The effect of porn on teenage boys and young men

Why don't men just stop watching porn?

spartacus "I guess a big part women can play in changing attitudes is speaking to their sons about porn, but from my experience many won't because they have dps or dhs who use porn themselves or because they think all men watch it etc."

You are saying that these women think "since it's ok if my husband does it, it's ok for my 10 year old son"? How stupid do they have to be. If "does it" is porn it's fine but if "does it" were say alcohol it wouldn't be fine?

This really annoys me, because the men that have warped views of women were exactly those 10 year olds.

qwerty232 "Then there is the Porn 2.0 domain of open platforms in which anyone can publish anything. User-gnerated content is increasingly dominating these sites. Couples and singles make homemade videos in which there are no directors, producers or middle men at all. Of course whatever capitalist pig owns Pornhub is making huge amounts of money whenever a video is clicked on"

You actually think pornhub is making most of its money from amateur videos?

"Women are increasingly embracing porn, depressingly."

Why? Instead of dismissing it as depressing, shouldn't you be more interested in understanding?

Devi "God forbid someone should see a picture of breastfeeding yet porn is fine"

Yes, this is something I want to understand. Maybe if we infiltrated porn with videos of breastfeeding it would become mainstream and no one would get triggered if they saw it in public.

I’m fairly sure if they took porn off the internet, there’d only be one website left, and it’d be called Bring back the porn!

beach "pornography violates Articles 1, 2 and 5 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights"

Really? Write me an argument for that. Especially Article 1.

tartansnowman, pornography violates Articles 1, 2 and 5 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

From a feminist perspective, pornography is material which dehumanizes, objectifies and degrades girls and women on the basis of their sex. It is material which sexualizes women's bodies, their skin colour, their abuse, their degradation. Pornographic material normalizes sexual violence against girls and women and the exploitation and abuse of women's bodies for the purpose of entertainment. The violence and abuse in pornography is overwhelmingly gendered with men depicted abusing and degrading women, often several men will be shown abusing a lone woman. This material is sold and distributed on a wide scale and the people whose images it contains have little or no control over that and little or no legal recourse should they want the images removed from the public domain.

There are a few different ways of objecting to pornography; the main ones being on the basis of obscenity law, as a matter of public health and as a human rights violation. Obscenity laws have failed to halt the proliferation of pornography and the extremity of that pornography. Public health is the argument of this thread; that pornography harms children's sexual development and both adult's and children's sexual relationships and gendered interactions. Human rights objections are based on the seemingly radical idea that women are human and that the Declaration of Human Rights applies to us.

For me its is less a utilitarian issue of human rights and more one of the moral and social health of our culture. Porn breeds contempt, alienation, loneliness, addiction, rage, self-disgust, objectification and commodification. It is the corruption of sex by the market. It turns sex from a thing of love and life into a thing of hate and death.

qwerty232, oracle

Ah, ok. ISWYM then!

You don't have to sign up to hubs, and hubs mean that nobody is really accountable for content.

Hate and death are human rights issues though.

Agreed qwerty.
tartan my reasoning was that, as pp said, porn is prevalent in social media and therefore eminently accessible by any kid with a phone. Which makes me despair. If this was restricted and access available only through hubs which you needed to sign up to, it would be less likely to be viewed by ppl as a normal /common part of everyday life.

For me its is less a utilitarian issue of human rights and more one of the moral and social health of our culture. Porn breeds contempt, alienation, loneliness, addiction, rage, self-disgust, objectification and commodification. It is the corruption of sex by the market. It turns sex from a thing of love and life into a thing of hate and death.

Can you explain that further, Beachcomber?

What elements of it would breach human rights? The violent elements of it or the viewing of images that have no source provided for them.

102, I'd rather see hubs tackled, and sharing of free material, rather than social media more widely. At least if content is related to social media the viewer cannot claim they have no responsibility to acquire some information about the wellbeing, age and consent of the people involved.

You cannot "ban" pornography or effectively object to its ubiquitousness without defining it as a something that should be understood in terms of it being a human rights breach and in conflict with equal and just society. IMO.

So as an average wife and mother sat at home on the computer, what can I/we do? I'm relatively new to the issue, but as pp have said, it seems a good starting point would be to get porn restricted to 'porn sites'...I'm assuming there are campaigns and such which I (and most other women) are unaware of? (I say other women, as sadly it seems that the majority of men still refuse to see the difference between old fashioned stills type porn and the increasingly common more extreme stuff, and the problem arising in that young girls are putting stuff out there just to feel validated as a desirable person.)
It's completely unrealistic to believe that a tidal wave of protest would shame social media sites into banning porn, but at least it would raise the issue further...

Making all porn sites pay to view might help as it would put off kids.

True. But as I say there's porn on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, Chat Roulette - every bloody where. A lot of porn isn't even on porn sites.

About ten years or so ago porn could have been regulated. Now I fear it's too late.

That said, the big mainstream sites should be made to impose an age restriction gateway asking for credit card details.

Growapear, women who post pornographic images of themselves on the internet are not the root of the problem - such behaviour and internalized misogyny are just yet another harmful consequence of internet pornography. As I keep saying, pornography does stuff to humans, it affects us.

Amateur selfie posts by women (concerning as they are) are peanuts.

Plus a lot of "amateur" stuff is well known to be anything but. They are a "produit d'appel" - they are cynically produced and marketed by men to men who want to consume pornography but find it tricky to get a boner if they have to consider that the woman in the films they are jacking off to hates being there, hates what is being done to her and hates the men who are jacking off to films of her being abused.

HTH

Men are to blame but so are some women - and even some lib fems: the Pandora Blake/Laurie Penny/Vagenda types who lots of young women listen to peddling irresponsible pro-porn rot.

Women are increasingly embracing porn, depressingly.

Oops Bold fail

In the context of this thread that might be a bad thing [qwerty]

I'm touched Rufus :)

Agree with qwerty

Which is a sentence i never thought i would write

Anyway - i bid you a good evening, I am getting angry at the myopia and refusal to read what other posters write when it doesn't fit with "all porn is hate and must be banned before all our young boys become effectively impotent" narrative.