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Utah Governor: 'Porn Is a Public Health Crisis' (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Utah Governor Gary Herbert said on his Facebook page: "Pornography is a public health crisis. The problem is rampant, yet it thrives in secrecy and silence." He emitted this thought on signing a resolution which says porn is "a public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms." In addition, it "perpetuates a sexually toxic environment." The resolution doesn't just stop there. It goes on to say "due to advances in technology and the universal availability of the Internet, young children are exposed to what used to be referred to as hard core, but is now considered mainstream, pornography at an alarming rate." The resolution says pornography "equates violence toward women and children with sex and pain with pleasure, which increases the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution, child sexual abuse images, and child pornography." It requests "the need for education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level in order to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the people of our state and nation." In the words of Gov. Gary Herbert, "Today's bills will start an open discussion." I couldn't agree more...
This is just the continuation of the "public health crisis" excuse to ban something people don't agree with. Smoking, Sugary drinks, guns, etc. The slippery slope continues.
That's a bold statement... If he's got proof, I'd like to see it (for free, obviously)
If only we had a way to instruct these children about responsible sexual practices. If only we could gather children together 5 days a week in public buildings and teach them sexual education along with math, science and history to demystify sex so that porn isn't their only reference.
If only...
Another attempt by the far right to legislate its religious morality. Maybe we should call religion a public health crisis. It damages people's ability to think rationally. Porn is like any other film; it's staged. Of course, the right doesn't call action movies a public health crisis, even though they tend to contain plenty of violence; action movies don't violate their religion's morals.
That's a bold statement... If he's got proof, I'd like to see it (for free, obviously)
Science would be great here, although any limitations are going to be severely limited by both the first amendment.
I remember hearing a few years ago that the effects of internet pornography were difficult to study because it is too difficult to find a control group.
Exposure to politicians and their desires to push their own ideals on others is a public health crisis.
WE should outlaw politicians at once!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Utah has the highest consumption rate of porn, and there really hasn't been a good explanation for it.
On the plus side, it's nice to see the religious right taking on the mantle of anti-porn crusaders again from feminist, as the you can only get so far with claims of misogyny.. Erototoxins are where its at.
Unfortunately for him, this discussion already took place in 1969 (snark), via the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Thus far, I haven't heard much in the way to contradict their findings.
And then there is that pesky free speech issue, which regardless of public health problems, the courts haven't seen fit to abridge.
I'll be the first to admit I'm dismayed at the prevalence of porn now, but simply asking people to use more discretion isn't nearly as headline grabbing as claiming porn is a health crisis.
Maybe he can look into why there is such a problem in his own state and get back to us?
Where do these guys come from? Someone must be kicking over the rocks for them to escape into the wild. Why not tackle real issues like hunger, torture, spying on citizens, wars, military budgets, infrastructure, climate change, etc? All he is doing is opening up another rabbit hole for society to run down when we need to put our energy in extinguishing fires that other idiots have started.
And not only Porn! Also:
- Videogames
- Role playing games
- Rock
- Divorces
- Sodomy
- Being black
- Heresy
- Witchcraft
- Barbarian..ism?
Utah Governor: 'Porn Is a Public Health Crisis'
Why would porn cause a pubi-
Oh, public. Never mind.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Can't they just let it go
Given their porn usage, the thing they really can't let go is clearly "it". As it were.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He's purdy much right. In fact, one of my wives swears up & down she'll be taking me to porn addicts anonymous meetings. As soon as she's old enough to drive. In about 3 years. Provided she is pregnant. Again.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
When I hear the word crisis my BS detector goes up. Almost nothing that is described as a crisis nowadays isn't.
In fact to the contrary, the use of hyperbole instead of just-the-facts-madam arguments to make the point betrays that even for the proponent the situation isn't that serious and hence the overreach.
All indications I have show that religion in various forms is a lot worse for your health than porn will ever be. It kills every day, and if it doesn't kill you today, at least causes serious lack of judgement and deformed perception of reality.
Perhaps the Senator should reset his priorities and fix the religion issue first? The world will be a better place without religion, thank you.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I'm not sure if you are Mormon or Protestant, but either way I presume you hold the Bible sacred. My Bible says in I Peter 4:15-16 not to be a busybody or meddler in other people's decisions. It's sort of a well known passage because it's one of only three places that the Bible uses the word "Christian," but somehow I think a lot of people have missed what it says not to do.
Being extremely religious, I take the Bible and this passage extremely seriously. I suggest you do start doing so as well. You're making things difficult for the rest of us.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
They've all been restricted to some extent, with attempts made to expand the restrictions.
The way you can tell if something is actually a public health issue is to figure out if it is a cause or problems or a symptom.
The problem is that sugar is needleslly subsidized so their economic cost isn't realized in their market price. Some consumption of sugar is fine but as a society we've gone WAY beyond what is demonstrably healthy. So over consumption of sugary drinks is a public health crisis because it is a significant factor in obesity, diabetes and other conditions common in the population. Eat too much sugar and you get fat and/or diabetes and/or other illnesses. Cause and effect.
Smoking IS a genuine public health crisis. There are innumerable diseases with clear causal relationships to smoking. It's not even a debate that it is a public health issue. Smoking clearly causes illnesses
Porn is NOT a genuine health crisis. Arguments to that effect are people looking for an excuse to interject their own morality in most cases. At most it is a symptom of people who have genuine mental health issues but the porn isn't the cause. Porn doesn't cause mental health issues but mental health issue might result in porn. You won't make the mental health issue go away by suppressing or removing access to porn. Even nasty stuff like kiddie-porn does not cause mental health problems - it merely shows us where they already exist.
...equates violence toward women and children with sex and pain with pleasure...
Implying....men are the perpetrators, amirite?
I am tired of the implication that all men, everywhere, are just busting at the seams to violate and hurt women and children ( no one seems to imply or care if they hurt each other, after all ), only we don't out of some fear of punishment. That's incredibly disrespectful and sexist towards men AND it infantilizes women. As if neither gender has any agency of self.
It's still sexism if it's against men. Hell, it's sexism even if the men are white.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Interesting article by Dr. Marty Klein (licensed marriage & family therapist and certified sex therapist for over thirty years) who adresses this topic rather well... http://www.skeptic.com/eskepti... ....and yes, there are problems, but no, they are not critical.
I didn't read it either. I just looked at the pictures.
Honestly this is something ISIS would say.
I seem to remember some studies that suggest that porn watching among teenagers *in the US* does in fact tend to bias them towards more extreme activities likely to induce pain, humiliation, etc.
As I recall though, those same studies suggested a much more practical solution - stop treating sexuality as a taboo subject. It's arguably the single most important biological drive, and as that drive gets activated as teenagers hit puberty they're naturally going to seek out information and stimulation. In the US today, that pretty much means pornographic depictions of often dubious activities*, since depictions of healthy, well-adjusted sexuality are banned from general media, and are insufficiently titillating to be the focus of much porn.
*I should clarify that I have nothing against "dubious activities" between consenting adults. But it makes for very poor education of what a healthy baseline sexual relationship looks like.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Conservatives used to declare things to be "immoral" and they could mess with people's lives to their hearts' content. That doesn't work anymore. But the left came up with something much better: declare something a "health crisis", and all of a sudden anything goes. As a bonus, many feminists have the same screwed up views of pornography as Mormons.
Coffee is also addictive, and the Mormons have banned the consumption of Caffeine.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
most nudity that is porn portrays abusive behavior and feeds a need in the viewer that probably is not healthy.
People are horny whether or not they have access to porn. "Portrays abusive behavior"? In some cases sure but the porn isn't the cause, it is the result.
I've done a lot of counseling sessions with people whose relationships and lives were ruined by the persons addiction to porn.
Addiction is a real problem but it doesn't follow that porn = public health crisis because some people cannot manage their libido effectively. Alcoholism is a disease but that doesn't make alcohol a public health problem. It makes alcoholism a public health problem. See the difference? Alcohol consumed responsibly is a non-problem. Alcohol consumed to excess routinely and/or in an irresponsible manner (i.e. alcoholism) is a problem.
Seriously, this is a Mormon lawmaker trying to legislate his own morality on others. Let's not pretend there is any credibility to calling this a public health crisis because it isn't.
I have yet to do a single one where sugary drinks, for example, caused it.
And exactly how do you get to the conclusion that obesity and diabetes are conditions best treated by counseling?
The resolution says pornography "equates violence toward women and children with sex and pain with pleasure, which increases the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution, child sexual abuse images, and child pornography."
I don't know which sites the Governor has been sampling, but my tastes are much more tame.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
I'm not sure your position is supported by recent publications. While I agree that people define "baseline" - the current concern is that teenagers are looking to porn as "what normal is." Teenagers make up their own truth in the absence of education. For example "you can't get pregnant the first time" ... etc.
I read an article recently that young women (girls) are being "trained" by young men (boys). Boys are watching porn and they expect girls to behave the same way. Girls want to be part of the in-club and are adapting - convincing themselves (for example) that oral sex isn't sex. Free to do it at will without consequence. They are not developing a healthy relationship with sex. Other forms of sex are now entering this new base-line. Forms that girls don't really want to do - but again adapt to remain in the club.
There are fears that STDs will rise because these "new" baseline forms of sex aren't considered problematic by teens - and therefore aren't protecting themselves....because of the "you can't get pregnant" line of reasoning.
My point is that teens may not be choosing their own baseline. Peer pressure is forcing unhealthy choices on them. You can't drink until 21, some states are proposing "can't smoke" until 21. Well thought out reasoning is not a skill teens have ;-)
Teaching our young what "healthy" looks like is probably the place to start. Okay - maybe parents not literally teaching them. Open the dialog and remove the taboo.
So far, most of the declarations which have been made public as to what "healthy baseline sexual relationship" means that I have encountered have been not so much simply wrong, as ludicrously stupid and profoundly wrongheaded.
The way I see it is this: Informed consent between the actual parties to the act(s.) That's it. That's all of it.
As soon as some wag wants to intervene without those parties consent, now there really is a problem that can realistically be defined as anti "healthy baseline sexual relationship."
We have an additional problem because we use an arbitrary "line in the sand" in a (inevitably doomed to failure) attempt to assign informed status in a completely arbitrary manner. Imagine if we said "at 16, you magically become ready to drive a car, here's the keys, see you on the freeway." The problems would be epic. That's exactly how we "manage" sexuality. We don't care if you are informed, we just up and claim you are because magic beans or fairy dust or something. And, of course, the resulting problems are similarly epic.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Hmm... How do you know the kid next door's porn viewing habits?!? Or is that a euphemism for you and you just don't want to admit you whack of to porn?
Dude, we're pretty much all guys here and we all know the internet was built for porn. I don't know anyone who actually watches porn for the good acting and I suspect they all sit around whacking off while watching porn. Sort if...
See, I did have a couple of friends who had a porn video playing, all the time, in their VCR. They'd even acquired a movie rewinder from a video store. They both had girlfriends but neither of the girlfriends lived with them. They both lived off-base and even had porn playing when they had their girlfriends over or company over. I don't recall there ever being a time when I was there that they did not have a video playing for any significant length of time and it was always porn. They'd both been in for a number of years and had traveled a lot by then, so they'd amassed a huge porn collection between the two of them.
I have no idea what happened to them or their vast stores of porn. This was before the days of the internet for regular people. I'd not be remotely surprised to find out that they somehow were still living the same sort of lifestyle with now mountainous volumes of porn on everything from laser disk to flash media storage. They both expected to do their full 20 and bounce so they'd have a fairly decent pension and might even have lined their walls with LCDs and have a whole room of porn.
I don't believe either of them ever had any family come to visit them, they were both from up near Ohio, Michigan, or something like that. I don't think they were gay or the likes - they routinely had females and were dating people. The porn never stopped playing and it wasn't gay porn or the likes. I'm honestly not sure if they'd have turned off the porn and "cleaned up their act" if they'd had family come down to visit. It was really one of the more unusual circumstances I've been in and I've been in some pretty fucked up circumstances.
It was just what they watched. They often had the sound turned down and the radio on and would actively pay attention and give a running commentary or pretend dialogue - almost like the MST3k stuff only predating that show. They'd do so as a matter of dialogue between them, complete with sound effects or mimicking the typical porn music background noises. I should also mention that they were frequently drunk but I'm not sure that had any impact on their choice of video.
As near as I know, they did not sit around and whack off while watching porn. They're the exception that proves the rule, I guess. It really was a rather odd experience but you just got used to it after a while. I was also often drunk when I visited. Actually, I want to say that I was drunk every time I went to their apartment or soon after getting to their apartment. Titties and beer, I guess.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The AMA and other medical professionals and groups have been dealing with porn for years now and they are anything other than religious. Porn is real and is more than nude pictures. Equating the two is a bit like saying a Star Wars and a snuff film are synonymous because people die in both of them.
As for all of the things you list as being the results of Mormonism being an oppressive religion, that would seem to be a simple experiment to design. Do other states that are not dominated by Mormonism have greater or lessor incidences of these things. Well, Utah is ranked 43 in teen pregnancies with 48 per 1,000. That would seem to be that if Mormonism does not encourage the practice. What about depression? Again, Utah ranks in the lower third of states. In both cases, the States one tends to think of as poor tend to have the highest incidences of both teen pregnancy and depression, so it would appear that socio-economic factors are more to blame than religion. Mormonism may have its problems, but Utah, the only state with a large percentage of Mormons, is just the most recent state to come out against pornography. There are 29 others, none of which have identified religious oppression as part of the cause.
I would suggest, with all due respect, that based on your own admission of being an "ex-Mormon" that you still have a lot of baggage to deal with and it is coloring your perspective
Burdens of proof do not work that way! Goodnight!
Mormonism is designed to be a demanding religion, which many do not appreciates. But many do follow the religious tenants do to the influence it has on us.
It is a gross exaggeration to imply that most people have a bad the experience in the Church of Jesus Christ. Similarly, though based on facts, your statements about Joseph Smith and early Utah are exaggerations with no context. It is a shame that your experience with Mormonism left you so bitter, but hanging out on exmormon.org can't improve your perspective.
I don't agree with calling pornography a public health crisis; it would be more honest to label it a widespread moral failing. But it is similarly incorrect to pretend that differences in moral values don't impact the other members of our society. We have a democratic process to resolve such differences. You undermine useful discussion when you label those who disagree with you as cultists or to misrepresent their viewpoints.