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Well, you could argue that widespread porn has massive implications on how people think about other people. I mean, why is it normal that we as a society priori

Well, you could argue that widespread porn has massive implications on how people think about other people. I mean, why is it normal that we as a society prioritize access to porn so much ? Why is it possible, in under 5 seconds probably, see even the most hardcore act of non-humanizing act of sexual expression that we can imagine ? Can this be good for the general thought process of humans, that you get to grow up with these very visual images of adults having sex that is so far fetched from what making love actually can be between two people ? At least for me personally it has taken a lot of willpower not to look at porn anymore, and I'm willing to admit it. I wish the children wouldn't have access to porn where ever they go. I mean, why is this not an issue ? Is is it because we are afraid to admit that watching porn can cause issues in our thinking ? How it objectifies women, and how these visual images can take up our thinking during the day, how these overly tuned sexual images actually can hijack our thinking and focus on only lust and sexual thoughts all the time, thinking about the woman on the street as a object to be used rather than an person? And what about the effects porn can have on the self worth of men, who are looking to perform like these actors on the screen and compare themselves to them when making love ? I have a hard time understanding why porn is being normalized, why we as a society are not thinking about the negative effects it has on our society, especially young people who are now growing up with this content available from every device they choose to use. There are many psychological issues related to watching porn and also there is the issue of having to resist the urge during the day if you have ever started the habit, I mean you can access it from anywhere, you just have to google and there you are. I wish there would be some moral compass when it comes to working to porn companies, or talking about porn, or supporting this idea that porn is just part of everyday life, when in fact it is far for a healthy thing to be thinking about. Of course, there are sides to this, maybe porn can reduce the amount of rapes and non-conforming sexual acts, but those should be considered morally wrong anyway and guided towards educating our children to restraining their urges towards that anyway. It kinda irks me that in this discussion also porn is just seen as something very normal, when in reality for example 30 years ago porn was not everywhere. Now it is just couple of clicks away, and your mind can be filled with people gagging stuff down other peoples throats, people being choked, violent acts of sex and all kinds of impossible beauty standards to fill. Imagine showing these acts to a five year old and what is going on in his mind while he watches this ? Imagine a 10 year old obsessively thinking about the act he saw, and not being able to forget it, as it is triggering something very primal in his still developing mind ? Image thinking that is normal, and that is how you treat people. To me, this is just a sign of a sick society, and we should as parents and people who are aware talk about the harmful sides of widespread normalization of porn. It is not allright. If you are working on porn, you are causing possible millions of people to possible get hooked into this act of loosing their vitality (sexual energy) in front of their devices every day. This is a fact. This is a direct loss in creativity also, in yogic traditions creativity is considered to be coming from the sexual energy, so everyday we are loosing so much creativity to the fact that people are just jacking off to virtual images. And I'm not even touching the widespread and common abuse of young women entering the field, possible traumatizing them for life, when thinking that a porn actress career would be something to pursue. And this is all because companies like PornHub don't just care, all they care about is making a profit in the end from ad revenues, by trying to maximize profit on the weak willedness of their viewers. To me, that is immoral and something that should not be supported. PornHub acts like they're all cool and that, and it's hip to view porn, but actually they are just a hightech pimp selling to the lowest common denominator and taking advantage of people in the process. I hope everyone who works for the porn industry, thinks about their actions and what consequences it ultimately can have on our society. Anyway, that is just my view on this, hoping that this will spark some thoughts on the subject. I have recovered from porn addiction, and I am more happy because of that. But it is just a few clicks away, and sometimes I still have to struggle with these thoughts taking over.

uxcolumbo 6y ago
Thanks for sharing your views and you raise a lot of good points. I'm no expert in this - but maybe a first good step would be to introduce some kind of rating system for porn, just like movies have. As with other things in our lives - porn is also on a spectrum. For example: - Clips showing sensual sexual exchange between 2 people = safe - Clips showing 10inch phalluses being rammed down your various orifices = probably needs a disclaimer that it's not reflecting the real world. Regarding kids watching this stuff - I also wonder what this does to their brain development. And regarding self-worth of men - if you promote the more realistic view of sex then porn can be educational, e.g. learning how to satisfy your sex partner. You bring up yogic traditions - again not an expert in this, but didn't some yogis show how to elevate your creativity via tantric yoga? But I think we can all agree (well not all, as is apparent from all the down-votes of the GP comment) that exploitation and abuse in porn is bad and hence why we shouldn't support companies that are not serious about eliminating this.
- inDigiNeous 6y ago
  Thanks for commenting and sharing your views too. A rating system and some kind of system that would allow consumers to limit what kind of porn can be viewed from their devices would be something I would think would be made compulsory in the future hopefully. Not so familiar with tantric traditions, but still that is something more coming closer to elevating your creativity and vital energy through sexual acts, than just releasing it that porn is encouraging people to do. If you think about this from a deeper perspective, porn is taking a lot of power away from our young men, so maybe it is a good thing to some parties to keep porn available, so people would not have their strength to themselves to resist control structures. But this is just a thought. We should not support, and yet, pornhub probably makes millions from their exploitative acts.
waterhouse 6y ago
Some thoughts: - What do you think about violence in games and video? Violence is probably just as primal as sex, and I think most of what you say could be applied to violent media. Normalization of violence? 10-year-olds seeing extreme acts of violence and thinking obsessively about them? Energy and creativity being spent on violent games? Exploiting game programmers (I'm not kidding here, there's quite a reputation for long hours, low pay, and burnout)? - maybe porn can reduce the amount of rapes and non-conforming sexual acts, but those should be considered morally wrong anyway and guided towards educating our children to restraining their urges towards that anyway. I think almost everyone learns that rape is immoral. A small fraction of people either don't care about morals, find some moral excuse for what they want to do, or have some kind of compulsion. For those who don't care, I think there is evidence that (at least some) psychopathy is caused by certain parts of the brain just not not working; about moral excuses, I would guess it takes the form "they deserve it" (some perceived injustice) or possibly "they will or should end up enjoying it"; compulsions are compulsions. I don't think there is reason to think that more education is likely to help. Some people resort to chemical castration of sex offenders, presumably because nothing else has seemed very effective. - Many specific complaints don't apply to particular kinds of porn. Consider an exhibitionist young woman who takes pictures or video of herself stripping and masturbating, and posts it on a free site. There's no gagging, violence, impossible beauty standard (assuming it's a relatively average young woman), no comparing oneself to the actor (assuming the consumer is male), no taking advantage of people. If the objection is specifically that some things are too extreme for young people to see (you mention 5-10 year olds here), well, fair enough. Films can get rated "R" for violence, too. Not that age is the universal metric, though; there are 10-year-olds who can watch a bloody stabbing and 20-year-olds who can't. (Also, people's ideas of what children can handle are kind of screwy. Hansel and Gretel, a tale for children, contains: attempted cannibalism, attempted murder of children (including abandoning one's own children to die in the woods), and burning someone to death. Thanks to Asimov for pointing this out.) To that, I'd mainly recommend good and not-misleading labeling of things. In fact, if you want to minimize the chance that twelve-year-old boys end up accidentally watching extreme porn, then a good way to do that would seem to be to create a very popular porn site that has only nice, vanilla, missionary-position sex between consenting adults (or whatever)—or which puts all its more extreme stuff in an area labeled "extreme" or some such. I would say something resembling this is done to a limited extent: Pornhub in particular says they don't allow "rape, snuff, torture, death, violence". Perhaps you'd prefer the "default offering" to be much more vanilla than that. But it sounds like you also object to adults having unlimited access to porn. Well... I'm just going to disagree there: I think it helps people sublimate unfulfilled sex urges in a harmless way; and if one group of people peacefully decide to use a camera they own to produce data that they peacefully provide to others, then I don't like the idea of laws preventing that. Regarding addiction, I don't think most addicts to, say, alcohol would advocate that everyone should be prevented from accessing it, even if that would make it easier for them to stay off of it.

uxcolumbo 6y ago

Thanks for sharing your views and you raise a lot of good points. I'm no expert in this - but maybe a first good step would be to introduce some kind of rating system for porn, just like movies have. As with other things in our lives - porn is also on a spectrum. For example: - Clips showing sensual sexual exchange between 2 people = safe - Clips showing 10inch phalluses being rammed down your various orifices = probably needs a disclaimer that it's not reflecting the real world. Regarding kids watching this stuff - I also wonder what this does to their brain development. And regarding self-worth of men - if you promote the more realistic view of sex then porn can be educational, e.g. learning how to satisfy your sex partner. You bring up yogic traditions - again not an expert in this, but didn't some yogis show how to elevate your creativity via tantric yoga? But I think we can all agree (well not all, as is apparent from all the down-votes of the GP comment) that exploitation and abuse in porn is bad and hence why we shouldn't support companies that are not serious about eliminating this.

inDigiNeous 6y ago
Thanks for commenting and sharing your views too. A rating system and some kind of system that would allow consumers to limit what kind of porn can be viewed from their devices would be something I would think would be made compulsory in the future hopefully. Not so familiar with tantric traditions, but still that is something more coming closer to elevating your creativity and vital energy through sexual acts, than just releasing it that porn is encouraging people to do. If you think about this from a deeper perspective, porn is taking a lot of power away from our young men, so maybe it is a good thing to some parties to keep porn available, so people would not have their strength to themselves to resist control structures. But this is just a thought. We should not support, and yet, pornhub probably makes millions from their exploitative acts.

waterhouse 6y ago

Some thoughts: - What do you think about violence in games and video? Violence is probably just as primal as sex, and I think most of what you say could be applied to violent media. Normalization of violence? 10-year-olds seeing extreme acts of violence and thinking obsessively about them? Energy and creativity being spent on violent games? Exploiting game programmers (I'm not kidding here, there's quite a reputation for long hours, low pay, and burnout)? - maybe porn can reduce the amount of rapes and non-conforming sexual acts, but those should be considered morally wrong anyway and guided towards educating our children to restraining their urges towards that anyway. I think almost everyone learns that rape is immoral. A small fraction of people either don't care about morals, find some moral excuse for what they want to do, or have some kind of compulsion. For those who don't care, I think there is evidence that (at least some) psychopathy is caused by certain parts of the brain just not not working; about moral excuses, I would guess it takes the form "they deserve it" (some perceived injustice) or possibly "they will or should end up enjoying it"; compulsions are compulsions. I don't think there is reason to think that more education is likely to help. Some people resort to chemical castration of sex offenders, presumably because nothing else has seemed very effective. - Many specific complaints don't apply to particular kinds of porn. Consider an exhibitionist young woman who takes pictures or video of herself stripping and masturbating, and posts it on a free site. There's no gagging, violence, impossible beauty standard (assuming it's a relatively average young woman), no comparing oneself to the actor (assuming the consumer is male), no taking advantage of people. If the objection is specifically that some things are too extreme for young people to see (you mention 5-10 year olds here), well, fair enough. Films can get rated "R" for violence, too. Not that age is the universal metric, though; there are 10-year-olds who can watch a bloody stabbing and 20-year-olds who can't. (Also, people's ideas of what children can handle are kind of screwy. Hansel and Gretel, a tale for children, contains: attempted cannibalism, attempted murder of children (including abandoning one's own children to die in the woods), and burning someone to death. Thanks to Asimov for pointing this out.) To that, I'd mainly recommend good and not-misleading labeling of things. In fact, if you want to minimize the chance that twelve-year-old boys end up accidentally watching extreme porn, then a good way to do that would seem to be to create a very popular porn site that has only nice, vanilla, missionary-position sex between consenting adults (or whatever)—or which puts all its more extreme stuff in an area labeled "extreme" or some such. I would say something resembling this is done to a limited extent: Pornhub in particular says they don't allow "rape, snuff, torture, death, violence". Perhaps you'd prefer the "default offering" to be much more vanilla than that. But it sounds like you also object to adults having unlimited access to porn. Well... I'm just going to disagree there: I think it helps people sublimate unfulfilled sex urges in a harmless way; and if one group of people peacefully decide to use a camera they own to produce data that they peacefully provide to others, then I don't like the idea of laws preventing that. Regarding addiction, I don't think most addicts to, say, alcohol would advocate that everyone should be prevented from accessing it, even if that would make it easier for them to stay off of it.