Is the easy availability of pornography damaging society?

I read this too and was going to post the link. Yes, I agree with everything in the article. It's the pernicious progressive desensitisation which occurs and then normalises the attitudes described.

I think it's very sad that the voices of feminism speaking about this, are so muted. I remember Claire Short's campaign against Page 3 in the 80s and that looks tame now against the dreadful images of degraded women and girls easily available at the click of a mouse.

One thing the media, and certain very influential voices, have been supremely successful at, is portraying women who object to being objectified as charmless, bitter, humourless and frigid.

I'm sure there are people on this forum who have expert knowledge of some of the effects of this stuff, Whenim will be able to provide an informed perspective.

There was a discussion on The Wright Stuff last week that almost had me shouting at the TV -somebody had suggested that there was such a thing as 'good' porn. I wanted somebody to say it depends exactly how you define pornography. Erotic images of people enjoying sexual contact could be useful, for example in a clinic for people with sexual disfunction, but I would not call that porn. To me, that means the depiction of anybody (usually women) being degraded, coerced, treated brutally or otherwise dehumanised.
That can never be good for anybody, particularly young people who actually believe that normal people behave in that way.

So agree Greatnan, there's all the difference in the world between images produced by (for example) Thomas Rowlandson, and the vile stuff freely available now.

There are parental settings on computers to stop children getting in to pornography.
What I can not understand is why porn sites can not be blocked. Where I worked they were blocked.
Occasionally somebody would accidently find a porn site on the work computer system usually by mistyping a site address . We had a number to call if this happened and the site would be blocked.
There are perverts around who finds these sites ok.

Frank

Erotica (preferable term - pornography is by definition a pejorative term) is popular and for the most part harmless.

A lady I knew defined obscenity as 'whatever doesn't turn on that particular judge'.

Feetle, I think that yours is a rather naive view of pornography.

My ex was a detective in the vice squad for some time, and I can assure that for the most part, it can be very harmful.

The most obvious immediate effect is the 'pornification' (probably not a word) of young women and girls. Both they and their boyfriends see anything other than hairless women as disgusting. I know of girls as young as 14 having total body waxes for this reason.

I agree with the piece. I find it sad that the sex industry is so pervasive - in fashion (including girl's clothes) in the music industry (some of those videos look like soft porn to me) as well as the "beauty" industry - depilation, breast enhancement etc.
We have gone backwards, not forwards, since The Female Eunuch was published. Sexual harrassment is also rife - follow the Twitter thread called Everyday Sexism if you want to hear more about this. There is also a lot of pressure on women - including young teenagers to engage in the kind of activities that boys and men see in porn. Filming sexual acts on mobile phones and sharing it with "friends" being just one example.
The last straw for me was the silly fad of "Slut Walks" - young women being inspired to demonstrate for their right to dress as if the are sex workers without inviting the attention that sex workers seek to attract.
Definitely time for a backlash but unfortunately there are huge vested interested including major newspaper publishers and commercial broadcasters.

Anyone who has visited the Abusive Images Unit (used to be called Obscene Publications) would be traumatised to see banks of monitors lining one wall, with videos of REAL children being subjected to what amounts to sexual torture. What the average person thinks is pornography is low level soft porn and erotica. The call for having no censorship doesn't make sense when you see what is being traded by paedophiles and circulated to, and between, children.

Profit from production of abusive images far exceeds revenue from drugs trafficking. The Copine Scale rates the seriousness of the content and distribution of abusive material, to enable assessment, conviction and sentencing of offenders found with such material. It was developed to try to end the myth that porn doesn't do any harm.

I don't support censorship in general, but when it comes to the wholesale corruption of users of abusive images, I do urge very tight controls.

Think about this - if adult, well-trained, hardened police officers, specially trained for dealing with sexual offending, can be reduced to stressed-out, mentally ill men and women from being exposed to this material day after day, despite receiving support, supervision and preventative counselling from the best forensic psychologists............what chance do children have? And before anyone takes up the debate by intellectualising it, remember that every time someone clicks on an abusive image, whether it be child, man, woman or animal, that image lessens in financial value and the manufacturers of this material are busy seeking out new, younger, more frightened victims, who won't look frightened on the videos because they are given drugs to render them compliant.

Sorry to sound so forceful, but I feel very strongly about the way that fans of 'pornography' (let's call it what it is that we're concerned about - images of sexual degradation and torture) defend the right to see it. Page 3 images are the 'acceptable' end of a nasty business.

Brilliant, well informed post Whenim.

Quote from Heridan's Play, The Rivals. It is about the dangers to young gels' morals from the innocent romantic novels distributed by the circulating libraries, but applies to pornograpy too:-

"Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge!† Depend upon it, Mrs Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last. "

Missed out an S. Heridan did not write any plays.

When I'm 64, Excellent post agree with all you say.

when I share your feelings about censorship. I don't support it in general but think that there are serious issues about images of violence and sex – and a lot of porn, from what I understand, features both of these.

HUNTERF As far as parental settings are concerned, I think these can be very useful but they cannot prevent access to all pornography, not least because there is such a lot of it and sites change.

I have worked extensively with adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse (including women who had become sex workers and were themselves used in the production of porn films) and to a lesser extent with children who have been abused. Almost all of the survivors I worked with had had their early sexual experiences 'normalised' through the use of pornography. Porn is addictive and, as with drugs, there is usually an escalation. I hate it.

I have heard that in Germany you have to visit the Post office and get some kind of access code or similar to access pornography. Why can we not have something similar here. Or at least the default setting on computers being to protect against pornography unless you take conscious steps to access it.

We are absolutely obsessed about paedophiles and child abuse, yet many children regularly see pornography on their parents computers. Isn't that a form of child sex abuse? Perhaps we should prosecute anybody, including parents whose actions make it possible for children under 15 to see pornographic images.

There is no doubt that we do need a system where people opt in rather than opt out of porn on the net. All child porn has a victim. Children involved have been damaged and have very little chance of living a normal life.

I don't want my grandchildren to be able to see these images at other people's houses.{or their own}

I believe the attitude of many boys towards girls has worsened since the advent of freely available pornography. There are so many horrible stories of girls whose lives are destroyed (sometimes literally, by suicide) because some boy has got them to perform 'a sexual act', presumably fellatio, filmed it and distributed it. I might have been a bit naive, but I had honestly never heard of this act until I had been married for several years.
The tabloid newspapers, not just The Sun, pretend to be shocked by pornography, but are delighted to post images of what the Mail calls 'wardrobe malfunctions' on their on- line version. An exposed nipple gets them salivating. Sometimes girls as young as 14 are described as 'flaunting their curves' when they are simply wearing a swimsuit.

I read last week that model agencies are now stationing recruiters outside eating disorder clinics because they want girls as thin as possible. Have these people no conscience?

ga My experiences, and those of the young people I worked with, would disagree with your comment of almost all of those who have experienced sexual abuse had 'normalised' their experiences through pornography.

There is a big difference between acting 'as if' and 'normalising' trauma. My work with young people would suggest quite the reverse of your almost all
comment.

Frankly, there is, and can never be, a normalising of such a history.

Quite apart from anything else accessing porn is risky. My husband used to fix computers for people at work and he found that if they were infected with viruses nine times out of ten they would have come from a porn site. He said a lot of the men hardly looked at anything else and were sitting ducks for attackers.

I certainly think boys are getting a very unrealistic view of sex. Women aren't always up for it, don't necessarily enjoy oral or anal sex or sado masochism, and don't find all men (however hideous) irresistable.

Butty I was working in a very specialised unit with a particular group of women. My comments refer only to that group of people.

Thanks for the clarification, ga.
Got a bit ratty - but then this sort of subject usually makes me feel that.
When I read you'd worked 'extensively', I didn't immediately think of a specialised unit.

when Great post.

Just how nasty this nasty business is (and business is what it is) was brought home to my Rotary group last night by a woman who works with young people who have been 'trafficked'. The people who run such 'business' are pitiless beasts who objectify human beings. It is appalling. If campaigning against the sexual objectification of people will make any difference, then we need to do it.

Another thing she highlighted when we mentioned our feeling of helplessness is that contacting MPs about making changes to laws which affect the asylum-seeking process of trafficked people is worth doing. The people she works with are so psychologically damaged that they can't cope with what we would think of as ordinary questions and this works against them because their 'stories' then don't hang together tight enough for lawyers. Language is usually a problem too.