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Egypt Banned Porn, But How Much of the Internet Is That?
pigrabbitbear writes "The recent web pornography ban in Egypt has raised questions about the evils of censorship (and porn) and the changing tide of popular attitude of Egyptians. It perhaps reflects the emerging influence of more conservative Muslim elements in government, a shift. Apparently the same ban was passed 3 years ago but was not enforced because their filtering system was not effective. But porn bans are nothing new. Other countries with strict censorship laws like China and Saudi Arabia have successfully implemented bans that restrict pornography along with anything else they deem inappropriate for public viewing. In 2010 the UK discussed a ban that would require users to specifically request access to pornographic material from their internet service providers. And porn-banning rhetoric has even stomped through the U.S. news media over the last few months, thanks to GOP also-ran Rick Santorum claiming President Obama is failing to enforce pornography laws. (There have also been some awesomely ridiculous pornography PSAs.)"
Violence plastered all over the media is okay, but God forbid little Hazem sees a tit.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
The Libertarian viewpoint is that, even if some people consider it harmful, people should still have the right to view it. There's a leap from "we think this is bad for your marriage" to "so we won't let you see it" that you're ignoring.
Ban Porn, but it's OK to beat your wife!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
So are cars (accidents create widows), jobs (long hours == annoyed wife), lack of jobs (husband annoyed because he thinks nonworking wife is lazy), children (lack of sex), TV (one spouse feels ignored), internet (ditto), books (ditto), gambling (wastes money), stores (spouse blows thousands of dollars).
Maybe we should just ban EVERYTHING that harms marriages.
Or we could take the more logical course and say, "With great freedom comes great responsibility. The government will not protect you from your own bad choices in life. You work too much, spend too much, have car wrecks, or view too much porn, youtube, TV, and your marriage fails. That's your own dumb fault." i.e. The path that was originally laid out for us in 1789.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
But that would mean that people are responsible for their own actions and that bad things can happen to them if they make poor decisions. People want to be able to blame others when they do something stupid. If they can't make it someone else's fault what are they going to do?
If watching porn borks a marriage, that marriage was boned regardless. Not seeing any porn won't keep you from realizing that there are hotter women out there. Not seeing porn won't form the connection being sought through a webcam.
Marriages based on looks are doomed. Marriages without a connection between the spouses are .. not even marriages, except on paper.
My wife is a sociologist and cultural anthropologist (double major, though closely related). Her anthro dissertation was on educational systems impact on child development both within the US and in the world in general (in many ways the village raising the child as seen in tribal communities in the Amazon and Africa does better at teaching children than the US system).
Her soc. paper was focused on the sex trade.
A couple interesting points come out of this: my children are less exposed to violence than sexuality (not to say they watch graphic movies, they are 6 and 8, but questions about gender are not danced around at all). My wife and I talk a lot about what the other finds attractive in a stranger/movie star (of either gender) && each other (though we specifically do not talk about friends this way, even if they have traits in common with those we discuss), and we have the open offer to each other to talk about the chance of an affair prior to one ever happening.
The point I'm trying to get at, porn will not damage a marriage nearly as badly as poor communication. It may not be a net positive for all marriages (though I think there are more [couples] than people think who indulge together), it should not be all that toxic to a well grounded marriage either.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
But the people watching internet porn aren't having any sex at all.
May the Maths Be with you!
I once did a Google image search on the most common 1000 words in English and noted the index of the first porn image in that list.
I was interested to see if there was a way to measure how far any word would have to be taken to indicate porn. For example, I would expect "car" to be distant from porn, but "head" to be fairly close.
To my surprise, using Google images as a metric indicated that all common English words were within 15 images of porn.
This was before they switched to the Javascript image results page, and they may have cleaned up their act a bit, but the results were inescapable - much of the net is centered around porn.
Trekkie had it pegged about right.
Completely agree. I have a theory about the underlying cause, though, and I'm curious as to what you (and others) would think of it:
Love is a meeting of minds, and healthy marriages are based on love. In the most grown-up model of a monogamous relationship, a sexual relationship is a possession of love.
It sounds like these marriages have been put together for the wrong reasons. Perhaps, when men come from a conservative culture where they must find women with whom to get married because there's social pressure to do so, they end up with sub-optimal relationships. At that point, all they have holding their holy matrimony together is a base instinct to pair off and procreate, and a big sign that says "recreational sex = eternal damnation." The traditional family structure puts the woman subservient to the man in pretty much every regard, so to her, he's primarily a ticket towards safety. Complicating this is the pressure to provide a positive environment for any children (which may be merely customary, as in Protestantism, or downright a legal matter, as in other monotheistic Abrahamic religions.) It's not hard to find examples of dirty jokes and other media that affirm these perceptions of the sexes, and the indoctrination seems to come mostly from how people have adapted to accommodate the expectations of traditional institutions. (This is not to say that men only want sex and women only want security; merely that they're encouraged to think that way through many generations of group polarization.)
It would seem to me that all this really proves is that the more rules you put on people, the more likely they are to resent them. The label of 'pornography addiction' is hence utterly pseudo-scientific; it's just a disinterest in the forced baby-generating/baby-protecting relationship brought on by animosity between partners. I would even go so far as to call it a misandrist concept, because escapism through trashy romance novels (the distaff counterpart to cheap pornography) in response to marital stress has been given absolutely no attention.
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Having been married for over 10 years, I've concluded that porn is awesome and keeps some marriages fun and interesting, if not most marriages.
Lack of communication is what's harmful to marriages.
Porn is generally harmless, its the sexual freedom that is perceived by fear filled conservative and sexually introverted religious people that does not work in their definition of normalcy and acceptable behavior, it ruins the artificial and suppressive rules of societal order among men and women. Moderation can be a good thing, but censorship is contrary to freedom of expression and personal liberty.
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