I'm increasingly alarmed with the degree to which internet porn is considered normal, acceptable, and good. In particular, people talking about it on irc. People that seem, otherwise, to be perfectly well adjusted and respectable. However, I've also heard porn discussed at technical conferences as though looking at porn online was a fundamental part of being male, and that there's no real difference from, say, reading the news or checking your stocks. From the platform. I think that the speakers in question were just trying to play to the crowd, but that says something as well. What alarms me is that there is no longer any social stigma attached to it. When people make comments about their own pornography habits without any trace of shame, it tells me something about their assumptions about me, the world, morality, etc.
Perhaps these attitudes about pornography predate the internet, and I was just unaware of them. Perhaps our culture at large really sees pornography as a completely acceptable form of entertainment. Perhaps I'm just old fashioned (something to which I readily admit, with some pride). But I find this attitude to be shocking and unacceptable. Pornography is an addiction, and a sickness. It is an industry that exploits people on both sides of the camera. The culture that accepts it as normal, acceptable, and even healthy behavior has its priorities turned around to an alarming degree.
On a related note, the degree to which porn is marketed to me, ever day, hundreds of times a day, via spam, is a further indication that this is just assumed to be ok. The fact that porn web sites are available in such enormous numbers (evidenced by the results almost every time I mistype a URL) is an indication that there are customers to be had, in their thousands or millions.
So, if you find my views on this matter vaguely archaic, I can only reply that archaic is good, in many, if not most, contexts. (Please reference the "Smarter People Than Me" criteria.) If you take offence when I refuse to help you with your Apache configuration issues, having found out that it is for a porn site, please take it personally - you are involved in an industry that is despicable, and this rubs off on you. If you find that I bounce every piece of email you try to send to me, or users on my servers, perhaps it is because you, or your ISP, or someone on your ISP, is distributing pornography, either via their web site, or via unsolicited email. And if you make pornograpy-related jokes on IRC, and I seem not to get it, it's because it wasn't funny.
Hi i absolutely agree wtih you about porno,i have a friend that is really addicted to barely legal female porn and it disgusts me, even though i have commented on his behaviour, he says its normal and his right,(his girlfriend is not impressed) and i cant say i blame her.He even says that he has not got a problem!I think he does!Anyway just thought i'd reply as i feel when will it ever end with this in society,Regards Gary
Is this site still active? I note the posting is from 2003. Pornography is, as you say, becoming more mainstream. It is a vicious time waster with no redeaming value, similar to any other addition that causes excess behavior. It will extract the artistic and romantic nature out of any relationship. Just like all Television and film, we have come to be victums of the media. How can you be creative to your significant other when your attention is on lewd acts with strangers.
Porn is socially acceptable because the media is keen on showing women with barely there clothing. The envelope keeps geeting pushed, and eventually network television will be airing soft core porn. People who view pornography as innocent need to take a hard look at themselves. Objectifying women is not acceptable. If the american public thinks it is perfectly fine to watch a man sodomize a women as she cries and screams then this culture is in need of an intervention!
...k that made no secret of the fact that it would use jokes about pornography to make its points.I've written before about how pornography is treated as acceptable for public discourse. That was 6 years ago. At least...
If its willingly performed by consenting adults and watched by the same, then its really no ones business of yours what others do as long as no one is jeopardized from it.
I am no great fan of porn and find it quite dull ( rather than offensive) I have lived in Asia and Europe for years and I don't find this same obsessive or phobia about porn I see from the USA. In most cases people regard porn as a means to enhance there marriages and sex lives and women as much as the men. In Europe its just another tool for this no different than using sexy toys or doing tantra sex courses.
In fact because it is not so obsessed over in these countries, it has a much lesser market than we see from the USA.
It never fails to astound me that on US media they will fuzz out a woman's nipples, yet it is fully acceptable to see someone killed, mutilated and cut up. What the big deal about nipples when you go to most museums and galleries in the world and see plenty of them. Its the acclimatisation your media puts on it that makes it more marketable right?
I think there are many more bigger issues modern western society faces rather than get so hung up with a few bums tits and dicks. Such as others dictating the constraints of others freedom which America is so good at thinking it leads the way in.
A powerful country such as the USA and its allies invading another country for its oil and slaughtering over 320,000 civilians.
Bailing out financial institutions with trillions of dollars who had generated the economic mess the world is in, yet a fraction of this could virtually alleviate so much poverty caused by the these big movers in the first place.
So watching a woman be sodomized, even though she consented to carry this out, is not acceptable, yet there is hardly any cry against the hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq.
I think the miss aligned attitudes as we see here is a much bigger issue than porn.
I do agree though, the amount of spam of this and any other kind is really annoying and unacceptable.
John