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.
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.
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...
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.