Rogue Keeper on 30/5/2007 at 13:37
fett: Finally someone attempted to bring up a serious assesment based on first-hand experience! I thought I'll never see one.
mopgoblin:
Good, but I think you have omitted one of my points : making porn affects not only the persons involved, but it also affects the viewer.
There would be nothing wrong with people being submissive or dominant by nature in their natural sexual life, unless I guess it reaches the point of extreme sadism or masochism, which would indicate some psychic disorder. But the prosess of virtual depiction of sexual act (in which one person is dominant and the other submissive) in the media is very derivative of reality circumstances not important for the viewer. For him or her, not involved in that act, his perception of that act in porn is completely depersonalized, detached of complex set of personal feelings of the people involved - not only towards each other on the scene, but also to circumstances and reasons of why they do what they do. There is very little emotional feedback from what we see on the scene, and even the feedback in form of what they pretend to feel can be fake. Our care for feelings of the objects of our electronic voyeurims goes to deeply to backround - thinking about it would interrupt the process of transmission of sexual stimulations from the medium to our brain, interrupt our brain's cooperation with the medium, in this case for a sole goal - satisfaction of basic instinct.
The person in charge of production of porn shapes the material to reach the desired effect on viewer - that is sexual excitement, he cuts out unimportant parts of the material which may be not dramatically important to reach that effect, he adds stimulating music, chooses setting and fictitious story, edits the original track - everything is subordinated to reach sexual excitement in the desired target audience. This way porn seriously distorts real human sexual life, and of course it affects how people perceive sexual life of other individuals, what examples and expectations they take from it, how do we socialize, how do we approach other people and various situations in our life, including sex. Media are very subtly educative, far beyond the point we are willing to admit to ourselves.
Role-playing is also supposed to look as real as possible. Just like any other fictitious movie. Afterall, actors and movie makers can learn to behave profesionally, they can smile when asked to, they can cry when askedto, they can moan when asked to. What's a porn movie? A tale for adults. A dream of ideal sexual reality. But people expect that tale to look as real as possible, otherwise it wouldn‘ have desired effect on them, they can easily recognize when something is fake - and if they do, fake image of reality is over.
Porn works only thanks to our ability of empathy supression. Porn in the media actually induces the supression of empaty in us - and by deciding to watch porn, we cooperate with it. More willingly or less - differs case from case.
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I'd be careful with that word, even if you're using it in the technical sense. There's plenty of debate over what should constitute a paraphilia, and indeed whether it's a meaningful notion at all in relation to consensual behaviour. Go back about thirty years, and homosexuality would generally be considered a paraphilia.
Yes, I'd be careful with that word as well. I think we shall leave it to psychiatry to consider where would be the unclear borders of healthy sexual behavior. But I'm not talking about situation before 30 years, neither predicting what comes in the future. The „sanctioning“ of homosexuality is a result of wide consensus in psychiatric community which has took a long time, but you can't expect such sanctioning would necessarily happen in case of most other forms of paraphilia.
According to the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the activity must be the sole means of sexual gratification for a period of six months, and either cause "clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" or involve a violation of consent to be diagnosed as a paraphilia. Debate about paraphilia in psychiatric community is certainly interesting to watch, but I think we have no other choice but to hold on the actual consensus in psychiatric community.
The fact that some specific kinds of porno are produced for audience with sadistic/masochistic, fetishist, frotteurist, pedophilic, voyeuristic or exhibitionist tendencies is, I think, beyond the point of discussion. But mild examples of such behaviors (and other more rare paraphilic forms) can be found also in mainstream, not undreground-only production.
Certainly not every paraphilic case is equally socially dangerous - one person can control his/her small deviation quite good better and practice it only in privacy and with consent of partner, another person can't control his/her sexual paraphilic behavior so well. Certain level of exhibitionism and voyeurism is a natural part of sexual seduction and would enrich sex life between partners. Problem with healthy sex life would begin when a person is beyond the point where he/she can't reach satisfaction in any other way and finds pleasure only in radicalization of certain behavior.
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Yeah, you can't really stop people from getting at porn if they're sufficiently determined. I'm not sure it's a good idea to try too hard in any case. Best bet is probably to make sure the "tasteful erotica" you mentioned earlier is somewhat more readily available than the nastier stuff (so they'll discover the tasteful stuff first), and to provide decent sex education that covers all aspects of sex, rather than just a few hours explaining contraception and STDs.
I would completely agree. I had luck to come into contact with the more tasteful stuff in my early teens (and of course I was curious just like every teenager), but now I'm thankful that harder forms of porn didn't have a chance to deform me. I remember though that my later first contact with hardcore was rather nauseous (more mentally than physically, I thought „That's unbelievable, why are these people doing this [acting in such degrading thing] to themselves ?“), fortunately I didn‘t have an easy access to such material and now I'm thankful.
Quality sexual education is of course important. Teenagers should be advised how to approach eventual exposition to pornography. I don't want to get into argument whether it should be left on the family or school right here. I personally received only marginal sexual education at home (if I asked, the answers would naturally come, but I prefered other sources) and almost none in school, but my own curiosity about sexuality was the best teacher. Even though it sometimes looked practically that I was reading forensic psychiatry handbook on paraphilias at the moment when my friends were seducing girls in clubs - but that was more because of my interest in criminology.
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I don't think prostitution is a particularly common outcome of using pornography (if so, there'd be a lot more prostitutes around). Besides, I'm not sure prostitution is inherently bad when it's legalised and properly regulated to minimise abuse. Sex tourism seems rather more abusive, but again I'm not sure it's a common consequence of pornography.
Some kinds of porn (more of the amateur sort than high-profile pron of the Playboy kind) reguraly shows girls being asked to strip and have intercourse for money. This is typical for gonzo porn. The producer and seducer in one person with camera may ask a „random“ woman on the street what she would be willing to do for certain amount of money. The woman on the street in most cases is not random, she may have been hired after regular casting, signed a legal contract, received a legal payment. But not necessarily in all cases. Then the scenario demands her to do this „as if“ performance. This may easily make impression that porn is actually a great business and prostitution (in service of pornography or not) is a quick&cool way how to regularly earn handful cash. You can imagine the consequences it may have on young people while their early decisions about what to do for living in the society are still in undecisive development. A psychologist Eva Vanickova from the Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague has made a study revealing that since mid-90s, tolerance of Czech college students to commercial sex has heightened considerably. : According to a survey the 3rd Medical faculty of Charles University in Prague conducted last year on 1200 students of the last years of secondary schools in Prague, about 4 percent of 19 year old female students and 2 percent of 19 year old male students had taken money for sex. One quarter of young women said they could imagine commercial sex as a solution to a possible difficult financial situation. The same possibility was conceded by one third of young men. Vanickova said the young generation make money through sex also because they do not want to give up higher living standards that the media present to them as a standard level. Many of them don't consider commercial escorting services which include expected sex as a form of prostitution anymore.
( (
http://www.praguemonitor.com/en/26/czech_national_news/1522/) )
Prostitution itself is of course immortal, it was here before mass media age porno, and I'm not completely against the idea of it's legalization, even though it brings out some new issues. Promiscuity is natural, but people do it for pleasure and in seek for love and most importantly they make decisions about their partners. Promiscuity for material or financial gain is, however, sad in all cases - a person is reduced to mere product and if she/he wants to earn, for him/herself or for her/his employer, she/he has little choice in being picky about customers.
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I don't think much of bullshit celebrity culture or the tendency to use sex to advertise just about any product ever devised, but they're only part of the problem, and I don't really see any strong connections/similarities to porn.
The whole image of sex in media is of course an issue not limited only to porno, but then porno is also inevitable part of virtual, ideal and often distorted world which media show us. However celebrity lifestyle (or alternatively „high society lifestyle“) is often being depicted in pornography. To what faithful measure, is an open question - it may be misleading. But a representant of a different social class can make either a false image of high-society sex life or get an impresion that misbehavior of it's members, „who don't know what to do with themselves“, is worth to be followed.
A real and faithful portrait of high society sex life is not pornography, rather a document with different aims than pure sexual excitement. Recently I had a chance to watch a film about rise and fall of a fictitious pornstar during 1970s/80s and I liked how smartly the film balanced between bitter comedy, biography and faithful portrait of sex industry. The film was far from being cheaply moralist, but it greatly described the tragicomic nature of porn business and celebrity lifestyle connected with it. And get this - the funniest thing was that it was being advertised in TV program schedule as an „erotic movie.“
