Does porn = adultery?

[RobinFinderson]

DDD is on to something. Is Tooblue's problem with porn, or the porn industry?

For the sake of argument, lets assume that Tooblue's assertions are correct, and the industry is steeped in child prostitution. Would Tooblue then be comfortable with an insider circuit of porn loving friends making non-commercial pornography for private distribution among themselves?

Porn and the Porn Industry are really two separate issues.

[tooblue]

I have a question for tooblue. I ask because he has experience/work in this area, while I admittedly have none.

Please correct me if I am misunderstanding your point. There seems to be an assertion that porn "stars" are all victims? Are you saying that based on your research or volunteer work that the vast majority of porn participants go into the industry under duress or other less-than-ideal circumstances?

The reason I ask is because it seems that in many contemporary circles, porn is actually "cool." It is quite mainstream now. Amateur porn uploaded by couples at home has proliferated the internet. In fact, I read a recent article that said that YouPorn and RedTube are some of the most visited sites on the internet in the USA. These sites consist largely of user-submitted content. Women go to the gym now and can take stripper pole dancing classes as a means to lose weight. You had mentioned Kim Kardashian earlier. Are you saying she didn't strategically and purposefully choose to do Playboy as a means to furthering her career?

I also think of Joe Francis and his GGW empire. True, he is a leech that goes where the drunk women will be. However, these college girls head down to Daytona, South Padre, etc....wanting to get drunk, have sex, and knowing that they will wind up flashing their breasts and hooking up with guys. I don't think it is a stretch to say that some guys really enjoy banging hot chicks and wouldn't mind getting paid a few hundred bucks to do so.

So again, my question, to be clear.....is your experience that there are no legitimate "professional" participants in adult porn? And if you are not claiming it to be an absolute, what would be your best guess as to a percentage of victims vs willing participants?

I would suggest that the vast majority (90%) of sex workers were abused or introduced to sex at a very early age. Sexual abuse is so pervasive in our society we only now, through exposure on the internet, are beginning to understand how vast the problem is and for how long it has been going on.

Abuse is cyclical behavior. Because I was abused (even statistically) I am now prone to be an abuser. Fortunately I have been able to disengage from the cycle of behavior. My faith has played a significant role in disengaging -- hence, some reasoning for my passion on the subject of religion (the Lord will make your weakness a strength).

My biggest concern is when sharing such facts openly, people who understand the issue will not trust me. But I feel compelled to speak up. Because I find that many people don't understand the issues.

Porn has become mainstream and society is now falling into the cycle of behavior. I agree with commentary in this story I linked to:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bes...er.trouble.cnn

[Jeff Lebowski]

If you have to start with 'with all due respect' maybe you shouldn't start at all? The only thing I can offer you is the idea that I don't have a persecution complex and don't really care whether I'm liked or not. But many here seem to want me to care! The simple fact you felt compelled to respond this way is indicative of perception.

Oh brother.

If you don't care, why bring it up all the time? Why all the defensiveness?

[tooblue]

Oh brother.

If you don't care, why bring it up all the time? Why all the defensiveness?

Oh brother is right. You believe I should care and change my behavior. To who's benefit?

[Jeff Lebowski]

Oh brother is right. You believe I should care and change my behavior. To who's benefit?

It was an observation. Feel free to disregard it.

[Sleeping in EQ]

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.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I’m going to wade in a bit here, ....

Fascinating. Thank you.

[BlueHair]

What is a strip club promoting? Does naked woman dancing on a stage promote smoking or does it promote sex? It's not mere coincidence ER that prostitutes 'happen' to be in the same vicinity or part of town. The two feed on another, and rely on one another to sustain themselves ... that's a fact!

Do you seriously believe that they are separate career paths and not in fact overlapping? Do you seriously contend that porn actors or only occasionally paid to have sex? What is the definition of a porn actor if it is not getting paid to have sex? That makes absolutely no sense.

How many porn actors are stars versus how many of the 'extras' are not? What do the non-stars of the films, the extras, do to earn money when they are not being cast as extras? Do many strip and perform tricks? Did many stars and extras strip and turn tricks before they became actors? Who are the headliners at strip clubs ER?

I think your dislike for me makes me the nail and you would prefer to hammer away instead of engage. Having been the beneficiary of good counseling, based upon my experience here, you would be an inadequate counselor.

I find no problem with someone getting paid to strip or have sex. In fact, I think prostitution should be legal. Let's face it, every industry exploits it's employees and customers. I think the prostitutes are doing the exploiting, not being exploited. They feed off ugly people that can't get free sex.

[BlueHair]

One more thing I just thought of...
This concept of porn ruining normal sexual appetite reminds me of one of my favorite books:
http://www.amazon.com/Wanting-More-C...8573250&sr=8-1

It's written by an LDS author (who specializes in sexual addiction, incidentally), but is written from a very secular perspective. His point is that we ruin our "enjoyment machinery" (I think that's the term he uses) by continually satisfying it, and thus we lose our capacity for happiness. He applies this to many areas of life, from eating to material possessions to sex. It's a quick easy read, full of great examples, and I'm a little surprised it hasn't taken a little stronger hold in the LDS book scene. Although not completely surprised, as I suspect it's not a real popular message to LDS materialists.

Sounds like he is justifying his lack of sex.

[ERCougar]

Sounds like he is justifying his lack of sex.

LOL...
Actually as I'm rereading my post, "enjoyment machinery" sounds like a ridiculous Mormon euphemism for something else. He actually uses the term to represent the pleasure centers in our brain, and then later applies it to sex (as well as food, material goods, etc). The focus of the book is much more on the dangers of Western materialism than on sex.

It really is a good book.

[The Rambam]

The connections you make above are abstract and silly, and offensive in context to this discussion. Why is it so hard to imagine that the amount of child porn and prostitution is proportional to the amount of adult porn and prostitution? And that the same people who create adult porn support with money the same people who create child porn in the name of protecting free speech.

You are making the mistake of believing this is a problem that does not exist here in North America -- link to graphic from earlier:

http://www.c-a-s-e.net/Child%20Trafficking%20Map.htm

The other report I posted is important because it shows just how vast and pervasive the problem is ... how much child porn exists for there to be "106,119" tips in 2004?

Seriously Robin, you want a sign? The very fact that you have even responded this way betrays your indifference. You don't want proof -- what you want is an excuse to ignore this issue.

Tips are different than images. The number of tips cited by your study is going up significantly. But it could very well be (I'd day probably is) due to the increase of internet hosting and accessibility in the third world resulting in previously existing child pornography being shown more often on more sites resulting in more tips.

An increase in tips does not automaticly mean an increase in child porn. You are not being logical here.

[The Rambam]

Look at that map I linked to Robin. It is from John's Hopkins University. Not some fanatical religious organization. Now ask yourself if you really believe those barely legal teens in those videos only started prostituting themselves the day they turned 18? Such naivety would be unfathomable.

The John's Hopkins map was silly. It cites cases of "women and children" with "some as young as 14" and the like. Does that mean there was one 14 year old girl with 198 adult Mexican women in the raided San Antonio brothel? Every instance is horrible, but from that map we can't tell if there are a handful of cases represented or hundreds. The map is designed not to give accurate data but rather to excite the excitable.

The fact that a lawyer put it together means the wording was most likely chosen carefully to put the facts in the worst possible light.

[The Rambam]

I'm not sure what your problem is with me but don't let it obscure the evidence presented. Is it your assertion that it's a huge leap for you to imagine that a young woman ONLY started performing sex acts, while getting paid, when she turned 18? You mean to say, you think it's highly unlikely that that same young woman was being paid to perform sex acts for many years before she turned 18? And you need evidence to support such an idea? Your common sense isn't good enough. How about your training as a doctor -- is that good enough?

How about the graphic from John's Hopkins University linked to -- is that good enough to demonstrate that the problem is wide spread?

"statistics released today by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) show child pornography reports to its CyberTipline, a congressionally mandated mechanism for reporting child sexual exploitation, jumped 39 percent in 2004."

You also mean to tell me that the increase linked above by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children is ONLY a new Phenomena? That those numbers can't be trusted. That it's not indicative that this is a wide spread problem that has existed for years before the internet proliferated accessibility to such material -- is that your contention?

You see, ER, you have yet to offer ANY evidence to counter my assertions, and yet continue to claim I offer no evidence when in fact I do, so all I can conclude is that you have a problem with me and your only intent here is derision!

I don't think you understand what constitutes evidence. The tips data might have nothing to do with rates of child exploitation and certainly do not represent lockstep movement. Think of it this way: If the internet was shut down for a year, there would be no tips of child pornography on the internet that year. But somewhere someone probably would make some child porn that year. Get it?

[Mormon Red Death]

If you have to start with 'with all due respect' maybe you shouldn't start at all? The only thing I can offer you is the idea that I don't have a persecution complex and don't really care whether I'm liked or not. But many here seem to want me to care! The simple fact you felt compelled to respond this way is indicative of perception.

with all due respect I think you are letting your emotions overcome your argument. Be honest, not all women who go into porn go in due duress. Not all of them were molested as a kid. The Barely legal stuff is actors who are all over 18 and who are made to look like they are "barely 18" This article talks about it.

I think everyone agrees that the exploitation of minors 17 and younger is the most despicable thing around today. However, to say that all people in porn were exploited or abused as minors is just plain inaccurate. People who go into porn do it for a variety of reasons.

[RobinFinderson]

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.

I don't think this post received enough attention, considering the spectacular effort made to express a fairly complicated idea. I'm neither going to nitpick this, nor am I going to agree. What I would like to say is that this is a fascinating look into the way that SIEQ constructs meaning around sex and sexuality. Some of this seems pretty reasonable. Some of it extrapolates a bit too much from the reasonable position. But whether scientific, conjecture or reasonable, it holds together as a thoughtful POV about one of life's most inescapable subjects. The brain, after all, even considering my own substantial endowment, is man's biggest sex organ. So how others construct meaning around matters of sex is always interesting, as it is in this case. Thank you for sharing your POV.