Boils, Blindness and other Blarney - 9 Anti-Porn Myths Debunked
Porn, and the people who make it, are far from perfect, but theres 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.
Here are nine answers to nine common accusations it's not worth losing one of your nine lives over.
1. Porn harms children
This argument takes two forms. Firstly, that children exposed to sexual material are harmed by it. This is doubtful.
Are children harmed by seeing images that distress them? Of course. Are images of sexual pleasure distressing? No. Should any child be seeing images they cant comprehend and might upset them? Probably not.
When I was six I thought women got pregnant when men took a pee inside them (it made sense at the time). If Id have seen an image of a man ejaculating I would have asked what all that white stuff was, but the image wouldnt have distressed me. Why should it?
Of course theres porn that contains images of degredation and fetish-play that are entirely unsuitable for young kids, but thats got nothing to do with the sex in the images. A pair of exposed breasts in a picture of bound woman being whipped are probably the least harmful things in the photo.
The other argument is that child pornography is connected to pornography and therefore all pornography somehow promotes the abuse of children. This is fatuous.
Child pornography is a record of child abuse. That most children who suffer abuse arent photographed doesnt make their abuse any more acceptable. Child abuse satisfies the urges of pedophiles, and a pedophile with a camera is no more a pornographer, than a murderer with a camera is a film director.
The idea that pornographers dont mind seeing children being abused is a myth. The idea that people who film child abuse are the same people who make and sell mainstream porn is a lie.
2. Porn breaks up families
This argument is always supported with anecdotal evidence and anecdotes arent 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 heres 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 theyre fact. They have them for drugs, homosexuality, porn and anything else theyve 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 thats its purpose. Organizations that seek to control people know that scared people follow anyone who can show them a way out of the fear theyve been sold. The National Socialists are the classic example, they argued that Jews are bad, well handle the Jews, now do as you're told or the Jews are going to get you.
Never believe anyone whos using psychology that Adolf Hitler was fond of.
3. 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 youll see that most peoples morals are infinitely flexible.
Theyll tell you that observing speed limits near schools, not over-eating and helping people in need are moral, but only behave that way when its convenient for them.
Porn is worth $10B a year in the US alone. If the moral standards of our society say porn is wrong wheres the money coming from?
4. 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 dont 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.
5. 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. The high profile arrests of paedophiles using the Internet are notable for almost never involving the commercial sex industry. Its always Feds arresting men who respond to entrapment operations. Theyre 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.
People love to see paedophiles busted of course. Parents are being told that the internet is full of sexual predators and its 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 theres not a demand for it which makes the risk worthwhile to those whod try. The child pornography that is produced is made by and for perverts wholl use any technology they think will allow them to remain anonymous.
The other crime which porn gets blamed for is rape. This falls down with the understanding that porn doesnt create desire, it reflects it. If porn could turn people into rapists it could also turn straight men gay and gay men straight. It doesnt.
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.
6. Porn is for perverts
With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyones 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. Hes 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, porns not a niche interest.
7. 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 isnt 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 cant define porn, you cant legislate against it.
So can we define it?
The word pornography is derived from Greek, who defined it as writing about prostitutes. Thats 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.
Thats 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.
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 Bill Hicks Sounds like every ad on TV to me.
Thats why defining pornography is a fools errand and well 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 todays Maxim magazine to the launch issue of Playboy.
8. Porn spreads STDs
The rate of STDs 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 its 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, youd 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 theyre infecting the public with cooties is unfounded.
9. 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 theres 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.
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.
Here are nine answers to nine common accusations it's not worth losing one of your nine lives over.
1. Porn harms children
This argument takes two forms. Firstly, that children exposed to sexual material are harmed by it. This is doubtful.
Are children harmed by seeing images that distress them? Of course. Are images of sexual pleasure distressing? No. Should any child be seeing images they cant comprehend and might upset them? Probably not.
When I was six I thought women got pregnant when men took a pee inside them (it made sense at the time). If Id have seen an image of a man ejaculating I would have asked what all that white stuff was, but the image wouldnt have distressed me. Why should it?
Of course theres porn that contains images of degredation and fetish-play that are entirely unsuitable for young kids, but thats got nothing to do with the sex in the images. A pair of exposed breasts in a picture of bound woman being whipped are probably the least harmful things in the photo.
The other argument is that child pornography is connected to pornography and therefore all pornography somehow promotes the abuse of children. This is fatuous.
Child pornography is a record of child abuse. That most children who suffer abuse arent photographed doesnt make their abuse any more acceptable. Child abuse satisfies the urges of pedophiles, and a pedophile with a camera is no more a pornographer, than a murderer with a camera is a film director.
The idea that pornographers dont mind seeing children being abused is a myth. The idea that people who film child abuse are the same people who make and sell mainstream porn is a lie.
2. Porn breaks up families
This argument is always supported with anecdotal evidence and anecdotes arent 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 heres 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 theyre fact. They have them for drugs, homosexuality, porn and anything else theyve 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 thats its purpose. Organizations that seek to control people know that scared people follow anyone who can show them a way out of the fear theyve been sold. The National Socialists are the classic example, they argued that Jews are bad, well handle the Jews, now do as you're told or the Jews are going to get you.
Never believe anyone whos using psychology that Adolf Hitler was fond of.
3. 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 youll see that most peoples morals are infinitely flexible.
Theyll tell you that observing speed limits near schools, not over-eating and helping people in need are moral, but only behave that way when its convenient for them.
Porn is worth $10B a year in the US alone. If the moral standards of our society say porn is wrong wheres the money coming from?
4. 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 dont 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.
5. 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. The high profile arrests of paedophiles using the Internet are notable for almost never involving the commercial sex industry. Its always Feds arresting men who respond to entrapment operations. Theyre 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.
People love to see paedophiles busted of course. Parents are being told that the internet is full of sexual predators and its 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 theres not a demand for it which makes the risk worthwhile to those whod try. The child pornography that is produced is made by and for perverts wholl use any technology they think will allow them to remain anonymous.
The other crime which porn gets blamed for is rape. This falls down with the understanding that porn doesnt create desire, it reflects it. If porn could turn people into rapists it could also turn straight men gay and gay men straight. It doesnt.
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.
6. Porn is for perverts
With 800 million videos being sold and rented in North America each year either porn is loved by everyone, or everyones 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. Hes 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, porns not a niche interest.
7. 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 isnt 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 cant define porn, you cant legislate against it.
So can we define it?
The word pornography is derived from Greek, who defined it as writing about prostitutes. Thats 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.
Thats 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.
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 Bill Hicks Sounds like every ad on TV to me.
Thats why defining pornography is a fools errand and well 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 todays Maxim magazine to the launch issue of Playboy.
8. Porn spreads STDs
The rate of STDs 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 its 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, youd 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 theyre infecting the public with cooties is unfounded.
9. 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 theres 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.
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