In case you missed it:
“And one of the things that he said to me, that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He said, ‘all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards…. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.” You know, that’s a, that’s a good comment. It’s a good point and it’s a good thing to teach young people.”
We should teach boys that pornography—even pictures of naked ladies—and masturbation—which 99.999999% of them engage in—will turn them gay. Because masturbation turns them “inward.” Because, hey, every time you touch your own cock, every time you give yourself an orgasm, you’ve just… um, what? Desensitizing yourself to sucking off strangers in toilets?
These comments—which are everywhere today—were offered up at a panel on masculinity at this weekend’s Value Voters Summit in Washington D.C. And not by some lunatic in the audience who got ahold of a mic and was quickly laughed out of the room, but by Michael Schwartz, chief of staff for Sen. Tom Coburn. What is there to say besides… these people are, well, first and foremost: these people are nuts. And they’re absolutely terrified of human sexuality. They’re afraid of women having control of their own reproductive systems, they’re afraid of pornography, they’re afraid of masturbation, of birth control, of homosexuality. And since they refuse to accept that homosexuality isn’t a choice—for reasons political as well as religious—they have to look for environmental causes, for accidents and incidents, for trapdoors that normal, red-blooded ‘merican men can fall through and into the homosexuality lifestyle.
Or they have to pretend that that’s what they’re doing. I don’t believe that Schwartz actually believes what he said and I don’t think that his audience really believes it either. The real key to Schwartz’s real meaning came in a comment he made a bit earlier, in an observation about 11-year-old boys:
“They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it.”
So lie to them about it—tell them pornography, which we don’t like, and masturbation, which we don’t like, will lead to homosexuality, which we detest. Doesn’t matter if it’s not true. Exploit their fears of homosexuality to keep them away from porn and keep them from masturbating—away from pleasure—and further stigmatize homosexuals in the eyes of straight boys and further terrify and isolate gay boys. Hey, we already lie to them about the harms of premarital sex, the effectiveness of birth control, the protections that condoms provide, the emotional consequences of abortion, and the existential threat that gay marriage supposedly poses to “opposite-marriage.” What’s one more lie?
What’s most amazing about this particular lie is how easily disproved it is. If pornography and masturbation makes you gay… how come all men aren’t gay?
“All porn is gay” is just something he tells himself while he is furiously pulling it to pictures of two dudes sucking each other off. After all, if all porn is gay, and as we know,all dudes like porn, it is not so bad that he spanks it to gay porn. He is weak, but no weaker than the guys out there spanking it to straight porn. The problem is not that he is a tormented closet case, but that he is just weak in face of porn like a lot of men.
@ LC, I’m trying to figure out how an example citing Emperor Nero is supportive of the original argument that modern pornography leads to (among other things), homosexuality (???)
The article/piece/quote referenced Playboy as a source of the sexual degradation/immorality. However, you write about an emperor who lived say 1500 years ago who never saw a “Playboy” or any modern form of pornography as your supportive argument?
Unless you have retrieved copies of Nero’s porno’s and have them for “Show & Tell”, please explain.
@53, finding Nero’s porn stash would be one hell of an archaeological discovery! As fiction, somebody should pitch this idea to Larry Flynt.
53 It can also be argued that even when watching straight porn, men who view it are also watching the naked bodies of the men who are engaged in sexual acts with the women. Viewing such images time after time as in the case of addictions has to incite some type of reaction on the psyche of such men who view it, even if at first they just view it to see the women. That’s what pornography even straight, does. It desensitizes those who watch it and spikes their drive into the unthinkable and harmful. And that’s the correlation many see with the life of someone like Nero.
38 I didn’t had my children out of wedlock, I had my first a year latter after my civil and religious wedding.
sounds about right to me… I liked looking at naked ladies at 11, and now I’m a lesbian. *thumbs up*
33
Hitler was gay, too.
Does that mean I’m not a straight girl, but a gay man? HALLELUJAH! Point me to the nearest leather club!
If masturbation causes men to be gay, ALL men would be gay except the Pope (and well, he does have his own room at the Vatican so who knows?).
Even Jerry and George in the masturbation episode on Seinfeld knew this.
Okay LC (Re:55),
So your argument is that desensitization will/can lead to a sex drive causing “unthinkable” and “harmful” behaviors…and that that is similar to Nero…I get it.
Except that if “desensitization” is your argument, you don’t need a reference Nero to make your case (!!)…rather, you can use all sorts of current trends to support your view using males from the 21st century 🙂 Remember, your argument is that modern pornography causes said desensitization and subsequent moral decay (i.e. “homosexuality”).
LC, you should be able to make your case (which you haven’t) without relating to a random 1500 year old emperor in the abstract.
So how old were you when you got married, LC? You have claimed the following over the last several months:
1)Three kids, the first born a year after you were married in a civil and religious ceremony.
2)The two eldest are boys, both over six feet tall and dating. The third is a girl.
3)That your in your 20s.
And, so you don’t feel vulnerable.
1) I married in my 20s and had my first child 1 1/2 years into our marriage.
2) My oldest child is 14 and is 5’7″ tall, and the youngest who is 11 is 5’4″.
They told me masturbating would make me go blind. I figured I’d just do it till I needed glasses.
See, I told you fundies were demented abstinence-only, virginity pledging loony tunes out to ruin sex for everyone. I told you!
Oh, I am so gay. So very, very, unbelievably gay.
This (xkcd) seems relevant.
Oh, I am so gay. So very, very, unbelievably gay.
This (xkcd) seems relevant.
Sargon Bighorn @1, it’s significantly more comfortable to imagine that these statements by Fagan, Spalding Schwartz and Coburn are calculated lies to move forward a well thought agenda, rather than the alternative, that they are, rather, the mad ravings of fools who are unknowingly pulling our society towards repression the like a panicked horse to its burning stable. The former scenario is not only optimistic, but gives these men the benefit of the doubt.
We’ve seen this kind of mix before. The Discovery Institute scholars, for example, really believe in the Christian dogma they’re trying to promote, and work diligently to create a scientifically sound model that fits with those beliefs. However, they also lie, calculatedly so, to the academic sectors in order to deny this intent, since it’s bad form to pursue theories non-objectively, i.e. with the intent of pursuing a specific agenda.
The abstenance only sex education programs in the US already use intentional deception (exaggerating risks of STI vectors and symptoms and misrepresenting the ineffectiveness of contrceptive measures) to create fear-based incentives for our adolescents to abstain from experimentation with their own sexuality, very much the way educational campaigns during the 1980’s to discourage experimentation with drugs exaggerated the symptoms and dangers of various substances. Both these campaigns have created a backfire effect when students gained access to more accurate facts and statistics. The additional discovery that primary school history courses are extremely revisionist (about which the History Channel has been capitalizing since it went on the air) has elevated student distrust of primary school curricula to an all time high. The good news is the smart ones are learning to think critically at an early age. The bad news is they aren’t the ones trading STIs like they were Pokémon cards.
Sorry about the double post.
Um mm… If looking at naked women make people gay, then what happens to the women that are being looked at? Do women all become gay by default. If so then we’re all gay.
Oh, and I’m going to have to take down that nude I have hanging on my bedroom wall …
How come all men aren’t gay, Dan? I can only speak for myself: when I was a boy, porno had Ron Jeremy in it.
@52 I think you’re dead-on. My husband said almost the same thing when I read Dan’s post to him: That this guy is a closet case, but surely he wasn’t born gay. It was teh evil pr0n that inflicted this hideous malady on him. We like your version even better.
And didn’t anyone else think it was funny that Schwartz thinks eleven year olds in 2009 get their porn from copies of Playboy? Don’t repubs know that the internet is for porn? Sheesh.
I don’t think porn makes you gay, but i do think it messes you up in the head. I really think everyone’s first real sexual experience should be with a person that they know, not a computer/magazine/whatever. That has serious mess-up potential.
Anyway, be more respectful to Loveschild. Forums/politics/LIFE seriously suck when there’s only one opinion around. While I don’t agree with her about homosexuality being a depravity or whatever, I really think there’s a lot to be said for living according to moral standards, as long as you’re not using them to hide other motives (i.e. taking a vow of chastity to conceal homosexuality) or inflicting it on other people (entering an open debate doesn’t count). Whatever the moral code is is up to you, but everyone should have one.
So in order for straight porn to make you gay, gay porn (the opposite of straight porn) needs to make you the opposite of gay. So gay porn makes you straight and straight porn makes you gay.
Quick, Loveschild! Go get some lesbian porn before it’s too late and you become one of the queers! Run!
Often, when I read these kind of posts , I have a cold sweat.
Not because of the fallacious arguments , but the realization that a majority of the american people is afraid of sex, not just of the act but of the pleasure you derive from such act.
I would consider a mass therapy , pleasure is nice, sex is nice ,therefore pleasure from sex is nice
Snickerdoodly porn may mess with the heads of a small cluster, but I would wager fewer than those messed up by the violence we take for granted in today’s media (including the evening news). I would say that fewer still would be affected by porn if US society wasn’t so uptight about human sexuality in the first place.
While I’d be the first to point out that correlation and causality are not necessarily related, while our access to porn has become widespread, sex related crimes (e.g. rape, sexual assault, child predation, etc.) have gone through the floor. Indeed, this suggests quite the opposite of what has been the usual rhetoric against porn since the ’60s, that being: porn increases sex related crime.
While the conservative right still think this is the case, some on the radical left think quite the opposite is occurring, that men are losing interest in real sex for porn (and to the discovery that we, as sexual creatures sometimes do, in fact, want to be objectified). Since not everyone (myself included) didn’t have a cool female friend with whom to experiment, sexually, some of us had to rely on porn to figure out what the heck was going on with our brains.
As for opposing opinions, I welcome them, when they’re based on reason and backed by relevant data. I don’t think citing Nero Claudius Caesar makes for a strong example on the perils of pornography; not only was Nero’s taste (or distaste) for porn not well documented, not only was there a pronounced cultural difference in how nudity and sexuality were/are regarded in classical Rome and the contemporary US, not only is the body of historical texts on Nero clearly biased against depicting him well, thanks to the politics of the era, but he’s one guy in history. Show me a civilization that fell to the corrupting power of porn, and we’ll talk.
A good example might be the Ottoman Empire, since The Cage was introduced as an alternative to post-succession fratricide. The cage was essentially imprisonment in paradise, and those so confined, though never short of women, wine and sport, would still go crazy over time. It didn’t bode well for the occasions when a prisoner had to be extracted to come out and rule. But I think the problem was confinement, moral decay (being spoiled stupid) and a lack of experience or education in civics, not their access to The Illustrated Kama Sutra.
Boobies make you gay? Excellent! All the kids should stop reading that smutty, SMUTTY bible RIGHT THIS INSTANT.
To wit:
“Behold, thou art fair, my love;
behold, thou art fair…
“Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet,
and thy speech is comely:
thy temples are like a piece of a pomegranate within thy locks.
“Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins,
which feed among the lilies.”
(Song of Solomon 4.1a, 3, 5, King James version.)
@70: We’ll be more respectful towards Lovechild when she stops being a hate-mongering bigot. Until that happens I prefer to ignore her posts, because they’re boring and predictable.
Loveschild, you make the teabaggers look downright intelligent and informed. Your wacky claims have the validity of calling Obama Hitler. You have no concept of world history, or psychology. Your severe lack of education is showing here. You can’t actually make arguments based in logic or truth, so you just make stuff up. Nero didn’t do the things he did because of porn, and there is absolutely no evidence that viewing porn will make someone homosexual. Honestly, why do you need to resort to lying? You only look to the Bible to attack others and ignore what you don’t want to follow. (Such as the 9th Commandment.)
Ridiculous assertion of porn leading to gayness aside, I am fascinated that the latest fear-mongering attack is on “turning inward.” It has long been held by philosophers and religions that “turning inward” in meditation and in prayer leads people to the discovery of the truth that lies within their souls*. In other words, that although people may lie to you in the outer world, your inner soul will never lie to you. It would appear that those who lie are afraid of the truth that people will discover if they turn inward and are attempting to fear them away from such discovery.
* In the modern genetic sense it can also be said that our genes actually contain an inner wisdom as well, that has been shaped and refined by evolution.
Shemale porn: the best of both worlds! (Jeez, where’d that come from?)
You guys, don’t you see the logic here? I’ll demonstrate on my friend Susie.
1. Susie likes autoerotic stimulation, i.e., having sex with herself, i.e, Susie(x) likes having sex with Susie(y).
2. Susie (x) and Susie(y) are the same person.
3. Therefore they are the same sex.
4. Therefore Susie is gay.
@79. So you’re saying Susie is variable curious?
The real key to Schwartz’s real meaning came in a comment he made a bit earlier, in an observation about 11-year-old boys:
“They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it.”
Why do they speak badly about homosexuality? Religion. They were already “taught” that it was “bad,” wrong, sinful and deviant.
Long ago, sex was dangerous, as its negative consequences- disease and unwanted pregnancy- could not be controlled. But now we can control those things- pregnancy can be prevented or safely aborted, condoms protect us from AIDS if we use them, and bacterial STDs can be cured with antibiotics. But these morons refuse to see progress for what it is and try to drag us all back to a medieval sexual culture, and for all kinds of stupid reasons that fall apart at the lightest touch of the truth.
@70: I agree with you that porn does not help kids develop realistic, healthy ideas about sex. The problem, though, isn’t that kids are finding porn (which they’ve been doing since the beginning of time), but that they aren’t receiving any messages from parents or other trusted figures about sex beyond “don’t do it.” WHAT THE FUCK IS ‘IT?’
Fortunately, my first sexual experience was with National Geographic, like a normal person.
this post made me sad. i am almost certain they really believe this because i’ve known so many people who honestly do. but i have a hard time believing they actually didn’t masturbate when young… i think they did, but now think it was wrong. so they are trying to pass on their “wisdom” based on experience to others, and possible creating very real problems for those 11 year old boys who believe what they say is true.
People should mind their own business.
@41: DO YOU HAVE THUMBS? SHOW ME YOUR THUMBS! THUMBS!
That’s awesome. I’ve always secretly wanted to be gay. Now that I’m gay, does that mean that I can get laid whenever I want? This is going to be good…
Thanks for the laugh, Aussie Steve.
Thank you #70 and #83.
Unfortunately, this article is yet another example of (what I see) as people concerned with porn for the wrong reasons.
Human sexuality should not be shameful. It upsets me that anti-porn folks like these seem to be concerned about exploration of sexuality, when really we should be concerned about what effect this has on the people who perform in this industry, the viewers who objectify the hot (mostly female) bodies, think violence (mostly toward females) in sex is ok, lose sexual creativity and seek Pavlovian-type orgasmic responses to porn, etc, etc, etc. I could keep going.
I’m all for healthy sexuality. I just don’t happen to think that includes porn.
In my book: Yes to masturbation, yes to gay sex, yes to education…no to porn and no to ridiculous conservative claims.
Not trying to change anyone’s mind (I’m sure there’s some of you out there that could show me examples of non-violent, non-objectifying, person-celebrating porn); just my humble, feminist opinion that most porn out there seems pretty awful to humankind.