Slashdot Mirror
Pr0n's Effect On Society
Rytis writes "An article at the Financial Times is analysing the growing impact of internet pornography, the phenomena itself and the problems that it causes to our society. Surveys within Great Britain have shown that more than a half of 9-19 years olds have seen pornography online. From the article: 'To some men, Haynes argues, clicking on porn is simply a way to pass the time. It's a hobby. Once they'd idly play solitaire; now they idly click on a porn site. Others, though, succumb to addiction: Most addictions are to do with internal emptiness, wanting to fill up dead space, and addiction is always destructive.'"
I wonder what the split was along gender lines?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Surveys within Great Britain have shown that more than a half of 9-19 years olds have seen pornography online.
And the other half lied.
But seriously, what's with the title, "pr0n"? How old are we here? Call it porn, or don't talk about it at all.
Once they'd idly play solitaire; now they idly click on a porn site.
And for others, its just the reverse, porn has lost its luster for me, I play solitaire heavily now. Don't get me wrong, I still look at porn, but sometimes its just so boring.
However, now we have a completely different context. The prevalence of porn is amazing and so is its accessibility.
It is becoming very clear that teenagers are conducting themselves (sexually) in a very different way from their parents or even probably older siblings. The recent case of the (Georgia?) teen who was convicted of a sex crime that was videotaped is a good example of this. I'm not debating about whether or not he committed a crime--I'm just discussing it in the context of the video.
In the seventies we had makeout parties, sure, but it was really rare to have people taking their clothes off and having sex in the open, orgy-style; it obviously was even more rare to take photos or film it, since the technology to view those photos or films without them being developed outside the home was absent.
Interesting argument. Though I agree to an extent I don't think your on the ball on this one. A recipercal effect though is that children exposed to pr0n will be exposed to sex much earlier and thus go looking for it. I know this sounds like some concervitive cop out but I do think there is some merrit. Let's say you have two kids one who grew up playing ball, hanging out with friends having crushes on girls. Then boy two who spends much of his time on the computer looking at pr0n and jerking off. Social development is paramout. Someone who spends much time looking at pr0n will develope a reclusive attitude and thus not have the same social development. I also believe that looking at pr0n does affect how you persieve the opposit sex. I say this all based on just being a teen myself and growing up, and having my own son. I'm a single dad, i'm not an idealist concervitive I'm just being honest. Sitting at home beeting it off to porn is not benificial in ones overall development.
You reduce your chance of getting prostate problems by ejeculating regularly, so do it for your health.
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn3942
Its not good to keep stuff in, you need to regularly clear out those pipes, 5 times a week or more is good.
Or do you abstain for religious reasons in which case why trot out a series of repeated non religious sounding reasons.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
You fail to recognise that almost all addiction springs from some sort of depression, self worth or external control issues. People don't tend to get addicted to things when they feel satisfied with life (not that there are many people that fit into this catagory.) To equate your lesbian stereotype with addiction filling a whole in ones life is ridiculous. The addiction comment wasn't directed at men, it was in reference to all people and is generaly considered a truism. Your lesbian stereotype is a concept some men came up with to comfort themselves. Your view on the matter leads me to believe you have some sexism issues to deal with.
I wonder how many of the people in here agree. Would you like to see some of the "actresses" do this or that, and are dissatisfied because they don't exactly do as you'd like them to?
What if we ignore 18 and 19 year olds?
.xxx domain for, however adults viewing it is none of our concern. It's their right, shut the fuck up about it. Thus to include young adults in with children is just not useful, and the only reason I can see is to try and bias a statistic that the researchers didn't like.
The reeks of a delibratly skewed statistic. I mean why would one pick that particular age range? Why would you include 18 and 19 year olds, who are adults in every country I'm aware of, with teens and children?
The reason is most likely that if you narrow the paramaters to 9-17 year olds, you find that the number who have viewed porn drops significantly. Of course the idea is to try and generate outrage "OMG t3h childrens are viewing t3h porn!!! Ban it!!!!!" This leaves the reader with the impression that "half of all children have viewed porn." However the reality might be something more along the lines of "10% of children 9-17 and more than 50% of 18-19 years olds have seen porn online."
How many children get access to pronography is a concern, at least when they do so without parental permission, though not one that we should mandidate filtering or something liek a
A long time ago, in the early seventies, politicians in several countries were concerned enough about pornography to commission studies to see just what was going on. These studies were commissioned in the USA, UK, Canada, and Denmark. There may have been others. In 1972 the President's Commission on Pornography issued its report, now nearly impossible to obtain (lots of good pictures), detailing thirty studies of the effects of pornography. 29 studies showed no correlation between pornography and aberrant behaviors, i.e.: crime. The Commission therefore recommended that laws against pornography be abolished. Though the study was commissioned before his term of office, Nixon was President at the time, and he totally rejected the conclusions of the study. The same conclusions were reached by the studies in the UK, Canada and Denmark. Canada and the UK reacted similar to the US. Denmark did not. Instead, they took the study results at face value and de-criminlaized pornography.
Then an odd thing happened. Within a single year sex-related crimes in Denmark went DOWN over 60%! See: "The effect of easy availability of pornography on the incidence of sex crimes: The Danish experience" Journal of Social Science, Vol 29:3 (1973), pp. 163-181. For a fuller accounting see "Porn Alley: Now at your local public library," by yours truly. Computers in Libraries, Vol 19:10, November-December, 1999, pp. 32-35. This may be available online.
There was a second commission on pornography in the US headed up by attorney general Meese. They had half the amount of money over ten years later, meant a few times, had some public meetings, went to some adult bookstores, and concluded that porn was bad. The history of this farscical commission is a real hoot to read. The commissioners in this case claimed exposure to pornography was damaging, but their year-long exposure to such somehow unaffected them. I wish I could cite the book that details this, but darned if I can find it. If only I had the software slashdot talked about a couple of days ago....
Now, if you have a moralistic issue about pornography, that is still valid, so all the folks who are posturing about porn treating women as objects and how unfair nature was to wire men and women differently, and how God doesn't like it, well, you just go for it. But if you're talking in scientific terms, the evidence would suggest that pornography does not create more crime, but it does create less crime. Nearly every study done suggests that is true and a whole country has proven it in real time. If you're going to assail the scientific evidence, you're going to have to do a lot more than just voice your opinion. That's not to say that a big political uproar cannot be made by rousing the ignorance and moral outrage of the populace, but the entire issue is based on nonsense.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
There are things that are genuinely physically addictive like hard drugs
I wouldn't be so sure about even that one.
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
My question: how many were looking for it when they found it? How many of those 9 year-olds who had seen porn (assuming that any of those 9 year-olds fall into the 50% mentioned) were looking for stuff on Pokemon or Cardcaptors?
Thats not always true.
a) there are "hardcore" porn mags
b) there is plenty of "soft core" porn on the web
Shit in addition to playboy (which I found at about 9), around the time I was 12 I found a bootleg copy of a movie that was mostly normal sex with thin plot, but towards the end involved a man being tied up and anally raped with a corn cob by a couple of sadistic women.
It was just one scene, and a short one (it was more part of the flimsy excuse of a plot than a real attempt at some sort of BDSM scene). However, honestly, it had almost no effect on my or my view of human sexuality at all... it was so beyond the scope of experiences I could relate to, that it was just a curiosity.... and not even much of one.
I dunno, as our hormones start changing us and awakening those animal desires, I think its natural for us to be curious and porn definitly plays a role in that curiosity.
You would think porn would be more encouraged, afterall, don't we not want kids channelling their sexual energy into eachother? They have to do something with it. So they see some images and jerk off. Isn't that better than trying to convince suzy down the road to spread her legs?
Honestly I wonder how useful it even is to discuss. I mean, are there really people who think that it would even be possible to prevent kids from growing up without seeing porn?
I know its a natural instinct of parents to want to "protect" their children from all harm, imagined or otherwise. I just wish the breeders out there would be more willing to take a step back and ask themselves whether the dangers they see are even real.
Just because someone says its "for the children" doesn't mean that what they want to do is helpful, or even not harmful to those same children.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This isn't a problem of porn per-se, it's a problem with porn's underground nature.
Currently, porn is in the middle of a "race to the bottom," from economic theory. The barrier to entry for making porn is almost nonexistant anymore (ditigal camera, computer, voila), so pornography is ironically one of the freest markets around -- at least on the Internet. In meatspace, though, pornography is still regulated and "hidden" -- witness strict zoning laws on everything from strip clubs to adult bookstores. With limited access in meatspace and the stigma still attached to actually getting caught with porn, there's no quality filtering of the sort done by nearly every middleman.
The upshot of the environment is that it's difficult for porn to compete on "quality" -- the Interweb thingy makes it comparatively easy to find porn from innumerable sources. Simultaneously, the sheer volume of what's available "for free" (with or without copyright violations attached) means that there's no incentive for the porn consumer to have "brand loyalty," so to speak.
Thus, porn has to compete on getting your attention now. This means that porn has to arouse (no pun intended) the strongest response in its viewers in the shortest time. The strongest human emotions are lust (check), fear, anger, and disgust. The latter three are what the "weird-shit" porn goes for -- and it does it reasonably well. (Porn mostly goes for "fear" in empathy, as in "girl gets 'raped'." Since true fear is generally incompatible with lustful feelings, my guess is that most people would respond with a degree of misogyny, rather than empathetic fear that the situation would normally evoke.)
Evocation of lust is pretty much peaked in porn, at least at the price porn has to be budgeted (that is, cheap). Any good writing that would lead to more complicated expressions is expensive, and also requires good acting and directing; these are all priced out by the market. I think that this is why we see so much anal sex in porn -- it's one of the last taboos.
The problem with young people viewing the "weird-shit" porn is exactly what the consensus opinion says it is -- youngsters are going to get their first exposure to sexuality in an environment that's actually designed to provoke feelings of anger, fear, and disgust. Without a healthy, open exposure to sexuality in broader society, kids will of course think that the "weird-shit" is what's normal... which doesn't bode well for their first few times at bat.
The answer to the problem of porn isn't to eliminate porn. The Internet isn't going back in the bottle, and porn's availability is probably here to stay. The answer is to deliberately introduce kids to healthy expressions of sexuality in an open way, so that they can see the weird shit in porn for what it really is, rather than interpret it as the "standard" expression of sexuality.
Modern sex-ed courses (at least in the States, where I grew up), do absolutely none of this. The basic anatomy lesson is worthless, and the STD treatment is about as effective as saying "here's the fun bits, but if you touch them your hands will fall off." Unfortunately, this is often the only "official" exposure to sex that most kids ever have, before they try it themselves for better or for worse.
To use a loose analogy, imagine if violence-as-expressed-in-modern-films (Terminator-esque) was the only expression of violence that kids ever saw, and then you hand them a machine gun on their 18th birthdays. Fortunately for the health of everyone in
"Evil company X is threatening to restrict our rights! Let's all get together to stop--OOOH! SHINEY!!!" -- AC
I agree, and I speak from experience.
My parents got an internet connection when I was 13, and, in the eight years since, I have spent a frighteningly large percentage of my time looking at porn. From time to time, I'll swear it off for a week, a month, even a year...but, eventually, I always go back. When I do, everything important in my life suffers; my friendships, my schoolwork, my work as a TA, my health, etc. all take a second seat. In the end, I've wasted collectively, perhaps, two or three years out of my life.
This is not to say that porn itself is responsible for this behavior; as someone commented earlier, porn is just a particularly easy (if destructive) way of filling a gap that sensible folks learn to fill constructively. I alone am responsible for my behavior over the last several years, and the most frustrating thing about it is that it seems so pointless and ridiculous in retrospect. However, to a kid like I was---one to whom simple human interaction and empathy came late and only with much effort, and someone whose sexuality only began to resolve itself quite late (I'm gay)---pornography offered a welcome (though dangerous) release from the huge effort of social contact. It didn't matter that it inevitably left me feeling dead inside.
Now, it's a pattern I'm having a hell of a time unlearning; every time something unpleasant happens, my first response is porn, which only makes things worse. In fact, I almost dropped out of school because of it a few years ago. To me, at least, porn has been a trap, which has separated me from reality, and stunted my growth as a sexual and emotional being (I still have yet to be in a real relationship of any kind). I don't like myself, and that's sad, because I'm smart and talented and capable of better than this. On more than one occasion, I've taken out this frustration with myself on the people that I care about. I wish I hadn't.
I'm currently attempting for the umpteenth time to go cold turkey. It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts. While I recognize that this is my problem and nobody else's, I do wish that my folks had been more careful about policing my internet usage way back when. Yes, I should have known better, but I just wasn't ready to deal with internet porn when I first found it. There's a reason there's so much fuss about keeping kids away from porn, and the effect of porn on society in general. Pornography encourages a way of thinking which is almost entirely destructive.