Features Oct 6, 2016 at 4:00 am

Religious Conservatives Are Using Porn as a Sexy Scapegoat for Social Ills

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Comments

1
"Porn teaches a different lesson—that these acts are common, fun, and can be healthy." Uh-huh. Tell that to the actresses suffering from prolapsed rectums.
2
I should add: I am an atheist.
3
Dr. David Ley is a leader in the movement against both sex and porn addiction. I have worked with him in combatting the disease/pathology/sex addiction model, which has no empirical support. I do not believe the legislature here will ever go the Utah way on this crazy idea. I am an AASECT certified sex therapist and couples counselor in Seattle, and I see lots of clients who first went to a so-called "sex addiction counselor" with 12-step approaches, which do not work. I use cognitive behavior therapy to help clients achieve a healthy balance with sex. No one can certify a counselor as a sex addiction counselor when sex addiction does not exist. It is the wrong term, and the approach does not get at internal locus of control for the client. Dr. Roger Libby
4
Mm, try harder. Just because Mormons are clutching their pearls about it doesn't mean there's not a problem.
6
This article is a gem. Thanks for the work you're doing, Dr Ley (and Dr Libby).
7
@1- Riding bikes is common, fun and healthy, despite the Olympic racer getting three broken bones in her spine recently.

I do believe we need to teach our kids about porn and the fact it isn't how sex works in reality. Kids who don't get real sex ed do end up thinking sex is like porn for lack of any other education. It is like thinking Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a good guide to how to win a fist fight. There isn't a porn problem, there is a sexual ignorance problem. There are also a lot of Christians in shitty marriages looking for something to blame.
8
Captain Edwards! O, Captain Edwards!
What percentage of people who use guns illegally started out as legal owners???
9
Much of this "problem" could have been averted in the 90s, when Congress failed to pass a bill that would have relegated all porn-related websites to the top-level domain .xxx

The porn industry was behind it, sensible people were behind it, but Congress critters got their religio-panties in such a knot that they couldn't bring themselves to "legitimize" porn, or whatever they thought they were(n't) doing, by mandating the .xxx domain.

The real shame ?: It is stunningly simple to block www.anything.xxx ... say at schools, or at home, or anywhere necessary to ensure that kids too young aren't accidentally exposed to something their impressionable minds might not be ready to handle yet. Yet still let adults access anything.xxx if they want to. It could be a simple checkbox in every home WiFi router configuration - "Allow .xxx domains". It would have given parents a very simple, clear ability to control that piece of cultural education.

BUT NO! We didn't do that, beacuase "religious values". So we opted for chaos. And now internet porn is scattered among random website addresses, impossible to wrangle, with new ones popping up all the time. And now because of "religious values" legislators are getting their panties in a twist about it again. This "problem" was actually their fault in the first place.

We could have solved a key piece of the very issue these "religious values" types are flapping their gums about now, right from the beginning, but we didn't, because of their "religious values" when it came up the first time. Oh the irony.
10
Let me be clear: Porn itself it not a problem, and I am in accord w/ Dr. Ley's perspectives.

What I am saying is that with an .xxx domain we could more consciously manage and craft how and when we encounter and engage with online pornography. That, I suspect, is an unspoken key piece of the Mormonic issue that has now become a larger legislative mess for the rest of us.
11
@9,
That's because the religious values people thrive on moral panics. It puts butts in the pews and dollars in the donation trays. Trust me, they know exactly what they're doing and they engineered all of this chaos on purpose.
12
You can definitely tell when a porn article is written by a man because it expresses very little concern about the nature of the content of porn these days.

Maybe the people who feel shameful about their porn use could try considering the possibility of disliking how turned on they get by seeing women put into those degrading roles. Watching women be treated the way they are treated in mainstream porn would darken anyone's mindset. It doesn't always have to do with religion.
13
Hey, I'll bet >90% of heroin addicts first used an addictive drug in the form of cigarettes. Ban tobacco, no more junkies! QED.
14
@2: You should also add that you're incapable of identifying a qualifier (like the word "can") within a sentence.

@3: Thank you for the work you're doing! It's important, and undervalued by society.

@12: It's telling that you assume all porn content depicts degradation of women.
15
@13
The phrase Quod Erat Demonstrandum should properly follow a thoughtfully constructed argument, not an evidence-free assertion.
16
@12- Is is so hard to understand that 99.9999% of people (men included) have no trouble separating fantasy from reality?
17
@12,
disliking how turned on they get by seeing women put into those degrading roles.
You mean, by seeing women who actively apply for and are paid for those roles?
18
@11 - Ain't that the truth! ... "Let it be Fear that binds us together...in Our Image of the Lord." quoth the Pastor.
19
Clearly, *religion* is a public health hazard and social problem.
20
I have no idea what this story is about, I don't read anything with the words "rape culture" in it, I don't allow such ideas into my safe place.
21
@20: That's unfortunate, because the word "culture" isn't found anywhere within this piece.

Maybe actually try next time, if the words of a scientific expert in the field don't threaten your narrow adolescent worldview too much.
22
@9 FTW
23
Pornography presents and teaches a distorted view of sexual behavior.
And is powerfully addictive to the male brain.
And in this society is ubiquitous and readily available to children from a young age.
It is objectively factually accurate to describe it as a public health crisis.

It the internet was flooded with,
and the entire population
(including and especially impressionable youth)
was voraciously consuming,
SkinHead Racist material
or HomoPhobic Hate material
we doubt Leftists would be so sanguine.

Radical Islams' success at recruiting terrorists from the ranks of the general population demonstrates that people will believe and incorporate into their belief system whatever they consume off the web.

Mr Savages 'It Get's Better' is based on the premise that youth can be reached and influenced thru the web, in spite of their parent's disapproval.

Why the Left imagines the distorted unhealthy messages of Pornography,
alone of all material peddled on the web,
will not rub off on it's consumers defies logic.
24
"Radical Islams' success at recruiting terrorists from the ranks of the general population demonstrates that people will believe and incorporate into their belief system whatever they consume off the web."

Yeah, centuries of abuse of Muslim populations by Christian countries has nothing to do with it.

Unsurprising that someone who so easily falls for obvious propaganda believes that everyone else is heavily influenced by pornography.

Meanwhile, another triumph of our Republican-controlled "Senate Majority Coalition" consists of spending our money to advance reactionary non-solutions to the "problem" of adults freely choosing to view what they wish in the privacy of their own homes.

We can't dump enough of these people out of power in November, but we can remove as many as we can.
26
@24 tensor. Operative word here is adult.
My concern re availability of porn to adolescent girls and boys, especially mainstream porn which does seem to follow @25 pansack's point( women as men pleasers), is they learn about intimacy and sex in a way that has very little to do with emerging sexuality.
Preconceived notions are developed about what a girl must do to please a boy and how many times she must moan in pleasure.
27
"...especially mainstream porn which does seem to follow @25 pansack's point( women as men pleasers)"

Sexism is a huge problem across our society, and anything mainstream will tend to reflect that. If you go back and read the bullet points in the article, you'll see that exactly zero of them have anything to do with opposing sexism. (The *first* one states concern about the supposedly negative effect porn has on the ability of adult males to engage in pleasurable sexual activity!) The concerns you expressed have nothing to do with our Republican-controlled state Senate's reasons for spending our tax money on their anti-porn crusade.

28
Oh tensor@27. Didn't know I had to stay within some confined lines of discussion.
You were saying about sexism?
29
Is Pornography Use a Public Health Problem?
is the title of this thread. My response @26 answers that question with a query about the health problems for young women who may be subjected to the demands made of them by young men who get their intimacy and sex ed from mainstream porn.
That satisfy your discussion parameters tensor @27?
30
Correction @29, Public Health Crisis.
31
Nothing our state Senate is now doing addresses any of the concerns you've expressed here. That's really the point of this article -- that *if* pornography causes or exacerbates problems in our society, the actions of our state Senate will not address those problems.

To your larger point, our society simply does not teach adolescent males anything respectful about sex. Unsurprisingly, they become consumers of disrespectful erotic images. Pornography is simply reflecting this dismal truth, and we should address the problem, not the symptom.
32
Chicken or the egg, Tensor.
If all porn showed total involvement of the female's pleasure, things might be different. Close down porn that shows females as mere objects used for male pleasure, then our young people wouldn't have images that deny female agency.
33
Western Women have been trying to address the problem, Patriarchy, for quite a while now.
35
"Close down porn that shows females as mere objects used for male pleasure,"

Yes, attempted censorship of sexual images has a great record of success in our culture.

You're playing right into the hands of our reactionary state senators.
37
Tensor, I'm not playing into anybody's hands.
This is a discussion about the effects porn might be having on human sexuality. How much effect does it have on developing minds, is a valid avenue of inquiry.
38
"...Health Crisis? "Religious Conservatives Are Using Porn as a Sexy Scapegoat for Social Ills", and yet "Mayday-business-destroying"-"black-friday-children-scaring"-liberals are doing the same thing with gun ownership, so whats the difference?
39
Utah? The most sexually repressive state in the universe? (Except for the polygamist aspect) I traveled a lot in Utah and So. Idaho and had business connections there, the gay community seems to thrive despite the taboo of any hanky panky when it comes to sex. Magic underwear for the guys, and the girls stay home and do the laundry and cook and lead very dull lives. No wonder porn is so popular, with private browsing so available.
40
"Tensor, I'm not playing into anybody's hands."

Just the people who want to blame pornography for pre-existing problems internal to the viewer. You know, like Republicans in our state's senate, who blamed pornography for erectile dysfunction.

"This is a discussion about the effects porn might be having on human sexuality."

Maybe that's what you think you're doing, but it's neither the point of the article, nor of most of the other comments. (In fact, it's about the irrelevance of pornography in the origins of certain problems.)

"How much effect does it have on developing minds,"

Which is also not the point of this article. Here's a clue as to what the real point was:

"Blaming porn is a distraction from the real social ills that put women and children at risk."

In other words, the exact polar opposite of, "Close down porn that shows females as mere objects used for male pleasure,"

Little wonder you were confused.

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