Is the easy availability of pornography damaging society?

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. "

Brilliant, well informed post Whenim.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

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

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 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.

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.