures. But porn gave to a lot of gay kids the reassurance and sexual freedom that society more generally was unwilling to even see or mention. Porn was a paracetamol for loneliness: it didn't solve it, but it eased the pain. You opened the newspaper and every time they mentioned something related to being gay, it was framed as some giant moral debate, a culture war, a political football. But on the Internet, there wasn't any of that bullshit, just sex and porn and other people (albeit behind screen names). If schools don't want to teach the gay kids about their sexuality, then the Internet and porn will do it for them.
My friends didn't need the Internet: probably every school in the country has an underground trade in porn, whether it's Internet-based, magazines, hacking satellite/cable TV, whatever. Heterosexual teenage boys will get their hands on images of naked ladies and distribute/trade them. That's just how it is.
Access to porn throughout my teenage years made life bearable. And, at risk of oversharing, the thing I find most attractive in porn isn't the whips and chains, as the author says, but simple expressions of real, genuine emotional intimacy.
http://www.skidmore.edu/~flip/Site/Lab/Entries/2007/1/31_For...
I then tried to quit again. I went 5 days, and then 4 days, and then gave up on the idea, resigning myself to immense sexual activity. Every month or so, I'll go on a complete rampage with as many as 10 orgasms a day for 2-3 days, rarely coming out of my room. Sometimes it even interferes with food.
My sexual tastes have grown increasingly complex, sometimes illegal, sometimes not outwardly sexual at all (example, the thought of loneliness in a girl). It has changed how I look at nearly everything, but I'm not ready to conclude that it has been for the worse.
I had sex for the first time this week. I didn't climax. My parter had no issues but I was completely uninterested, which is interesting because I had been looking forward (greatly) to the encounter for more than a week. But when it finally happened... complete disinterest. I did my best to think of porn and at least play along, but part of me felt that was more rude than just failing to climax so I sat back and let my partner enjoy her share. ED was no issue.
It's worth adding that I had never met the girl before, seen pics and talked via phone but never met in person. I had little (if any) emotional attraction to the girl, and for this reason specifically I'm not very worried. It just caught my attention because I would never have guessed that a 19yo boy would go through 40 minutes of sex with an attractive girl and not climax.
Since then I've been more motivated to quit, but I'm still not ready to conclude that porn has been a negative or bad experience. It has consistently given me a lot to think about, especially watching my interests and needs shift over the past few years. I've noticed a better control over my need for porn but it's only been a few days.
Porning all day is over doing it, but still is far better than syphilis and herpes and AIDS and surprise pregnancy jealousy and heartbreak and all the jazz that comes with immature sex outside of a committed relationship.
Instead of stopping cold, rate limit yourself. You already have a solid baseline of your current frequency. Pick something a bit less and don't go over that for a week. Figure out some strategies for coping; I'd suggest going for long walks to public places. Note that you've achieved that milestone and step it down another notch the next week.
You don't have to go all the way to zero unless you want to, either. Demonstrating to yourself that you've got a measure of control is important.
I don't understand why sex has become this generation's absolute number 1 priority, the one thing everyone defines themselves almost religiously through and reads way too much into. Everyone has seen "group action" and gets off on borderline cartoon rape and, to quote SouthPark, Japanese girls vomiting on each other... at the same time people are so alienated from each other they can barely look at others in a pub or start talking to people, so then they flock to "pickup artists" and countless self-help books teaching them yet more ways of "getting into someone else's pants" and then all they are left with is the urgent, defining feeling of having to "perform" and live up to an allegedly commonly-agreed-upon standard - instead of valuing actual human interaction and truly accepting one self and others and feeling welcome and whole in another person's presence.
It's sort of like martial arts. Real martial arts isn't guys jumping 30 ft at each other, or fighting 10 opponents at once, doing somersaults, etc. If kids go to martial arts training expecting this, they will be sorely disappointed. Most martial arts is practicing moves over and over again. It's tedious and boring for those that are expecting Jackie Chan or Jet Li. Over the course of many years, you can get to a certain level of expertise. But the martial arts movies are essentially a caricature.
Hopefully the kids growing up today realize this.
Martial arts - maybe. But if your never had sex and your only education on the topic is porn, then how could you know how it really looks like? And then you have your first, and second, and third time, and you feel a bit disappointed that it didn't feel or look like you expected, and even if you realize that porn is a caricature, you're still left wondering, how much of the difference between porn and real life is because of lack of realism in videos, and how much is because of your deficiencies.
It's a real problem and it's sad that the only sexual education kids usually get comes from porn.
EDIT
There was a TED talk about this topic once, [0]. While her site doesn't have much content and I don't recall the book being very insightful (though definitely an interesting read), she raises some good points so I recommend the video (it's 4 minutes).
Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaCt6qUL_Pk&feature=share
I'm a father of 3 girls. I'm teaching them all how to defend themselves with and without a gun.
Sexual violence towards women existed well before any porn ever existed. For example, the vikings raped and pillaged. I'm pretty sure they didn't have porn available to motivate them. There are many more examples. Rape has been a constant in history and was not uncommon well before porn became readily available.
In fact, a search for "rape vs porn" suggests that it reduces rape:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/everyday_economics/2006/1...
Any study that measures the real impact of porn is going to involve measuring real incidents of rape witnessed or committed by a statistically significant population or porn viewers. Barring actual incident levels, this is crappy research. Asking questions like "Have you ever witnessed a rape in progress? And if so, did you do anything to report it or stop it?" and comparing those numbers to porn viewing habits would be far more valuable. At least in that case it ceases to be based on self-reports of behavior in hypothetical situations and is instead based on correlation of historical fact with porn habits.
Lastly, and I know this is an ad hominem attack, but judging by John Foubert's other research interests, I'd consider his rape research to be tainted and likely to be skewed in favor of demonstrating correlation where there isn't one or demonstrating correlation which is of no consequence but is sensational. Judging by several of his other published papers, Christianity and Spirituality primary areas of research for him. This puts him among a group of people who are impartial and very likely have an agenda with respect to the issue of pornography. ref: http://okstate.academia.edu/JohnFoubert
Do you have any research that compares actual incidents of rape and porn?
This article is timely because the author is on the leading edge of a generation of men whose sexual education during their adolescent years was characterized by unprecedented access to pornography. The world has never seen the result of this being the case for millions of men. It's a father's job to prepare his children to engage in the world they will live in. You can be sure I'm keeping my eye on how having a Big Porn industry will play out for our generation, to give my kids the best chance they have to thrive in theirs.
I speak out at times on forums when women are calling for the death penalty for rape and things like that. I don't think teaching girls to hate, fear, and assault men is a good way to protect them. I think it damages their chances of creating a healthy relationship.Teach them how to recognize disrespect and sidestep it. Teach them men are human too. Teach them about respectful consent. Teach them to honor their right to choose.
I am fine with being willing and able to break bones if necessary. But I am not so fine with the starting assumption of hostility, distrust, and so on or actively promoting that as a firstline defense. A much better firstline defense is raising them in an environment of mutual consent. I wrote some about that here:
http://www.kidslikemine.com/2012/06/13/an-invisible-shield-h...
First, your perspective raises the question for me, "Am I too focused on protecting my (future) teenage daughters, at the expense of not diligently analyzing their current environment?" Your approach here (of emphasizing mutual consent of affection to your young children) seems novel and effective. Was discovering that really the simple and logical progression you laid out in your post, or was there more to it than that?
Second, it seems to me that GP was more concerned with how his daughters might protect themselves from strangers, as adults. Mutual consent might be a good red flag for a slowly escalating sexual assault, but for a more aggressive assault, doesn't physical deterrence seem more appropriate?
In those circumstances, the difference between first-line defense and last-line defense seems incredibly small to me. But then, I'm not a woman and I've never been abused, so I'm probably ill-equipped to speculate there.
As for adult women: Violent assault out of nowhere with no warning is incredibly rare. The vast majority of rapes (and child molestation) start with disrespecting social boundaries and escalate. It is almost always someone you know who has opportunity to worm their way inside your defenses and has spent some time doing so. Women are generally raped by "friends", relatives, coworkers, dates and other members of their social circle. Being randomly assaulted by a stranger is the exception. As an adult, I have never faced imminent violent assault of that sort, though I have routinely faced social situations wherein some man was pretty clearly up to no good. I have a track record of not allowing them to escalate. If you don't allow the escalation, it gets pretty darn hard to take advantage of someone.
Please remember that the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent. Most rapes do not involve significant violence. A lot of rapes boil down to tragic misunderstanding. I am pretty darn confident that most men who would be okay with manipulating and maneuvering me and cavalier about whether or not I really wanted sex would absolutely not resort to violent assault if I simply refuse to engage them in their sick little game. I am confident of it in part because I have a long history of doing exactly that. I have been met with anger, frustration, shame, and other strong negative emotions. But I have not been violently assaulted and brutally raped for refusing to go along with their plans to have me, like it or not.
As for physical defense, it is possible I am somewhat biased about not needing any particular preparation due in part to my "cultural" background, for lack of a better word. I had a knife collection as a child. My father was a career soldier who grew up on a farm. There were guns on the wall and I knew how to use them. My ex was a career soldier. He took martial arts, had a knife collection, and owned a couple of swords (a real katana and a wooden practice katana). I am 5'8" tall and athletically inclined. My oldest son tells me he has watched me face down a threatening group of three or four men and my subconscious response was to position myself to be able to grab the nearest impromptu weapon should it escalate. Having been slapped around by a drug addicted relative, I have some firsthand familiarity with violence. I am aware I will fight back when faced with such.
Still, I was not taught to shoot on the idea that I might need to kill a rapist. I find that a somewhat horrifying message to give a young woman. Yes, other people can be dangerous. But that is true of both men and women and it is not particular to sexual situations. Suggesting that it is sounds pretty emotionally poisonous to me. (Which may not be at all what the OP is doing. I am trying to answer your question, not slander him.) Having good boundaries is a generally more useful and better solution than being prepared for the worst. Preparing for the worst can be self fulfilling prophecy.
My experience is that victimizers are not just bad people. They are also victims of a social paradigm which gives them no other viable choice. Having been trained to be a professional victim and then retrained myself, I am clear that part of the problem is that we teach women to be prey. If you run from a bear or wolf, it will chase you. Your flight incites its predatory chase instinct. Backing away slowly is a much better plan. You are much less likely to get mauled. That same general principal applies when dealing with another potentially predatory animal: Humankind.
I do not believe that overemphasizing a need to be prepared to physically assault another person is a means to teach women to not behave as prey in relation to men. I think it mostly reinforces the mental model that women are, in fact, prey. It strikes me as counterproductive to frame it that way. Again: I learned to shoot as a child. I was a damn good shot at one time. I was aware that my father viewed the guns on the wall as a potential means of defense if someone invaded our home. But they were also tools by which food was put on the table. He hunted. I grew up eating squirrel and deer. So my exposure to guns was not a strong message that the point was to shoot other people. For one thing, I was taught to shoot in part as a gun safety issue. It was part of teaching me guns are not toys and you do not play with them.
So I don't have any problem whatsoever with teaching children to shoot or enrolling them in martial arts. But I am very leery of doing so with some implicit or explicit message that it is something a girl needs to know "to deal with rapists". The main thing a girl needs to know is how to insist a man treat her with respect. That will protect her far better and in far more situations than being a good shot. Violence is not the best antidote to violence. Respect is overall a better antidote. It is more likely to actually prevent violence rather than merely invert who got hurt.
Since you mentioned it, I will suggest you are putting your children at grave risk to view protecting their sexuality as an issue for their teen years. I was molested as a toddler and again from age 11 to 13.5. I did not get my period until I was nearly 17. My lack of sexual maturity did not prevent me from being raped at age 12. If you are worried about predators, your daughters' sexual maturation is not that relevant to the problem. Teach them now that they have a right to say "no" to unwanted affection -- to anyone, you included, with zero need to justify it. Be prepared to back their decision if someone else will not take "no" for an answer from them. Tell them that is the policy -- that it is their choice and they can call on you to back them if necessary.
Thank you very much for asking.
And neither was that the message I intended to give them. It's an educational issue. I live on a farm and we kill a large portion of what we eat ourselves. Given a collapse of the supply-chain ecosystem that keeps grocery stores stocked with food, my family won't be scratching their heads wondering where the food went. I don't expect the global collapse of a food supply chain. I would guess it's statistically less likely to affect any one individual than rape is. But the tools for dealing with a worst-case scenario are best learned in advance. And so I intend to educate my children about self-defense in much the same way.
"I do not believe that overemphasizing a need to be prepared to physically assault another person is a means to teach women to not behave as prey in relation to men."
Isn't it similar to how you emphasized a need for mutual consent to your children? Moreover, isn't physical defense merely one more tool to pull out when others have crossed a boundary? I understand your argument that it isn't likely to be used, but it seems like you're drawing a distinction between the value of having boundaries and not letting people cross them, and the value of being able to reestablish those boundaries once crossed. Why do so strongly prefer the former to the latter?
This seems especially odd considering your own position of being physically capable of defense. Doesn't it seem like a good idea to have other women be as capable of defending themselves as you are?
"..., I will suggest you are putting your children at grave risk to view protecting their sexuality as an issue for their teen years."
That's the question I mentioned in my last post that your experience has raised for me. I intend to very carefully reconsider how I'm protecting my children in their current environment. Thanks for pointing me in that direction.
In brief: I have no problem with teaching kids how to defend themselves. But I think kids who know how to defend themselves but were never taught healthy boundaries are at greater risk than kids with zero training in "defense" but much clearer boundaries than average. My sons were never taught to shoot and never took martial arts. That did not prevent my oldest son from hitting or shoving classmates in elementary school who were refusing to respect his boundaries.
I also want to educate them as to how to avoid dangerous environments, to be street-wise, to avoid frat parties, how to spot an abuser, how to know when a guy is manipulating them, et al. Education is my primary tool, self-defense and knowledge of how to use weapons is a secondary, but necessary, tool.
This is only a correlation. No causation can be should. You could argue that the drop in rape incidents is attributable to better crime fighting technology that has put more serial rape offenders behind bars. It's anybody's guess as to the cause of lower incidents of forcible rape, but what you can't do is attribute greater incidents of forcible rape with the rise in porn because the actual historical figures simply don't support that conclusion, in fact they contradict it despite any self reports of hypothetical behavior might suggest.
I don't know the figures, but I imagine that most incidents of rape involve someone the victim knows and involves ambiguous circumstances such as both the victim and the accused being under the influence of alcohol or some other voluntarily consumed mind altering substance. For rape under those conditions, both the victim and accused are equally at fault, just like a drunk driver is responsible for a car accident. Driving your body into another under the influence is not really not that dissimilar from driving a car into another under the influence. Your approach of educating your daughters into making the right decisions and avoiding risky situations is the best weapon you have to combat the risk of rape.
[1] http://www.lowtechcombat.com/2010/12/50-year-trends-in-viole...
A good friend's job is specifically to monitor internet purchases of all manner of things that break bank and payment processor Terms of Service. While there is quite a lot of distressing porn that includes violence towards women (simulated or otherwise), "most" is an exaggeration. Interestingly enough, most of the people who manually verify compliance seem to be women.
The author's fetish is with the anxiety of getting caught. He's making anxiety porn by watching something so extreme that it's guaranteed to offend anyone who catches him. The author has connected the anxiety of being caught with sexual desires in his head. It's actually a very common fetish.
" Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. I've seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. [...]
As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed."
So yes, porn has always existed. So has smoking. But, industrial cigarettes and broadband porn streaming are "more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors." and hence they are more dangerous.
PS: Just to clarify, Pg did not mention porn addiction in his essay. He does mention Internet addiction, though.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorde...
and "super-stimulus":
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h3/superstimuli_and_the_collapse_of_...
Growing up in Las Vegas I had a pretty unconventional view of sex, and was completely caught off guard by the emotions that came with my first actual sexual experience.
hehe. Blew it.
Porn is such a non-issue in my life. It's soulless and empty as it should be, but it's also human sexual nature at its rawest. I'm glad we live in an era where we can freely and easily experience it.
Anecdotally, I find their arguments compelling.
"A brain originally designed to cope with nothing more tempting than an occasional glimpse of a tribesperson across the savannah is lost with what’s now on offer on the net at the click of a button: when confronted with offers to participate continuously in scenarios outstripping any that could be dreamt up by the diseased mind of the Marquis de Sade. There is nothing robust enough in our psychological make-up to compensate for developments in our technological capacities."
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/12/26/why-we-should-limi...
By the way, the word 'sadism' comes from his name, but he himself never actually physically hurt anyone. He was very much perceived as a threat by the successive governments of the time as he had no respect for authority and didn't hesitate to put himself in danger for speaking his mind and denouncing the hypocrisy of the society he lived in.
He would be very much at home here today. A larger than life hero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquis_de_Sade#Scandals_and_im...
Also, if 120 Days in Sodom is not a work of a diseased mind, I'd be curious to find out what you think is. I'm sure 32 years in prison sucks, but would most people get relief by graphically daydreaming about torturing their own children to death?
Given his personal life it certainly doesn't seem impossible that he was fantasising about what he wrote, but isn't it always a possibility that he wasn't too? It's possible to write fiction that you wouldn't want to happen in real life, after all.
To address the particular hogwash in that editorial, glimpse a tribesperson across the savannah? Human beings were living in groups with topless women tens of millenia ago. So it doesn't even stand on those grounds.
Look at what the bonobos do with each other - and we're more creative.
I thought so.
There were no cars, planes, or McDs in the Savannah either yet somehow we cope with those things. Personally I dont think porn comes close what the Romans were actually doing...
</sarcasm>
"It is perhaps only people who haven’t felt the full power of sex over their logical selves who can remain uncensorious and liberally 'modern' on the subject. Philosophies of sexual liberation appeal mostly to people who don’t have anything too destructive or weird that that they wish to do once they have been liberated.
"However, anyone who has experienced the power of sex in general and internet pornography in particular to reroute our priorities is unlikely to be so sanguine about liberty."
I don't want to keep quoting passages, so I encourage you to read the whole thing.
This does not go well with the fact from OP article that every boy after ten is exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet. If it's true, people who "once have had a peek" do not exist and the author of the article you quoted fools us.
Having said that, my main reaction to that kind of reasoning is on the lines of "We're going to watch porn anyway, you won't stop us (and by us I mean everyone) and that's what we are going to do boo hoo. So what can you do? With your religion schmeligion and morals schmorals? Even if we hurt us in the process, so what? You can't do anything about this."
Seriously, he's like a parent who thinks he's going to tell us what to do. But he doesn't have any ways to make us listen. And no ways at all to affect the situation. So why bother at all?
I've seen several comments that have opposed what I would call the Church & Moral perspective on porn, without really having an example of what that perspective is. Let me put forth a few claims, so those of you who would disagree with them have something concrete to which to attach your arguments.
FWIW, I'm a religious person. I've been married for 9 years, and I've only ever been physically intimate with my wife. I accept that that deeply colors my perception of the world and this issue specifically.
Here are my claims:
- Porn is designed to be "used" by an individual to satisfy themselves sexually.
- Especially when encountered at a formative age (such as the author's and my own), porn greatly influences your perception of "good sex".
- Pornography and sexual intimacy are diametrically opposed.
- Sexual intimacy is more satisfying, on the whole, than porn.
- There is no such thing as "harmless porn".
Finally, a standing invitation. If you ever want more information on the mainstream evangelical Christian viewpoint on pornography, or my viewpoint specifically, feel free to email me at donspauldingii at googlemail dot com
While much porn isn't of particularly good quality, lots of porn is designed for couples. And it's great! You should try it with your wife.
Again, you've been watching the wrong porn. Plenty depicts beautiful sexual intimacy.
Having used porn myself for the majority of my life, and for almost the entirety of my marriage, I have quite a number of empirical data points of its affects on me and my sexuality. I will say that my wife and I need much less of the influence of porn on our sex life, not more.
Your anecdotes don't require disproving. They are just your anecdotes about your particular personality and calling them "empirical" does not give them any more expandability to the whole.
My "empirical" remark was simply to explain that I have enough knowledge about myself to draw the conclusion that engaging in pornography would not help my marriage. I wasn't expanding it to the whole in any way there.
I think it's necessary to learn to live with and love your lusts if you want to be in control of them. "Know thyself."
Porn isn't bad, it's a part of society now and has been for a long while, but it's the same way drugs aren't necessarily bad unless you start needing a bigger and bigger kick.
Logically speaking, that doesn't mean it's not a bad thing.
EDIT: Porn is indeed almost a staple of Western society, but note that Western culture is also very image-focused and has high rates of divorce and eating disorders among women.
I present to you, old Japanese porn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s...
And here's a documentary about ancient Egyptian porn: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7HttHvJ8Gc
And here's a book about Mesopotamian porn: http://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_erotic_reliefs_of...
What I want to say is that porn is not only a staple of Western culture, it's a staple of humanity.
Even 20 years ago porn was too expensive for the average person to afford very much of it.
They could afford it, they could not afford to hoard and stream it at will. The mechanics have not changed significantly, even as we spend more time searching for "novel" mp3s and video.
Do we have a "problem" with Netflix? Pandora? I spend constant (wasted) hours cataloging and retagging my music collection.
http://www.japanese-buddhism.com/giant-pink-penis-festival.h...
The Japanese have had a penis festival since the 1600's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maypole#Scandinavia
"The central part played by young children in the celebration emphasize the procreation aspect of the celebration"
We've had celebrations and representations of sexuality throught history.
The Romans took to this a climax (pun intended)
http://www.mariamilani.com/ancient_rome/Ancient_Roman_Orgy.h...
Interesting thing is in most of these historical cases, there is a strong authoritarian push to stop these festivals to keep from corrupting people. This is the wheel of history coming around again.
It's one of those things that can rapidly spiral, you
start needing a bigger kick to keep it interesting.
I have no idea if these claims are true or trying to justify what they've done but it seems relevant and worth mentioning. Here is an AMA from a wife of one such man: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/15b3vt/iam_the_wife_of...
Are you sure about that? It seems that widespread, easy access to porn is something very new. Before the internet, you would have to go through some embarrassing procedure at a checkout counter to purchase just a few pornographic items.
The amount of free porn I could access in the next hour would have cost me thousands of dollars in the 1980s.
We have normalized porn very recently and it is just a piece of modernist faith that it is harmless.
Do you abstain from television, computers, rock and roll, role playing, comic books and video games by this same line of FUD?
Mass media has the power to create unrealistic expectations. Someone growing up in the age of Petrarch and Dante had unrealistic expectations of romantic love. It's easy to imagine that someone growing up in the age of internet porn would have unrealistic expectations of sex. Beyond that, I'd have to see hard, consistent evidence before I'd write off porn as especially harmful.
Video games are very addictive to me. After playing Starcraft for 16 hours straight one saturday, I carefully watch and moderate my video game play and have deleted most games from my system.
In your battle to live a meaningful, purposeful life, the peddlers of superstimuli are your enemy.
Respond to what people actually say. If you really need to respond to something unsaid, make it explicit. Anything else is a strawman fallacy.
> They were responding to a specific claim of the GGP, that porn is harmless.
Speaking of strawmen, it was Jacob who used the word harmless. Nicholas went so far as to draw an analogy with drugs concerning the effects of responsible versus irresponsible use. When he said porn wasn't bad, he clearly didn't mean that it is harmless in an absolute sense but was expressing a nuanced point of view.
I've had some first hand experience on that count, though not as extreme as the linked article.
You haven't clearly defined what you mean by harmful. Does it ruin otherwise healthy relationships on a massive scale? Does it teach impressionable young men that all women want to fuck them, leading to violence? Those seem like typical charges brought against porn. Were they true I'd agree there would be cause for serious concern. I haven't seen the data to back up these claims. If it exists, let's see it. Porn is widespread enough that you'd expect the large-scale statistical effects to be manifest.
There is certainly a modern syndrome around the nexus of sex, relationships, and family (less stable relationships, fewer children raised in stable homes, fewer children, more sex, more sexual culture, technology that lowers the cost of sex, easy access to porn). It's hard to know which pieces of the syndrome are causes and which are effects.
But if you don't see anything broken with modern relationships, you aren't paying attention to the statistics. Since the 1960s things have certainly changed at a rapid rate and some of that change is clearly for the worse.
Today, you have stats like this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2103235/Most-childre... or this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/13/health/13mothers.html?_r=0
Again, I'm not saying porn or a less repressed culture are causative, but they are part of the syndrome we observe that sex is less serious and more pervasive, relationships are more temporary, and children grow up in more chaotic homes at a distinct disadvantage to children that grow up in stable homes. The family is disappearing for a large portion of the population. Marriage is later. Children are fewer - especially for the upper class. You have more wealth in the country and more children being raised in poverty by a single parent.
For instance, a higher divorce rate is not necessarily bad. Decades ago, women had fewer rights in marriage and there was a cultural expectation for marriages to stay together, no matter how unhealthy, unhappy, or sometimes even abusive the marriage happened to be. As recently as the 1970's, the law had no concept of spousal rape--in other words, it was perfectly legal for a husband to rape his wife. Today, not only can women escape from marriages that are bad for them, but married couples can mutually agree that the marriage is no longer serving their or their childrens' needs.
I also find little to complain about in a lower birthrate. The bifurcation by class is troubling, but the net trend is towards zero or negative population growth. This doesn't necessarily indicate the disappearance of family, but rather a slight adjustment from more of an r-selection strategy to more of a K-selection strategy.
Conflating these issues as a "syndrome" is a little too simplistic and tendentious towards an ill-founded social conservatism.
On the other hand, when couples decide that their marriage "is no longer serving ... their childrens' needs", they are most likely wrong. Children grow up with fewer problems if their parents stay together, on average. Easier divorce in cases of abuse is good. But how common is that out of the 50% of first marriages that break up? Divorce in cases of boredom have a high cost on children with little social benefit.
In many ways we are better off than our parents and grandparents. But I don't think cheap sex and disposable relationships represent an advance.
Neither are new. The only difference is that the woman isn't shamed into poverty if she gets out of them without a shotgun marriage.
And thank goodness for that. You have an overinflated opinion of what marriage "used to mean". People having an out from abuse and misery is worth it all. Your efforts to shame the divorced are moralizing, not "for the children". Marriages are not happy because they're forced through law and social stigma. The option to leave is freedom.
It's also hard to see why decreased birthrates, delayed marriage, and delayed childbirth are bad moves. High birthrates and family formation early in life are more of an r-strategy. Moving to a K-strategy is better for the children you do have, which is the entire point. As a side effect, maybe young people have to find outlets other than marrying at age 16 and having babies to satisfy their sexual urges, but what's the harm in that?
You could plausibly say that most of the harm, in terms of single mothers, comes from the war on drugs, which affects minorities and the lower classes the most. It's two-faced for conservatives to point at certain communities for having so many children out of wedlock while locking up alarming proportions of their men for victimless crimes and turning them into hardened criminals.
Fundamentally, I think people more qualified to make decisions about their own families and relationships than the Pope, the government, or you and I.
Decreased birthrates pose problems for current economic systems which are premised on taxing the young to pay for the old. Later children are more likely to have birth defects. But like I said, ultimately it is necessary, so it is a mixed bag.
I totally agree with you on the War on Drugs. A legal system that sends 28% of black males to at least one year of prison undoubtably has something to do with why 80% of black children in the US grow up without fathers, and that undoubtably has something to do with why 28% of black males in the US spend at least a year in prison.
Feel free to email me if you want to continue this discussion. It's interesting and I'm enjoying it, but it's grown into a bit of a tangent.
More equality for women? That has improved. Access to abortion? That has improved? Domestic abuse and assault in sexual relationship? Are there any good statistics on these trends? Courts upholding child support agreements with force of law. Don't pay your child support and see what happens.
The reason something may appear broken with modern relationships is the fact we are looking at them thru historical perspective, when it was much less likely a person could survive and raise children while not married. The fact is so many things have changed (at least in the U.S. where I am) in the last 50 year the chain of causality is likely impossible to unwrap.
You will notice that the upper class still marries before they have children.
Also: you say "divorce is bad for children" when a good share of those children were born by mothers who aren't in a marriage and never were (at least not with the father).
What about those cases? "divorce" is not applicable to those.
Which is true of everything. How do you know eating chicken is harmless? What about cellphones? What about under arm deodorant? Laundry Detergent?
There are tons and tons of new things added to society all the time.
The only reason anyone has a problem with porn is because some people have moral hangups about it.
I am curious though, was your upbringing liberal regarding sex, or was it considered a taboo as well? For me, it was very much even taboo to think about it, even though I later found out this is terribly hypocritical considering those telling us it was taboo were doing it just as much as we would eventually. I even got in trouble for uttering the word "condom" once, almost to the same extent as for saying "fuck", which seems utterly ridiculous to me now. I'm curious if sex having been taboo for so many years is actually what makes it more stimulating, or if it's just a difference in sexuality from person to person.
I think the article speaks more to the issue with recovery and the issues surrounding "getting back to neutral."
This problem exists. He explains in laymen's terms a simple Pavlovian response that requires more and more brain stimulation to achieve the same level of dopamine needed for ejaculation.
I'm not a neuroscientist, but I bet someone out there can explain it better than I can.
For everyone who doesn't like their relationship to porn, there are other people who don't like that they got diseases, or got pregnant without a plan. But we don't pathologize this.
Let's be careful not to follow in the footsteps of Dr. Kellogg, who used the trappings of science to push predetermined conclusions in a campaign against harmless sexuality.
It can happen a million different ways; for the author, it was (probably) porn.
I've never tried to smoke so I can't really compare.
We have tested and tasted too much, lover--
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
the knowledge we stole but could not use.
The author's already found the solution - we need to separate sexuality from guilt and shame, to be able to feel aroused and wholesome at the same time. But it's hard to do that after you've already fallen down the spiral. We need to make our children's first experiences of arousal feel natural and wholesome - which means more openness, more embracing of sexuality in artforms that are going to portray it positively. But that's a hard sell to middle America.
That's part of the puritanical and (maybe any religious) mind control. People need to feel guilty so they self-police themselves, and it also has to be something that is common (such as sex) so everyone is always guilty. Guilty people are vulnerable and easily controlled.
This has to be planted early in the childhood, then it sort of becomes automatic and not that easy to unlearn. Even rationally if some admit there is nothing wrong with this or that, they'll still feel guilty -- it because it becomes part of their personality.
Is this really true anymore? It seems that the majority of the media consumed by young people carries the message that sex is extremely important and if you are not doing it with everyone in every way, you are brainwashed by religious or moral beliefs.
Obviously there is denigration of sex from many sources but which of these sources actually have an impact on young people?
Sex as necessary for social station is not being sex-positive.
You seem to not pay attention to our lawmakers, our newsmedia, and have many conversations with the persons around you.
I think Skoofoo is spot on.
Putting the "its not good for you" label on it also makes it immediately more interesting than it should be. Increases the guilty pleasure and so on.
The guy in the article - maybe he would have erectile problems never having watched porn too. Performance anxiety is normal.
One thing I am sure about: The cure for bad sex is lots of sex.
And that's from only reading the first couple sentences.
In my opinion it's important to know the symptoms of any addiction in case you see those patterns in your own or your peer's behaviors.
For me, in this day and age, its really hard to say one way or the other. How poorly done and/or wrong will it be, and is having it done that way better than nothing? I can't know, but I suspect that with societal attitudes on sex, "some porn is fine, how much is too much is different for everybody and here's how to tell where the line is" is too complicated of a message to effectively communicate. If it is even allowed to be communicated at all. Don't forget widespread acceptance of "abstinence only" rubbish isn't far behind us, I'm reminded of this every time I visit family in the South and see the big labels on every gas station condom dispenser reminding me that the only real way to avoid HIV/AIDS is monogamy and abstinence before marriage. Whereas growing up in the North, we didn't even have those dispensers. I suspect their presence is related to the greater taboos about sex in those areas, but in the north I was never scared away from buying rubbers at the counter when I was young.
I try not to lie to children, if at all possible.
Nope, it wasn't the porn.
I see a general male catharsis that borders on the neurotic. Society demands verile/potent men who can, at the same time, subjugate themselves fully to society and their mates.
Really . . . What a wanker!
Seriously though, where is the discussion happening about the link between porn and the degradation of women? Is there just no argument against it, or does HN not even realize it's there?
http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/WarZoneChaptIIIE.htm...
". . . if equality is what you want and what you care about, then you have to fight for the institutions that will make it socially real. It is not just a matter of your attitude. You can't think it and make it exist. You can't try sometimes, when it works to your advantage, and throw it out the rest of the time. Equality is a discipline. It is a way of life."
Concerning distribution: is there anybody stupid enough to ask for an never-ending, positional "war on porn"? As if wars on drugs and on pirates wasn't enough
As for the production aspect, as I said, there are women in porn who view it as a women's rights issue, ie who is to say what women can and can't do with their bodies.
For example, the previous life story article ending with a question mark on Salon was "Can I date a Republican?", and the clear answer from the article is "yes."
The one before that is "Should the terminally ill control their deaths?" and the author's statement is "A year after my mother's uncomfortable decline, it's a question with which I'm still wrestling", but it's clear that the author supports people learning more about the options for palliative care over attempts at staying alive for as long as possible. I'll put this as a "yes."
Then there's the quoted question '“Are you on the cover of a magazine?”', where the answer is definitely "yes", but this too doesn't fit Betteridge's law.
And "Was I selfish to have fertility treatments?", where the author states "I honestly don’t think my choice was any more selfish than anyone’s choice to have a child." So that's a "no." But there wa s a while when she worried about the question.
I think you get the idea.
And yes, it was not made for opinion pieces or personal narratives and, like in the examples you give, doesn't generally work in these situations.
My intention was just to point out that it happens to apply here because the headline is childish link bait.
The author covers in the piece that it wasn't really porn that lead to this and it's not going to be "forever" either if he does something about it.
That doesn't apply here, because "if he does something about it" is a different cause than not having enough information.
It looks like you say that it "happens to apply here" because 1) the answer is no, and 2) it's "childish link bait." Why not then just say "No. This is childish link bait."?
Suppose the NM governor wrote an op-ed piece "Should I stay the death penalty?", which outlines her ongoing thoughts both for and against commuting the sentence for the last two people on NM's death row. Suppose you are ardently pro-death penalty, support RepealTheRepeal, and believe that only fools would be against it. You could quite justifiably answer "no" to that headline and believe the title to be "childish link bait." But you would be wrong to say that Betteridge's Law applies.
I think the misunderstanding here is that you are looking Betteridge's Law as more of a pseudo-law that has specific constraints and I'm looking at is as shorthand for a specific critique of bad writing, which I think does apply here even though, as you stated, it was not created to apply to personal writing.
The difference is that most of the examples you are giving of personal writing are subjective and/or value judgements that have no factual answer to the headline question. This one does have an answer, the answer is "no" and the author knew the answer was "no".
Anyway, clearly a better comment for me to have made would have been "Although it doesn't apply here this post makes me think of Betteridge's Law!" but it's much less pithy.
"You can't tell the players from the fans"
Could someone give me a summary of the article?
The fact that an average person can't summit Everest while a practiced climber can is not a disparagement on the former.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/16/internet-porn-men-p...
Do check out my venture https://makelovenotporn.tv/ 'Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.'
* fundamentally true; not correct, but fundamentally true.
BTB, I am not talking about blocking porn, just users should go through a password wall. Also the users should be able to change this default setting if they like. This is not much different from the password protection for adult content offered by many cable tv companies.
Pirate Bay and other trackers, for example.
His problems with porn is just his problems. I suggest dealing with it.
(Because dealing with fear without treating harmful things being feared seems pointless)
I'm about 5 years older than the article poster. I haven't had unfiltered Internet since way before puberty, but I knew where my dad kept the tapes and magazines and I've had the Internet connection by the time I was 15-16. Either I was too young to care or old enough to know where to find it.
I don't think my parents would have added anything to either of our lives by filtering the Internet connection. They spent enough time trying to push me away from computers, which in hindsight I think they'd admit was folly since it was this "addiction" which I used to dig myself out of a childhood of poverty.
Anyway part of that time was used looking at porn, more of it on on-line games and a bit of it learning interesting things. Other than turning into a geek, I don't really think I'm messed up in any special way.
We now have two data points running contrary from each other. I see no significant evidence to suggest porn is really the problem it's make it out to be.
That perspective brings us to a different question: What can we do to ensure safe and positive sexual development in children without censoring the web and imposing our generation's morals on the next?
People who take the banned of protecting children from porn usually do this not from the safety & positivity point of view but from church & "morals" one. That's the most putrid, patronizing and hypicritical kind of people available; moreover, they don't see (or care) the relation of law and its effect (those two rarely match perfectly, sometimes not at all) and naturally they push for the measures I listed.
People who could ask this question never get any saying.
what the web has to do with it? as a teenager I could buy hardcore porn magazines without any problems.
Are you really making this argument on HN of all places? That behaviour doesn't have the ability to fluctuate wildly with only small differences in friction (not a pun!)?
You can moderate your intake of cookies; but limiting yourself to one kind of porn and not the other doesn't feel a working solution.
You can try to limit your porn consumption to once per a period of time (a week?) but I bet it will make the symptoms worse.
There is a very fancy word for being addicted to being intoxicated, no matter with what (I forgot the word for now). Being addicted to all kinds of porn at once seems similar - and, frankly, equally rare.
The whole point of the article was that it was not "just his problem", and beyond missing that point, the poster responds to a straw man not even hinted at in the article.
His inability to "deal with it" was the purpose of the article!
I experimented with porn growing up, and certainly saw somethings I wish I hadn't, but I have never had trouble getting it up for a real girl either.
He does not condemn porn. He questions what it means to have a natural sexuality when "Sexiness is always constructed — it used to be normatively hot to be fat and pale! " His problem is not that he has "demons", but that "I feel estranged from my sexuality, like it’s somebody else’s."
The piece comes across to me as very self reflective, asking '(why) is this a problem?' 'What would I be like in not for Y (porn)', and so forth.
I do not see any clear path to a police state (and I like to think of myself as (relativly) extremely biased to seeing a police state).
But it seems to me that winter is coming and we all might be heading to a police state. And I don't see how his article can't be used as a brick in the wall constructed by people not really caring about us (but only about "demons" in their heads") between us and free speech, freedom of expression and sometimes physical freedom.
That's what I'm fearing.
He's projecting his other issues on pornography, though. All of these issues will continue to exist unanswered long after he abandons porno.