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I'm kind of wondering whether it is more the intercourse part or the hugging and cuddling part. But never mind, whole communities have formed around this idea of yours.

You could read the paper by Prescott called "Body pleasure and the origins of violence". As far as I have followed this addiction can be one result of to little contact to people in your early life:
"http://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/610/1/Somatosensory-Affectional-Deprivation-Theory/Page1.html"

Also you can read from the following page:
http://www.violence.de/

On the page it is stated:
"CULTURES THAT PUNISH INFANTS OR REPRESS SEXUALITY ARE VIOLENT"

I would suspect that if you want to build an empire you tell your people that sex is bad for them so you can expand through violence. Maybe this is the reason that I have to point you to a German page and not an American one. You will find that this empire building idea is not that en vogue over here anymore and people actually carry their kids around with them now to simulate the natural behaviour. Interestingly there are even places around here where you can learn to massage your kids. This follows one of Prescott's suggestions.

So the negative influence of too little body contact and sex is not underestimated but not read about enough.

Beyond all that I heard that human immune systems can accommodate a number of partners with their different microbial fauna, but that there is a natural limit of around a handful. Unfortunately I can't give you a citation.

"I did fail to proofread prior to posting, but you will note the correction I posted immediately after."

I noticed after I sent the reply.

"There is no danger that I am doing serious damage by simply not associating with someone who acts in a way I find unacceptable. If you wish to argue this further, please go into great detail regarding how, by not interacting with someone, I am causing any damage at all."

Well, assuming that people like/need to communicate with others, withholding that possibility can make them feel isolated and some get depressed. I would grant you the right to be stressed out by unnecessarily talkative people, but your behaviour could erect some "wall of silence" if copied. I remember situations where I felt about silence like that.

Also ghettoization happens not only because some party builds a wall around another group but because people move closer to similarly minded people, here is an example:

"To take just one example: a large number of Muslim teachers of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in New Delhi, reputedly an enlightened institution with liberal outlook and social sensitivity, prefer to live in Muslim-dominated colonies or ghettos rather than on university campus after 1992."

From here:
http://twocircles.net/2010apr14/living_together_separately_ghettoization_muslims.html

I personally think we should rather try to live all mixed up, if we claim we live in the same country. While you are not that far yet, ghettoization is the next step.

Regarding the "great damage", I could point you to the Origins of violence paper by Prescott, that appeared around 1975 in the "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists". While we are not talking about bringing up children, I have the suspicion that it is still important for the larger society. Personally I would rather follow the precautionary principle regarding my social interactions.

Here is a link:

http://www.violence.de/

Don't worry it is an english language website. Also there is some nudity.

I just went to some erotic massage training course over the weekend, one woman there said that she has stopped judging people. I wished more people were like that. But yes, I find the society of promiscuous people relaxing, I'm almost ready to move into some sort of ghetto :).

I wonder why religions even have made sex to look like a bad thing.

...and the simplified answer is, people growing up in societies where pleasure is a normal component of everyday life don't feel like organizing an army to aggressively expand the borders of their nations. Refer: Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence.

I find it odd that the ChiCom government should CARE about porn.

They don't. The lawmakers are politicians elected by the Chinese peoples. The Prescott papers are not required reading for them. If the people are against porn, the politicians and therefore the government are against porn - it makes them more popular.

Profiteering from the own populace is not a possible motive because, being communist, the money the government makes belongs to the people anyway, and not to the politicians. (Profiteering from foreigners is ok though, it makes the Chinese people richer.)

Deprivation of Physical Affection is a Main Cause of Depression, Aggression and Drug Abuse. This has been known for decades. http://www.violence.de/

So many comments have been posted that enthusiastically denigrate people who have sex. In summary, stating that people who do not practice abstinence and have contracted HIV somehow deserve it. By this silly, childish reasoning, anyone who drives a car on a regular basis and gets into a fatal accident likewise “deserves it” because they know driving a car comes with inherent risk.

Sex is not bad and it is hardly immoral when safely practiced between two consenting partners. I hope all of you will take notice that every one of us are equipped with organs and instincts that have developed specifically for the purpose of engaging sexual practices. No one would disparage anyone else for using their eyes to see. Why do so towards people who use their genitals for their proper purpose? Perhaps it upsets certain groups that people who enjoy sex are just that much more likely to propagate their genes than those who consider sex an abomination.

What we need are more people who are properly informed about sex so that it can be had as a rational pleasure. This completely baseless and subjective assumption that we must abhor the practice needs to go away. Supporters of anti-sex messages need to prove it or keep their opinions to themselves if they only want to tear down others.

At any rate, I would rather see more people fucking than fighting.

Move to Japan. Judeo-Christian imposed shame on sexuality is blissfully absent. People bathe naked in communal baths, sometimes mixed-sex. Pornos are next to regular magazines in the newsstand. Condoms are on display shelves like regular items in the convenience store (you don't need to ask a clerk to get one for you behind the counter).

And you know what? Sex crime rates are LOWER in Japan than elsewhere in the world. Says something about an open vs. a repressive sexual attitude.

Sweden's pretty open too, from what I hear.

Check out http://www.violence.de/prescott/bulletin/article.h tml for a fascinating analysis about sexual repression and violence.

Um, how is child porn dangerous?

I'd guess this is by virtue of being one of those topics that still exceeds polite conversation. Child abuse of any type is universally publicly deplored.

Child abuse is, but thought crime is not. Looking at kiddie pr0n is not child abuse. The interesting thing is that researchers in this area like Finkelhor have been tracking the up trend in availability of kiddie pr0n and the down trend in actual child abuse.

I can't agree with that. A child of 12 simply does not posssess the judgement (nothing to do with intelligence) to understand and accept the consequences of being filmed having sex with someone else,

How do you know that? Your crystal ball?

or themselves for that matter. Participation in porn goes way beyond put that thing in here, no matter how it's done. And it's hard to avoid asking the question: why does an adult want to see a child in sexual poses, when the adult knows or should know that children simply don't understand sex?

And it's hard to avoid asking the question: why does an adult male want to see other men in sexual poses, when the adult knows or should know that the bible simply forbids homosexuality?

Kids are human beings, and they are attractive and beautiful people. Since when does an attraction erotic or sexual in nature make a human relationship suddenly "bad?" You can see the two in sets. The inner set is the set of all relationships based on "good" feelings like friendship and love. There's another set that largely overlaps and includes another category of feelings, the sexual or erotic. What's the difference? Not much. Only the sexual or erotic. What actually matters is how you treat someone and whether you have any respect for them and their feelings (e.g. the younger person doesn't want to have sex or whatever).

Have you ever hooked up with someone a good bit younger than you? You know how they interpret everything you do with meanings far different and greater than what you intended?

They do? What's a "good bit younger?" And who cares if there are individual differences? Maybe it will be sorted out later.

If an adult goes specifically looking for that kind of reaction, a la child porn, it's hard not to conclude that the adult is looking for control/power/manipulation through a sexual lens.

Oh, that's just funny. There is such a thing as sexual desire coming from feelings of love. But in your world, there's a line sprinkled with magical fairy dust that automatically inverts the basic feelings and desires when someone's chronological age slips below a certain point.

And, even if that were true for a small subset of motivating desires, then why not ban relationships between men and women? The man is more powerful and desires sex moreso than the woman (presumably), and can do whatever he wants in a physical sense, ergo, he is looking for control/power/manipulation through his sexual lens.

I believe you felt/feel that way. But if you look at the people who did do that, it generally turned out much worse than they expected.

You're forgetting the data collected from those where it turned out to be average and ho-hum, and where it turned out to be, well, just fine and dandy.

Sex is potent stuff, and it takes a fair bit of self-knowledge to learn how to handle the physical, emotional, and relationship elements of it, and make it something good for you.

Really? As opposed to the smarts to ignore social pressures and the messages from the TV? Simple physical and affectionate behaviour with someone else is good and healthy regardless of age.

http://www.violence.de/

Not necessarily sex of course, but affectionate behaviour you would otherwise classify as sexual.

People learn to use

Is anybody worried about looking at voilence and death? Is anybody worried about public brain-washing propaganda?

We live in strange times! War and soldiers and stylised to glory and heros, while sex and other fun and is somehow dirty and should be avoided. A strange so called "Morality", indeed!

In Body Pleasure And The Originbs Of Violence James W. Prescott relates the tendency towards violence to general sexual opression. It's worth a read.
(James W. Prescott was employed at the US Public Health Department and layed off five years after he published this document (in 1980), because he wanted to conduct more studies in the area of child abuse and neglect.)

I don't get it.

There is a lot of evidence out there that relates the tendency to violence to the lack of premartial sex, or the sexual opression of children.

The author James W. Prescott was employed at the US Public Health Department and layed off five years after he published this document (in 1980), because he wanted to conduct more studies in the area of child abuse and neglect.

I'll probably get flamed to death for this, by people who are not even willing to consider other viewpoints than their own.

But the rabid monkeys already took over the senate, and the rest of the government! Just look at the president.

Common knowledge?

The idea to combine wikis and weblogs is very promising. The sequential nature of weblogs is great for news, but not for acting on these news in a sustained fashion. If Slashdot writes about some political issue, if actions are taken they are usually short-lived, or move to other mailing lists. Similarly, wikis can combine sites which host both a lot of persistent knowledge (e.g. papers, essays) with the dynamic, community-creating nature of a weblog. I plan to eventually run violence.de as a wiki-weblog, with the wiki (access-restricted) storing the papers, film pages etc., and the weblog reporting about current issues (sexual repression, censorship, new studies etc.) -- mail me if you want to help.

Wikis, when properly deployed, are the missing component to make weblogs truly useful. With properly deployed, I mean that typical wiki idiosyncrasies need to be avoided: Nobody really wants to use WikiStyleLinks, they make text harder to read and are difficult to get rid of once you have decided to use them. Choose E2 or Wikipedia style links instead. Also, access restrictions are necessary in many contexts. See the article for some further design details.

This reminds me of an interesting article I once read correlating the rejection of sexuality and pleasure to a reciprocal acceptance of violence and aggression within a society. The scope of the research seems to be fairly comprehensive in terms of number of societies and types of behavior it covers.

The conclusion is that affection-deprivation in infancy is what contributes to an aggressive personality in adulthood (and it is my view that violent media is only an expression or a harmless outlet for indulgence of these violent tendencies.)

Interesting read nonetheless. Especially because it gives me all kinds of ammo to blame everyone that fears sex and nudity, and thinks it to be something from which children should be 'protected' for causing all the violence which we can all agree is harmful.

Aticle here

-Denizen

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An interesting study in that vein can be found here. It's an excellent examination of some basic pleasure/pain biases that the PMRC types seemed to overlook as they 'wimpified' the media while pulling threatening numbers out of their ass to support the War on Some Drugs.

Indeed, there are many areas of the Net for which application and licensing should perhaps be required. Pornography is too rampant and too available to any kid who can "borrow" a credit card or simply surf the web, as are gambling sites, sketchy chat rooms, etc. Licenses and passwords could help a lot of this.

So far so good: We are talking about material that is obviously dangerous and has been criminalized in other areas.

"Too much pornography" is "obviously dangerous"?! This guy scares me. I plan on raising my daughter to be comfortable with nudity and pornography.

Screw the prudes!

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I would not be surprised if we would find more violent offenders in the former group, given this research. The key question for the future will be which side wins. And it's not like the progressive side always wins. Remember the Dark Ages.

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• George R. Stewart: Earth Abides: A melancholic, but neither explicit nor scary story about the last human survivors of a disease. The grandfather of many post-apocalyptic stories. Very readable.
• Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (all parts): An incredibly funny story about life, the universe, and everything. The book begins with earth being destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial express route. Don't panic -- it's only the beginning .. You can find all parts on the net for previewing.
• George Orwell: 1984: Not much to say about that. Tell her about DoubleClick after she's finished reading it. You'll also find this one on the net.

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Origins of Violence

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