| Saying that porn is bad because it teaches
| people different ways to have sex doesn't
| make sense.
This is not my intention. I actually wish that people would get over a lot of their sexual hang-ups. My thoughts:
1. I am against censorship.
2. I don't think that porn by itself dangerous to humans in some sort of Puritanical way of thinking.
3. My thinking is that a lot of porn out there is all about the male dominating the female, and basically just using her. Allowing young children to have access to this shapes their views on sex. The older the child, the more prepared they are to deal with this. Taken with a healthy dose of discussion from parents that aren't afraid to talk sex with their kids this might not be so bad, but a lot of parents are averse to these discussions, so the child is only left with porn as a teacher.
4. Porn is all about fantasy, so if you are using porn as a guide (e.g.) for anal sex, you're not seeing the prep that is needed for the scene. There are videos out there of unprotected anal sex, unprotected ass-to-mouth, anal sex where the guy just jams it right in, etc. None of these show the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making those scenes safe (anal douching, warming up rather than instance penetration, etc), or are just showing people being unsafe without any context for learning. It's not meant to be a how-to guide.
5. I keep focusing on anal sex because it's so prevalent in porn now vs. the past. There are many other things that could also be bad[1] (e.g. skat), but it's less likely that kids/teens will come across them.
6. Many women are against anal sex because of bad experiences. If teenagers start engaging in more anal sex, it could just as easily have the opposite affect on 'uptake' of anal sex: inexperienced, uninformed teenage boys attempting painful anal sex with teenage girls that then grow up with a bad view of anal sex. Or teenage girls getting painful UTIs due to unsafe practice of anal sex, and writing it off.
7. I'm also envisioning teenage boys demanding anal sex, and teenage girls going along with it even though it is uncomfortable and/or painful as some sort of bid for acceptance or because they like the boy (possibly not even telling the boys that they don't enjoy it because this might be viewed as a bad thing; i.e. peer pressure to grin and bear it). I'll admit that this is not really based on any evidence and I (hopefully) wouldn't legislate based on just my unfounded opinions.
8. I'm often found to be a contrarian. If someone puts forth an idea, sometimes all I can see are edge cases.
9. Most of the porn that I found as a child was relatively tame, and there wasn't such free access to video porn as there is today with the 'tubes.
10. I realize that a lot of this isn't at some 'sky is falling' level like many anti-porn conservatives would have people believe.
| Before the internet, teens got their hands on
| magazines and those generations aren't damaged
| by it either
The variety of porn in the pre-Internet age was nothing compared to the variety of porn now. Sure, not everything is 'new,' but the availability has increased tremendously for non-vanilla sex acts. This could be good, bad or have no effect, but you can't claim that it's the same. Also, pictures are different than videos:
1. In a picture, you don't pick up on the manner-isms and general body language that you would see if you were watching the same thing in video form. E.g. you see an even starker picture of 'the woman is an object' when you watch a video of a guy berating a woman while dominating her vs. just seeing a few snapshots of the same act.
2. Going back to the anal sex example (yeah, yeah, beating a dead horse), seeing a couple of pictures of anal sex, you know that you're missing out on the full act and just seeing a snapshot. If you watch a video of anal sex from start to end, you could easily not realize all of the steps involved (before, after, in the middle, but cut out in post-production), and think that you now have a complete picture of what is involved and how it happens.
[1] Bad as in for health reasons in this case.