Does porn = adultery?

[ERCougar]

I love porn.

Rowr!!

[Art Vandelay]

lol.

I love porn threads.

Understandable, considering the way the Sooners are playing...you need some enjoyment in your life.

[LA Ute]

I agree. I think that's an excellent and honest strategy.

My only concern, and I'm not sure it's valid, is that I'm not sure that teens are tuned into this quite as much. A teenaged girl who thinks she's in love and is continually being pressured to go further (with a boy with whom she thinks she's in love...) may not think at the critical moment "I might lose the HG". But then again, maybe I'm not giving her enough credit. I'm just not sure that would have spoken to me too strongly, which I think is why we resort to these fear tactics.

Good point. Off the top of my head, I guess that's why raising kids is such an art. Maintaining trust with teen-agers is not easy, but if we can do that, it increases the chance that they'll actually listen to us. In other words, sometimes we have to be able to say, "Trust me on this, you'll be happier if you live the law of chastity," and hope they believe us. When I look back on myself at the age of 17, I see a good kid but not one who had much understanding of how the Spirit works.

[Pheidippides]

I just saw this thread for the first time. SIEQ, that is a spectacular explanation. Porn as McDonald's!

[Art Vandelay]

My only concern, and I'm not sure it's valid, is that I'm not sure that teens are tuned into this quite as much. A teenaged girl who thinks she's in love and is continually being pressured to go further (with a boy with whom she thinks she's in love...) may not think at the critical moment "I might lose the HG". But then again, maybe I'm not giving her enough credit. I'm just not sure that would have spoken to me too strongly, which I think is why we resort to these fear tactics.

.

Good point. Off the top of my head, I guess that's why raising kids is such an art. Maintaining trust with teen-agers is not easy, but if we can do that, it increases the chance that they'll actually listen to us. In other words, sometimes we have to be able to say, "Trust me on this, you'll be happier if you live the law of chastity," and hope they believe us. When I look back on myself at the age of 17, I see a good kid but not one who had much understanding of how the Spirit works.

You both make excellent points. I suppose as LA states it comes down to the individual child and what he or she needs to hear or be told at certain stages in her life. I just recall as a teen listening to advisers telling me about how horrible life would be if I drank or broke the law of chastity. But when I looked around my HS and even in my quorum it often seemed the exact opposite to my immature and selfish mind. Perhaps my philosophy is swinging the pendulum too far the other way. As I stated yesterday the older my kids get the more this parenting thing scares me.

[Babs]

Understandable, considering the way the Sooners are playing...you need some enjoyment in your life.

yup. It's all about diversion.

[cowboy]

Good point. Off the top of my head, I guess that's why raising kids is such an art. Maintaining trust with teen-agers is not easy, but if we can do that, it increases the chance that they'll actually listen to us. In other words, sometimes we have to be able to say, "Trust me on this, you'll be happier if you live the law of chastity," and hope they believe us. When I look back on myself at the age of 17, I see a good kid but not one who had much understanding of how the Spirit works.

Unfortunately, kids don't understand how important it is to have the Spirit with them until they've done something to offend it and make it withdraw (interesting that we refer to the Spirit as 'it', but that's another topic.) Then, when kids make mistakes, they feel overwhelmed and hopeless.

[SoCalCoug]

I just saw this thread for the first time. SIEQ, that is a spectacular explanation. Porn as McDonald's!

Just don't ask for a vanilla shake. You're liable to get it in your face.

[wuapinmon]

I’m going to wade in a bit here, and will say more if someone expresses interest. Please forgive my sloppiness, I only have time for a one-shot rant today:

For the most part, when people are advancing reasonable objections to pornography, they are actually objecting to spectacle. In philosophical terms, spectacle has everything to do with fascism, but it will take me a few minutes to make the connection. First, I need to distinguish between sex and mediated representations of sex, discuss how pornography can be considered commodity fetish, and discuss the part each of us play in giving meaning to objects.

Sex requires literal, physical co-presence. It involves all of the senses and makes partial objects of participants. Givens (2005) affirms the observation made by many anthropologists and biologists over the years: that lovers infantilize one another. Cheesy lyricists have noticed this too (“baby, baby”), but infantilization is communicated through child-like gazes, gentle grasping, whispering, nuzzling, and mouthing. This communicates that we care for our lovers and mean them no harm, and encourages mutual possession of one another as objects. Sex is performance art that accentuates the most intimate of senses—touch, taste, and smell (pheremones included), and also a moderately intimate sense, hearing—and that is different every time (even if lovers are caught in a rut). In this sense, I’d advance a materialist argument that sex is natural in that nature is about the reproduction of difference: No two snowflakes are alike, no two pine trees are identical, and no two humans are perfect replicas of one another (including twins, of course). Artistic representations of sex strive for the attributes I’ve just mentioned—they “craft” them, as it were.

Sight is a distancing sense in that it always communicates our proximity to other subjects and objects, and even to parts of ourselves. In courtship, sight is used first, and afterward hearing and smell, before touch and taste. Our eyes respond best on the periphery to movement—an evolved trait that warns us of danger and can trigger our fight or flight response, a trait made use of in action movies and video games. In the center of our vision is our focus point, and we see fine detail—objects are most completely objectified. Sight orients us (and in a Cartesian sense too—think back to those x-y-z grids in trigonometry) and because of this situates us and other subjects in our own minds (and brains). Sight helps us feel control in this sense (please forgive the pun).

Because sight has much to do with distance, control, and objectification, humans are careful of their use of it in sex. Lingerie is a perfect example of this care, as it fetishizes parts of the body by indicating their presence even as it conceals them (“It’s not what you see, but the way you don’t see it” that makes lingerie effective). Frigid or shy people are concerned about lovers seeing their private parts (and so prefer sex in the dark, which goes against biology in some measure. Sex in lowlight makes perfect sense though, as enlarged pupils communicate “attractiveness” to primates. This is also why we find candlelight dinners romantic).

Sex culminates in a unique experience of touch that is both primal and involuntary. The muscle movements in coitus are controlled in the “reptilian” (and oldest) parts of our brains, the parts that control our abdominal and back muscles, and that snakes and fish still use to move. At orgasm, our primitive muscle movement becomes involuntary and our brains release all kinds of pleasure chemicals. So guys, in a sense your snake is a snake.

Mediated representations of sex, on the other hand, are quite different. The artistic ones gesture to sex through subtleties of shape, brush stroke, texture, light, etc. The intimate senses are gestured to, such as how the famous statue of David seems to touch and move as you look at it. But the ones produced for mass consumption (and I’m including pornography here) lose many of these qualities, and privilege sight’s tendency for control while reproducing sameness (instead of difference). In opposition to nature, commodities are about the reproduction of sameness—whether we are talking about cans of soda or photos in a magazine. In this way pornography is an industrial, commodified mass bastardization of a unique, interpersonal performance craft.

As a commodity, pornography imparts a sense of control. One can gaze at the page or screen at one’s leisure, and with no responsibility to the image (unlike to a lover). One can rewind and make the image (and sound), perform exactly as before. One controls it as an object, and purchase of the object is implied consent. The spectacle is both simplified and singularized—the complexities of a relationship are foregone in favor of control. Where sex is like a live symphony--with competing movements and ideologies, a tangle of beautiful contradictions—pornography is like a three chord pop song on the radio with ideological tension removed in favor of control and the repetition of sameness. The complexities of personhood have been foregone in favor of a one-dimensional identity—sexual identity. Fascism is about eliminating ideological tension in favor of the construction of a single, simplified identity. As representation, objects produced with the intent of eliminating ideological tension are spectacles.

Two lovers filming themselves would not necessarily be creating a fetishized sex commodity (how I’ve defined pornography), but the moment they injected it into the circuits of capital (such as uploading it to redtube), they would be doing that very thing. A wife slipping sexy photos of herself into her husband’s suitcase before he goes away on business could be gesturing to their deep, intimate, and complex relationship (and is thus providing him with a craft), but if the husband showed the photos to his buddies they would experience it as fetishized objects. There is a fine, but definite line between artful sexual representation and pornography (as I’ve defined it), and that line has everything to do with the person experiencing the object.

Who you are and how you are “situated” to a sexual craft has everything to do with the meaning of that craft. Industrial, mass produced spectacles of sex are fascist, fetishized objects to the degree that they have been reduced to a singular, sexual and controllable identity. There is a continuum for all sexual objects—from unique, interpersonal craft to industrialized, mass produced sex commodites—but I think a natural (and as I’ve implied, moral) line is crossed as soon as a commodity is manufactured or distributed as spectacle. Ideological tension is a good thing, and on the level of sexual relationships, is divine.

Again, this is a great post. I was reading some Baudrillard the other day and this subject came to mind. The Zizek article wherein he talks about the fiber-optic camera strapped to someone's penis is the ultimate example of your "fetishized object" as a decentered sex commodity. This has been on my mind even more than normal lately because I found out on Sunday that one of our friends divorced her husband because he was addicted to porn.

lol.

I love porn threads.

I think the Victoria's Secret fashion show is this week.

[RobinFinderson]

I would liken SIEQ's post to poetry in this sense -- a poem can import great significance to just about anything. Consider the drop of water dangling from an icicle on a warm day. Think about how the sunlight sparkles on that drop of water, and how the roundness of the swelling form flips and magnifies the world around it like a tiny little lens. As with William Carlos Williams' Red Wheelbarrow, the little drop of water can become a window looking out onto a whole world of meaning. But it is also just a banal little drip of water. This is one of the things that human beings do -- we construct meaning and imbue things with significance, and that meaning and significance are real for all people who embrace it.

There are real reals, things that will affect our lives whether we accept them or not, and there are constructed reals, which are things that will only ripple through our lives if we embrace them. I think that SIEQ's ideas about porn fall into the second category.

One inescapable real reality for many of us, depending on how nature baked us, is the need for sexual release. Nature requires that humans 'get off' from time to time, and I personally think that self-denial in the 'getting off' department will have consequences that many people would consider to be unhealthy. Does 'getting off' always need to be some epic display of love between a committed pair of adults? I don't think so. I think that sounds like an exhausting prospect. Sometimes I want sex to be filled with meaning and purpose, and sometimes I just want to 'get off' because my body is telling me it wants that release.

Whatever great significance some people choose to impart on pornography, it is also just a banal tool for 'getting off.' Personally, I'd rather imbue the water drop at the bottom of the icicle with great significance, and leave porn to the dustbins of banality. Ironically, I think, porn becomes more central to Mormon identity than it is to my own identity precisely because Mormons choose to imbue it with so much unnecessary significance.

[RobinFinderson]

Porn is to masturbation what a fork is to eating a Cobb salad. Sure, you can eat a Cobb salad without a fork, but why would you want to? Maybe other people have all day to eat a Cobb salad, but I've got other things I I would like to get done.

[Donuthole]

Porn is to masturbation what a fork is to eating a Cobb salad. Sure, you can eat a Cobb salad without a fork, but why would you want to? Maybe other people have all day to eat a Cobb salad, but I've got other things I I would like to get done.

Lol. For some reason that would not have been nearly as funny if you had used a different type of salad.

[Portland Ute]

I would liken SIEQ's post to poetry in this sense -- a poem can import great significance to just about anything. Consider the drop of water dangling from an icicle on a warm day. Think about how the sunlight sparkles on that drop of water, and how the roundness of the swelling form flips and magnifies the world around it like a tiny little lens. As with William Carlos Williams' Red Wheelbarrow, the little drop of water can become a window looking out onto a whole world of meaning. But it is also just a banal little drip of water. This is one of the things that human beings do -- we construct meaning and imbue things with significance, and that meaning and significance are real for all people who embrace it.

There are real reals, things that will affect our lives whether we accept them or not, and there are constructed reals, which are things that will only ripple through our lives if we embrace them. I think that SIEQ's ideas about porn fall into the second category.

One inescapable real reality for many of us, depending on how nature baked us, is the need for sexual release. Nature requires that humans 'get off' from time to time, and I personally think that self-denial in the 'getting off' department will have consequences that many people would consider to be unhealthy. Does 'getting off' always need to be some epic display of love between a committed pair of adults? I don't think so. I think that sounds like an exhausting prospect. Sometimes I want sex to be filled with meaning and purpose, and sometimes I just want to 'get off' because my body is telling me it wants that release.

Whatever great significance some people choose to impart on pornography, it is also just a banal tool for 'getting off.' Personally, I'd rather imbue the water drop at the bottom of the icicle with great significance, and leave porn to the dustbins of banality. Ironically, I think, porn becomes more central to Mormon identity than it is to my own identity precisely because Mormons choose to imbue it with so much unnecessary significance.

My MIL would go utterly insane listening to this. Well, if she could understand the big words you use, Robin.

Her entire life has become consumed by porn. Not viewing or producing it, rather, talking or writing or opining on the evils of porn.

She didn't put out. She had let herself go and openly mocked people that exercised. Trying to look good in her twisted mind equalled vanity and that was nearly a sin. My father in law, her ex husband, wanted to get off. He took up the fork once in a while and ate the ole Cobb Salad.

I'm in no way saying I condone his actions. Nor do I condone hers.

That being said, they got divorced. He found a wife. Porn does not define him in the least. Yet, her entire existence revolves around helping women who's husbands are peaking at 2D tits. You cannot talk to this woman for more than 30 minutes without her bringing up something related to the ills of porn.

Her life is consumed by it. His is not. He's moved on and is a healthy individual. She is a nut job. Her kids are uncomfortable even being around her.

[Surfah]

My MIL would go utterly insane listening to this. Well, if she could understand the big words you use, Robin.

Her entire life has become consumed by porn. Not viewing or producing it, rather, talking or writing or opining on the evils of porn.

She didn't put out. She had let herself go and openly mocked people that exercised. Trying to look good in her twisted mind equalled vanity and that was nearly a sin. My father in law, her ex husband, wanted to get off. He took up the fork once in a while and ate the ole Cobb Salad.

I'm in no way saying I condone his actions. Nor do I condone hers.

That being said, they got divorced. He found a wife. Porn does not define him in the least. Yet, her entire existence revolves around helping women who's husbands are peaking at 2D tits. You cannot talk to this woman for more than 30 minutes without her bringing up something related to the ills of porn.

Her life is consumed by it. His is not. He's moved on and is a healthy individual. She is a nut job. Her kids are uncomfortable even being around her.

That typo works.

[Portland Ute]

That typo works.

Oh how I wish I could say it was intentional....