So reasons a generation. Then, in their thirties, they decide to settle down. Good luck buddy!
My friend Tee Tyson recently did this vlog on porn or “pron” as the Internet generation calls it. I liked how she handled this subject, without getting preachy.
Check it out:That Girl Tyson
While I was amused by it, I was also experiencing a much stronger reaction: you see, I HATE PORN.
Two words: conditioned response.
For those who haven’t had Psychology 101, it’s what happens when you pair a stimulus (porn) with a response (masturbation/arousal) and habitually, over time, you get a conditioned response that ends up diminishing the real thing. Think Pavlov’s dogs- porn is the bell, arousal is the drool, and masturbation is the result. Check out this article in Wired Magazine: Internet Porn: Worse than Crack?
What happens when a generation of young boys, by the millions, surfing porn on the internet, masturbating to it, learn at a formative age that women aren’t really people. They’re bitches and hos, and when they say no they don’t really mean it.
Classic!
For the girls, they hear that sexting is cool, that being a porn star is something to aspire to, and they actually compete for the chance to let it all hang out. Girls are photographing themselves and each other and circulating these images among themselves, and they think nothing of it unless someone makes fun, calling them fat or something.
I had a client cutting herself over a photo she sent to a boyfriend of her open coochie. She thought this was perfectly normal, was just upset when he sent the photo to all his buddies and they approached her for sex. Thought the boyfriend betrayed their love.
She was twelve.
It scares me to think of this generation trying to find long term partners and raise families with this kind of foundation for their relationships.
Ten years ago I thought I was a cool mom, hiring a 15 year old neighborhood boy to babysit afterschool. Our son, aged 9 at the time, idolized the boy, and he was a good kid, no dad in his life and loved our family, coming to holidays and just really being a part of our lives. We had cyberprotect programs on all our computers and thought we were safe until one day Mike checked the browsing history and found out the kid had been surfing porn on our computers- and not only that, had let our son see it too.
We fired the kid in a heartwrenching sit-down talk. He cried and begged to be given another chance, but I couldn’t help wondering if something worse had happened—and to this day we live with the knowledge that it could have. Do I blame the kid? No. I blame porn—its insidious hold, its addictive bell-ringing titillation, its open door into darker and darker things to get the same arousal.
Porn is shown to be an escalating factor in sexual deviance and violence. When investigators are looking for rapists, pedophiles, and other sexual perpetrators they look for porn. It’s the gateway drug of sexual violence.
As a therapist I can attest to how many relationships porn hurts. WAAAAAYYYYY more than it’s ever helped, that’s for sure. And dudes who want to quit struggle to worse than smoking. Because, people, they’ve become Pavlov’s dogs. Watch, listen, drool. Pretty soon you can’t get it up without the bell.
How are these folks going to enjoy the dimply, jiggly, smelly, sweaty, hairy realities of what is the most intimate part of love? Porn is poison, of the arsenic-slow-build kind. Not entertainment.
Don’t even let it burn your eyeballs, because unfortunately, those images may be in your mind forever. Porn’s not cool—it cheapens all the tomatoes who watch it.
unspeakable leftovers. Ewwwwww!
That article has a fear mongering tone, and I see no sources other than experts sounding off. I too have a psychology degree, and in abnormal psych, and I haven’t read a single study that suggests a link between porn and any of this. Most FBI profilers agree that even when they find a violent offender who consumes a large amount of porn, it is not that the porn creates a violent fantasy. It’s that the porn feeds a dysfunction that is already there. If the porn were not available that personality defect would not disappear. What about the studies that suggest at least a correlation between the availability of written child porn–where no children are photographed or otherwise hurt–and the DECREASE of pedophile related crimes? I understand that as psychologists it is very easy to fall in to the trap of thinking our patients are representative but in the end we’re seeing such a small sample of people that we cannot draw scientific conclusions from our studies of them. I understand you have big feelings on this subject, but they’re feelings. Until I see some science–a body of work, written for peer reviewed journals, I continue to think that most people have an appropriate distance from acts of fantasy.
Also, here you go.
http://www.ccoso.org/library%20articles/Research%20and%20Statistics%20-%20T…pdf
“In other words, sex offenders may become involved with pornography for a variety of reasons. Despite this involvement, there is no evidence of a causal link between viewing adult or child pornography and the commission of sexual crimes. The fact that some sex offenders, including child molesters, consume pornography, and some use it during the commission of a sexual offence does not mean that the
pornography caused the offence to occur.”
”
Authors of retrospective research studies and clinicians generally conclude that many sex offenders have deviant fantasies and/or behaviours that preceded preferences for specific sexually explicit material, such as child pornography (Nutter and Kearns, 1993; Groth and Oliveri, 1989)
“In summary, child and/or adult pornography is a feature in the lives of many pedophiles and other sex offenders, just as it is a feature in the lives of some persons who do not commit sexual offences. Alternatively, some sex offenders do not use pornography of any kind. There appears to be no strong and consistent evidence that sex offenders are more avid consumers of pornography than other males. A
simple, direct causal link between pornography and sexual offending is not supported by the literature.”
Making these kind of emotional statements when you are a psychologist borders on irresponsible.
Hi there,
I never set out to write a scholarly treatise on porn, or it would have had a much different feel believe me. This is my opinion, supported by some anecdotal evidence just as your comment is. I appreciate the articles, thanks!
I based my statement on the law enforcement people I talked to in researching the violent rapist in my FICTION novel. Yes I could have done a pros and cons, and lots of research, but this was an opinion piece pure and simple. Its a chicken-or-egg argument.
I think it’s certainly fine to make an opinion based post, but you do present things here in a way that implies they are fact. I admit to being a stickler for a clear delineation between fact and emotion, and a stickler for research. Especially with statements like “porn is poison.” I think it’s important to not present this kind of attitude to clients. If we’re going to talk anecdotal evidence, I once had a psychiatrist insist to me that marajuana would and could kill my brain, and she had exactly nothing to back that up. She was perfectly happy to shame me on that score, however.
Thank you for the discussion, btw. Not everyone responds to being challenged in a classy way.
If you’re looking for empirical evidence, I suggest looking up books by Patrick Carnes. Carnes (Ph.D, specializes in sexual disorder services, multipublished author, and internationally recognized expert on the subject) published a book called “In the Shadows of the Net.”
My husband is a therapist specializing in marriage and family therapy, and most of clients have problems with porn. He uses Carnes’s books as much of the basis of his therapy. They are targeted at treatment but are based on years of research into the subject. He’s also published numerous scholarly papers.
I am planning to buy the book and read the resources. Thanks so much, I have lots of print articles I use with clients, though I don’t specialize in this it often comes up as an area of struggle.
Also, don’t we as writers have an obligation to realism?
Yes, indeed we do, except when writing fiction!!! LOL
Do I have to present an unbiased view on my writing blog, complete with citations for every statement, or does it? Shoots, where’s the fun in that?
I’ve just seen more people hurt by porn than “helped.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that about the sex offenders, but it was based on talking with cops and I could have included that as my reference, for all it’s anecdotal provenance.
No. Writers DO NOT have an “obligation to realism” as you put it. Did you somehow miss the 20th century and all of its attendant avant garde movements in art and literature?
Except it sounds as thought she’s writing something with realistic underpinnings. Even when it’s surreal, I do think you must know the rules of reality before you can properly warp them. So I’m afraid I stand by the question.
Everyone knows the “rules of reality” instinctively. I’ve seen child development experiments that show that even toddlers can demonstrate that they understand the rules of reality.
But if you do have a problem with people warping reality, then you should have some major issues with the people who write the scripts for porn films. So you’re standing by your question, grand. But you’re not really going to try to convince us that porn has something to do with realism, are you?
The problem I see is that people in law enforcement tend to be conservative thinkers and rather biased against psychology. Citing sources? Well, I might. When you say you’re a psychologist in a post, it does imply–to me anyway, caveat here–that your opinion has some fact to it.
I am also a believer in realism in fiction, though I admit I am a total obsessive about it. I have looked up things like how far a drive between two towns is, what kind of water systems Washington state has, the realities of sex with a paraplegic, how to insert a catheter, how much spinal surgery costs, what the most popular orange soda was in Britain in the seventies, and so on. I am certainly not saying a book that deviates from that or stretches reality can’t be fun though!
It’s great to have that kind of detail, the world the reader enters is more ‘real.’
That story with the twelve year old disturbs and worries me greatly.
In my time online, I’ve join various communities where there are different rules in effect. Most communities I’ve been a part of, the rule is no real names and they don’t even want to see a picture. The only exception is after a few years when you really know someone. But in my early 20’s I joined a forum that was super open. First names, pictures, and even addresses and phone numbers were exchanged. And everyone did it because it was normal. If you didn’t, you were the stand offish one and it was kinda weird.
I sort of see some of the “sexting” behavior like that. Kids see others doing it, and as they’re always comparing themselves to others and looking for “normal,” they do it too.
On the flip side, and actually on the subject of porn, my boyfriend has gotten to know a lot of college age guys (19 and 20) on a forum he frequents, and he’s surprised at how many of them have not had sex. He says they know a lot about it because they’ve seen it with all the porn that’s easily available online, and that somehow seems to work against them. Like because they’ve seen it so graphically, sex isn’t as huge a deal to them as it was to my boyfriend when he was their age. I met three of these guys last year, and two of them, in an off handed way, seemed to suggest that what they wanted was a connection deeper than just sex.
Thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. I like your explanation for the sexting; I agree it’s something they’ve seen among themselves. My point is, the general climate of accessibility, minimizing of harm and new norms for sexual behavior that count on porn exposure/use as part of a knowledge lexicon, is creating change at a pace we can’t even keep up with to study. Interesting about your boyfriend’s virgin friends; my guess is they’re of the icon on my blog school “Who needs sex when you got porn, cheap easy and emotionally safe”. Just a guess, feel free to challenge!
http://www.iprc.unc.edu/G8/Hernandez_position_paper_Global_Symposium.pdf
Anybody who is still around for this discussion, please read this position paper/resource posted by a member of law enforcement.
Unfortunately, even if we don’t want it to be true, there’s considerable evidence in support of the role that pornography (especially certain specific types of porn) plays in serious sexual offences. I speak as a former police officer and pretty regular guy – i.e: one who doesn’t hate porn or think it should be piled up and burned!
The part that’s less clear, is whether the porn produces the seed of the behaviour itself, or (more likely) merely serves as a fuel for the twisted psychology of certain types of character. A couple of ‘rape’ porn and hard-core bondage enthusiasts who’ve contributed to this debate are Harvey Murray Glatman (killer of 3 women in the 50’s) and Theodore Robert Bundy (killer of many more) – extreme examples undoubtedly; but there are many, many more.
I don’t have a simple solution (serial murder and sexual offences predate the modern preoccupation with porn); but don’t kid yourself that it’s harmless.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I know you have a considerable knowledge base (and I’m not implying of porn, LOL!) upon which you base your comment.
i appreciate your taking the time to write a well-thought-out post on a very difficult subject.
found you through K. C. Woolf and will keep you on my list of blogs to read.
Thanks that’s a compliment! Feel free to weigh in on the Porn discussion 2 blogs back, I enjoyed the diverse views expressed!
Thanks Michelle, I’m so glad you stopped by, I have to pop in on yours ASAP.