Porn. A word we all know and many consider Porn taboo, the question is, is it ? When my grandma was growing up in Detroit, Michigan in the 1940s, as a teenager, she went to the library to learn about sex. Schools back then didn't teach birds and the bees. The librarian told my grandma and her friend that they are dirty and banned them from the library for looking up what sex is all about....
In the 1990s, when I was a teen, I remember I was watching Lifetime Television for Women and there was a sex scene came on. My grandma walked into the kitchen (next to the living room) and said "you know sex on tv is't real."- And you all were teens at some point, we all talk about sex in schools. Hormones kick in, that is normal. So why, as a adults do many think talking/reading/watching erotica & Porn (there is a difference!) is taboo?
Is reading sex dirty/taboo? Is watching porn dirty/taboo? We are living in 2023 and honestly, as a woman in my 40s, I think the answer is no. it isn't taboo but many will say it is. Many will say that porn is degrading to women, is it? I don't think so. Fun fact, did you know a lot of straight women watch lesbian porn?
In fact, majority erotica writers are in fact women! Also, according to a scientific study by researcher Harold Leitenberg of The Journal of Sex Research, women who read romance or erotic novels have an astounding 74 per cent more sex with their partners than those who don’t.
Remember 50 Shades of Grey? That book is erotica - sex. Made movies - and you know how much the movie grossed? A total of $569.7 Million! US$166.2 million in the US and Canada and US$403.5 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of US$569.7 million against a budget of US$40 million.
You can go on and on about morality, religion, etc and get into endless debates, name-calling and finger-pointing. There is a very practical reason why porn is considered taboo that few have considered. A woman’s sexuality gives her empowerment over men. A man’s strong desire for sex that overwhelms his rational thinking is a weakness that a woman can exploit.
Her sexuality is a commodity that she can use to her advantage. So, through strictly traditional thinking, in order for a man to have sex he has to court the woman, buy her gifts and dinners, take her on dates, develop a relationship with her and then marry her. Marriage, by the way, was not invented by God or born out of love. Marriage is for the purpose of knowing whose kids are whose, so the male can pass down property to his rightful heirs. This came about of course, before paternity testing.
But it is 2023- the world of hookup culture. The world of sexting. The world of- well you know . Desires and lust are normal and isn't taboo but yet, we think it as a sin. Why? Because Bible says so-
Lust is defined as sinful longing - the inward sin which leads to the falling away from God ( Romans 1:21). Lust, the origin of sin, has its place in the heart to act upon impulses.
In a society where there is no sex before marriage, there is some security in knowing who one’s parents are. There is security for the man in knowing his wife’s kids are his kids, and security for the woman knowing the man will support her (to be blunt, he will do anything for her because she holds all the cards in the sexual game). When men can get their sexual gratification by watching porn, laying with hookers, going to strip clubs or just sleeping around with loose women, then the more men that do this, the less power women have in general over men (or you could look at it as the strippers, the hookers and the porn stars taking the power away from your average woman).
Consider— a woman wants a man to marry her. She doesn’t want to have sex before marriage. The man goes and finds someone else and sleeps with her. But in a society where that is taboo or outlawed, she would not be in danger of having that happen. She can continue to hold out on the guy until he commits. On a lesser level, a man won’t be likely to weaken in front of the might of female sexuality if he can get his gratification by watching porn.
This basically boils down to, “Why do I need a woman if I have a computer and my right hand?” And if the attitude becomes too widespread, then the whole structure of the sexual game collapses, with women the losers of it. This is why porn is considered to be degrading to women, and therefore taboo. It disempowers them.
Porn, and the people who make it, are far from perfect, but there’s a lot of mud thrown about by people who spend their time trying to re-run Roe vs. Wade, The Scopes Trial and other fights lost years ago.
Thanks to Fox News, The Washington Post and talk radio, being involved in pornography means having to defend yourself against the rabid accusations of self-righteous blowhards. Sex is everywhere, music, books and so on. We listen to the words describing sex in songs- so what is the beef? I want to know why people have an issue with sex in general?
Here are nine answers to 8 common accusations....
1. Porn breaks up families
This argument is always supported with anecdotal evidence and anecdotes aren’t worth the paper their written on. They usually concern some ‘good’ father who someone ‘gets sucked in’ to watching porn and then is ‘lost’ until (and here’s the predictable kicker) he finds the ‘strength’ to resist through God.
People who tell stories that end with God saving the day are recruiting.
Pastors, do-gooders and nuts make these stories up and put them on the internet. Twenty embellished re-tellings later and they’re fact. They have them for drugs, homosexuality, porn and anything else they’ve decided is ‘evil’. Most ‘anti’ websites are long collections of partisan ‘research’ and anecdotal ‘evidence’.
The idea they being spread is that ‘the family’ is ‘under attack’ from outside forces and that unless we ‘fight back’ the end is nigh. It scares people and that’s its purpose. Organizations that seek to control people know that scared people follow anyone who can show them a way out of the fear they’ve been sold. We know many historical events that that did this....
Never believe anyone who’s using psychology that evil doers in history have been fond of...
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2. Porn is immoral
Immoral means ‘failing to adhere to moral standards’ and moral standards are a matter of opinion.
Amoral means ‘without, or not concerned with moral standards’ and most porn is amoral because moral standards are impossible to define.
What is moral depends on your viewpoint. To Vegans, eating meat is immoral. To some Christians not going to church on Sunday is immoral. To know what prevailing moral standards are you have to look at what people do, not what they pretend they do. If you do you’ll see that most people’s morals are infinitely flexible.
They’ll tell you that observing speed limits near schools, not over-eating and helping people in need are moral, but only behave that way when it’s convenient for them.
Porn is worth $10B a year in the US alone. If the moral standards of our society say porn is wrong where’s the money coming from?
3. Porn is addictive
Anything can be addictive in the wrong hands, which is the clearest proof that many addictions are a choice as much as a need. Even if you accept that porn is addictive, a porn addiction is benign. You don’t have to break any laws to get porn and you can consume it without any impact on the people around you.
The only way to make a porn addiction seem scary, is to tie it to other behavior which is wholly unacceptable under any circumstance, and has nothing to do with enjoying sexually explicit material.
The people who cite porn as dangerously addictive are more concerned with stopping porn production than helping addicts. Porn addiction is used as an argument to support prohibition by people who are really just upset porn exists at all.
Alcoholics are rightly told not to drink, not to try and stop perfectly healthy people like me from having whiskey for breakfast. Campaigning for prohibition using addiction as an excuse has little to do with helping people with a problem, and everything to do with imposing a particular conservative moral agenda.
4. Porn is the start of a slippery slope
Anti-porn activists try to connect anything with a sexual element, including crimes, to sexual material. If they can do this, they can fantasize a cause and effect connection which justifies their prejudice.
Sexual crimes are particularly horrifying and never to be ignored but paedophilia, which has always been, and continues to be abhorrent, is not on the rise. And yes PEDOS should be banished -they are sicko-s!!! The high profile arrests of paedophiles using the Internet are notable for almost never involving the commercial sex industry. It’s always Feds arresting men who respond to entrapment operations. They’re not even subtle. The cops email pictures from accounts with names like ‘Horny15bi’ and send messages to people containing lines like “vice is nice but incest is best”.
Parents are being told that the internet is full of sexual predators and it’s easy for journalists to link the use of porn to perversion. The truth is there is no child-porn industry in America. Aside from being utterly revolting it would be impossible to run and there’s not a demand for it which makes the risk worthwhile to those who’d try. The child pornography that is produced is made by and for perverts who’ll use any technology they think will allow them to remain anonymous. They are sick mutherfuckers those pedos.
The other crime which porn gets blamed for is rape. This falls down with the understanding that porn doesn’t create desire, it reflects it. If porn could turn people into rapists it could also turn straight men gay and gay men straight. It doesn’t.
Links between rape and pornography are tenuous. The majority of people enjoy porn at some point in their life. Saying that most rapists have used pornography is like saying that most of them have worn jeans and then charging Levi Strauss with crimes against women.
Linking porn to rape is based on the idea that viewing porn leads to sexual thoughts and sexual thoughts lead to rape. You have to be criminally unstable to make that leap. The idea that ‘normal’ people view porn, get sexually frustrated and then rape goes against everything we know about human nature and the mentality of rapists. Rape is a crime rooted in anger, hate and power.
Studies like ‘Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan’ show that a rise in the availability of porn coincides with a decrease in the rate of sex crimes.
5. Porn is for perverts
With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyone’s a pervert.
Paul Fishbein (founder of AVN magazine) said that anti-porn protestors want us to believe that the porn industry serves 800 guys who each rent a million movies a year. He’s right.
People want to enjoy sexual material in every city and state, they spend more on porn in hotels than they do on drinks from the mini-bar. Whatever your thoughts about it, porn’s not a niche interest.
6. Porn can be easily defined
If you assume porn is bad, and has to be eliminated, you need to be able to reliably identify it in order to know what to ban.
A lot of people claim they ‘know it when they see it’ but this isn’t really true. Everyone knows what they consider to be pornographic, and can guess at what other people do. Coming to a concise agreement between people has proved to be impossible in human history. Unfortunately for detractors, if you can’t define porn, you can’t legislate against it.
So can we define it?
The word pornography is derived from Greek, who defined it as ‘writing about prostitutes’. That’s obviously too narrow. More modern definitions are can be boiled down into two camps. The American English Dictionary says porn is “printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity, intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.”
That’s the kind of definition that anti-porn people favor. It separates erotic feelings from emotional ones, puritanically suggesting orgasm is an erotic feeling but has nothing to do with emotion. It also mandates that porn is explicit, which allows for some clearly sexual art to slip under the wire, and guarantees that almost anything explicit can be defined as pornography. - so is writing erotica explicit? depends how prudish a person is. Because if they think it is, then 50 Shades of Grey would not have been made a movie. And trust me, 50 Shades of Grey did bring arousal in many of us women.. and men out there. There have been movies before 50 Shades of Grey that is mainstream one I love , Secretary staring James Spader (love him!)- we watch sex in mainstream movies, it isn't porn but some can define it is. So many double standards out there isn't there?
Conversely, according to the ‘Encyclopedia of Ethics’ porn is “the sexually explicit depiction of persons, in words or images, created with the primary, proximate aim, and reasonable hope, of eliciting significant sexual arousal on the part of the consumer of such materials.”
To quote the great stand up comedian, Bill Hicks – “Sounds like every ad on TV to me.” I will add to that quote, books and music included.
That’s why defining pornography is a fools errand and we’ll never agree on what it is. Accepting that makes porn a concept based on perspective, which shifts from time to time and culture to culture. To see how quickly things change, compare today’s Maxim magazine to the launch issue of Playboy.
7. Porn spreads STD’s
The rate of STD’s in the porn industry is well documented and below that found in the general population. More impressive given the large number of high-risk unprotected sex acts a portion of performers are involved in.
A lot of hardcore porn is shot without condoms, and some people argue that emulating that behavior puts the public at risk.
Porn fans who favor condom-free material normally say that condoms get in the way of the fantasy, which suggests they know it’s not real, and are no more likely to copy what they see on screen, than they are to kick someone in the face because they saw it in an action movie.
Anyway, if you had a sex life like the kind portrayed in porn movies, without the protections of the porn industry, you’d be a tired fool. Adult performers are less disease ridden than the general population (even though Chlamydia is referred to as ‘porn flu’ by people in the movie trade). The idea that they’re infecting the public with cooties is unfounded.
We all know that Tinder, Bumble and other dating apps is the actual STD spreader - that is why many, like myself included, don't do the hookup culture. ewe. That is writing erotica stories are easy for me. fantasies in my mind but not in real life.
8. Porn undermines society
The argument favored by people with nothing left to say, is that porn, and the business’ that deal in it, turn people and places ‘bad’.
These arguments are really about zoning laws.
In areas where video stores that carry adult titles are pushed into deserted areas by angry citizens, or in places where the residents are too poor to be bothered about campaigning against a new business opening, crime rates are predictably high.
Depressed, poor and deserted parts of town are where the desperate and criminal congregate. If you want to get mugged anywhere on the planet find out where the poor people live and hang out somewhere industrial nearby late at night. If there’s a reason to be there, like a lonely strip club, even better.
When sexually oriented businesses are allowed to open in decent locations, like the Hustler store on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles, or the majority of the clubs in Vegas, no rise in crime or criminality in adjacent areas is noted.
More importantly porn companies, unlike churches which also take in billions of dollars a year, pay taxes.
