David J. Ley

“But many more people are told today that watching porn makes them a bad person, and it’s something they should be ashamed of. We are told that watching porn is bad for society, women, and women’s role in society. It warps kids’ brains and is destroying all that is beautiful about sex and love. Basically, we are told that every time we watch porn, a baby seal gets strangled with XXX-rated videotape. […] But I believe it is possible to be a gentlemen and watch porn. It’s possible to be an ethical, responsible person and treat oneself and others with dignity and integrity, AND to watch hot, no-holds-barred sex on screen.”

In “Ethical Porn for Dicks” by David J. Ley

Did you hear the one about Hugh Hefner going to his doctor?

Hugh: "Doc - I have a personal problem"
Doc: "What’s up?"
Hugh: "Well, Every day I sleep with three women. When we get up in the morning and after breakfast we do it till lunch time. Then, a spot of lunch followed by a bit more action round the pool. Then we have dinner and usually invite a few friends over for an orgy until about Midnight or so".
Doc: "And what’s the problem?
Hugh: "It hurts when I w*nk"

The war on pornography strikes me as a game authoritarians play ... an ideology of embedding dependence, infantilisation and aversion to risk and pleasure in society. In this case, the problem is not the porn but what makes young males and females so conflicted about sexual representation that one walks out just because another is interested in sexual representation as pleasure. Removing pornography appears now to be necessary to ensure that we remain a sex-negative culture dependent on priests and their social science surrogates. Sad really.

So, I am not saying that I know what is making persons miserable but I am saying that we do not know that it is the porn that is contributing to their misery rather than being a symptom of misery which is only more plausible because we can observe such cases of porn being used to distract from conditions of failed intimacy around us every day. Faced with the impossibility of a desired intimacy on their terms, males will retreat into fantasy, their last refuge from obligations where the balance of power is now firmly in the hands of the 'other'. As with so much ideology, there is a lack of imagination in considering the complexity of human responses to the world. If every man is interested in porn (and the truth is that any man who says he isn't is probably a liar or under the cosh of some external system that has terrified him into submission), then it is a natural thing for men.

Women are being oppressive in demanding that this private vice be eliminated - and indeed oppressive to those women who actively choose under conditions of informed consent and without coercion to provide it. There is much talk of the 'war on women' but this is a 'war on men' - or rather we have a 'war of all on all' instead of an acceptance and respect for difference and desire.

To deny a male and female access to visual erotic stimulation without judgement may be regarded as a form of rape of the soul that, in its creation of an atmosphere of fear and submission, is not dissimilar to the fear of bodily rape that might emerge amongst women because of 'superior' male strength. The tolerance of 'male soul rape' is now embedded in our culture much as tolerance of female bodily rape was tragically embedded in past cultures.

The issue here is not the porn but a culture of judgmentalism and control - once allegedly patriarchal (though always more complex) and now in danger of becoming 'matriarchical' (though far more complex than that because much of this is about class and not gender as it was with prohibition of alcohol in the US in the last century). The issue here is not the research but the use to which the research is put by people of 'in böser Absicht' on the one hand or people of limited intellect and strong conviction on the other.

My thesis (which I think more plausible than that pornography intrinsically causes harm on the basis that there is observable evidence that it causes pleasure without harm in many cases) is that the attempt to control 'vices' misses two points:

1 - that the 'vice' is only a vice if it does harm and the point of universal as opposed to particular harm is unproven; and
2 - that the person engaged in a 'vice' that has harmful consequences has fundamental personal issues on the one hand or is fundamentally oppressed by social conditions on the other so that dealing with personal issues (my 'getting religion' might be one solution) and dealing with oppressive psycho-social conditions should be the focus of interest and not trying to engage in authoritarian social control of what are mere tools.

Authoritarian 'liberalism' creates a cocoon of ideology (much as religion does) which may offer an individual solution but which becomes oppressive when imposed on those who do not have such personal issues and are in control of their desires and are 'self-medicating' the human condition successfully. The extension of the 'self-medication' of the disturbed authoritarian personality to society as a whole merely spreads the disease of ideology outwards.

Ley successfully attempts to define what porn is and actually what it relates to. I agree with him that we need to be more specific than just a reference to this vague nebulous 'thing' since even now nobody really understands what it means. When hearing the term 'porn' people tend to focus on things they don't personally like. Some see it as degradation of the female - others as something emotionless - others as 'disgusting' fetishes that they can't stomach - others as some kind of promotion of violence. All of these are wrong in terms of a definition - they may be part of it, but never the entire picture. There are no boundaries between 'porn' and sex education and 'porn' and art - and even 'porn' and politics and 'porn' and feminism. And perhaps not even 'porn' and the real world. So just what is it people are addicted to so destructively and what particular part of things is causing problems? The question should not be 'is porn harmful', it should be 'what part of porn are we doing wrong? And why?' In the absence of any kind of real exploration or debate like that, most articles don't really add much. There's some interesting points here, but it is let down rather by the all-too-familiar 'postmodern prudery' that surrounds the subject. If one wants to explore the psychology of porn, maybe one should get in there, explore the online communities and 'scenes', the good the bad, and experience firsthand what makes them tick, what good they can do and what damage they can cause. Then maybe we could do more with the subject than just benevolently frown down from on high! Trust me - they know more about it than you do! At the same applies to politicians who want to control something they have no understanding of whatsoever.

I think the one thing you can guarantee about anything sexual is that it is more complex and multilayered than you think. Our relationship with real-world sex is hardly very good, even now, and whenever I read something about 'porn' being harmful I am left wondering just what is doing the harm? Porn or our still phenomenally bad interrelationships with ourselves and others. How do you differentiate the two? What's the cause and what's the symptom? I don't know. Sometimes we can get too damn clever for our own good in seeking to understand the human mind, the good the bad, the light, the darkness. Not unlike Pandora's box, and once out, albeit the seed of an idea, you can't put it back. I just like women, and am content with that.

Millennia ago Socrates thought literacy was the big problem. Of course he might have been right. Literacy might have enabled all sorts of advances because information could be recorded, instructions and orders relayed etc. But pre-literate organised societies with complex cultures meant that people used their brains differently, had to memorise things far more effectively and carefully, for example. And there is no question that the internet, Google, Wikipedia, etc., have produced another shift in the way we function that might not all be positive. But on the other hand it doesn't really matter because in another ten years twitter will have devolved us all to the cultural level of gibbons anyway!… (altro)