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The Forum > Article Comments > The woman and the octopus, or how anti porn activists sabotage their own message > Comments

The woman and the octopus, or how anti porn activists sabotage their own message : Comments

By Jennifer Wilson, published 14/9/2011

There is no reason to oppose all sexually explicit images, as if the sexually explicit in itself is dangerous and anti social.

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Well suze, I don't like to 'blow my own trumpet', but I do have some experience. I am excited at the prospect of doing some research for you.

In all honesty, I don't think a teen who is looking for something else, will find violent porn. If they're looking for porn, they may 'accidently' find stuff that one could consider abusive, though I would argue not have it imposed upon them.

They would have to click on a quite low resolution 'thumbnail' of a resonably tame picture (compared to the rest of the content) to see any of this. If I was a lawyerly type, I think it would be pretty easy to convict that they got what they were looking for. Obviously curiosity plays a part, but I cant agree that the mythical power of porn can make a kid into something they don't find arousing. Granny porn? :-) Ewwww!

Anyway, Hormone fuelled teens have an imagination that would send the censors into the red zone. How will you stop that? Is it only real if you see it in a picture? Do books count? With new technology one day we may be able to censor their imagination! Think about it!

In the end the point is moot really. The only way to regulate this stuff would really be quite draconian. Mentioning China is not hyperbole. Kids are on P2P networks for music and movies, and although I have never used this stuff for porn, they could get all sorts of stuff on there apparently. The internet is designed to be open and laws governing it cant be inforced across all international boundaries, and that power the populace has is integral to democracy now that the internet is so much a part of people's lives.

The only %100 effective control is at the home. By the parents

BTW: 'Gore Gallary', which showed real-life police shots of terrible accidents was much more disturbing for me at that age.
Posted by Houellebecq, Thursday, 15 September 2011 1:02:45 PM
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We are in a ludicrous situation in which adolescents can be charged with child sexual abuse in this country for “sexting” one another. Society is a work in progress. Child pornography legislation did not take teenagers “sexting” into account as it wasn’t an issue when it was passed, and could hardly have been foreseen.

While you and Houllie, Peter, are sure that it’s very difficult to access violent porn, there are others who disagree with you on that. The answer is to get some reliable research going into this, it shouldn’t be difficult, it’s not rocket science. And the state could usefully fund that. Then we’d know.

To be continued
Posted by briar rose, Thursday, 15 September 2011 4:17:43 PM
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There are clinicians who say that they are seeing an increasing number of clients with porn related issues, sometimes described as addictive. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe these clinicians are lying. You don’t have to be Freud to realize that intense, early formative sexual experiences can have an effect on sexual functioning, not necessarily negative but sometimes negative.

So it doesn’t sound like a very good idea for the young to be learning about sex from violent porn on the Internet. It isn’t going to mess up everybody’s head as the anti porn crowd ludicrously claim, but it has risks. It can also be difficult to engage in real life sex if you have learned to sexually respond primarily to violent images.

The area is horribly under researched, and if the state wanted to do something useful it could fund such research.

Just because you and Houllie may have watched a ton of porn and not experienced any of these difficulties doesn’t mean they don’t exist for some people. Your argument is like saying cigarettes aren't harmful because you’ve been smoking all your life and you’ve never got lung cancer. Think outside the self-box. People who have experienced distress and dysfunction are hardly likely to front up on a forum like this and say so.

I don’t think anyone has the right to argue against the possible negative effects of violent porn, or its accessibility, when we don’t have the research and the knowledge we need to make informed decisions about it.

Unless you can come up with substantial proof that violent porn is inaccessible to children, and unless you can come up with substantial proof that violent porn is not a factor in sexual dysfunction, you haven’t got a leg to stand on. All you’re saying is it hasn’t bothered you
Posted by briar rose, Thursday, 15 September 2011 4:19:04 PM
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"Unless you can come up with substantial proof that violent porn is inaccessible to children, and unless you can come up with substantial proof that violent porn is not a factor in sexual dysfunction, you haven’t got a leg to stand on. All you’re saying is it hasn’t bothered you".

This is true, but I do think that having some people relate their personal experiences can be a catalyst for further interest and, eventually, research. Supposedly child abuse wasn't widely recognised as a phenomenon until Mary Ellen McCormack's neighbour, having been fobbed off by the police, alerted the animal welfare services of the girl's plight. http://www.aifs.gov.au/nch/pubs/sheets/rs22/ And ok I admit that's a gratuitously extreme example, but still...

If I wasn't at work right now I'd google "pornography addicts' support groups", but perhaps someone who's not being spied upon could. I think we might be surprised at what banks of personal experiences that might turn up.
Posted by Sam Jandwich, Thursday, 15 September 2011 5:56:34 PM
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[cont]

"Hormone fuelled teens have an imagination that would send the censors into the red zone."

Yes I agree another problem is that we don't have a particularly good understanding of adolescent, or even pre-adolescent sexuality. I would say it's quite conceivable that a large proportion of current consumers of internet pornography would be under 18, and maybe some of that is kids looking at violent porn. I'm going to resist the temptation to get personal here, but suffice to say that I have read in blog comments, and in some of Shere Hite's work for example, people reporting that they started having sado-masochistic fantasies from a ver early age - like 5 or 6. Why is this? and what's the extent of it? and what would these kids' reactions be to seeing violent pornography? We simply don't know - but if we want to research the effects of violent pornography then we have to at least start musing on these questions as a precursor.

And as briar rose, and also Nina Funnell in the SMH last weekend have pointed out, criminalising consensual adolescent sexuality by treating sexting in the same way as would be child pornography is deeply inappropriate.

And please rest assured that I do think it is damaging for children to see some types of pornography, and the nature of this damage depends on the age of the child, and on what's depicted. Showing porn to kids is recognised as a form of child abuse after all. But basically what I'm saying is that there is still an awful lot we don't know about the effects of pornography - and certainly nowhere near enough to allow Gail Tankard Bray to make the claims that they do.
Posted by Sam Jandwich, Thursday, 15 September 2011 6:00:14 PM
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Briar rose
You've got the onus of proof back the front. The starting point is not that everything should be illegal, unless people can obtain their freedom by pleading for the gracious permission of the self-opinionated officious busybodies of the anti-sex brigade.

To say people need "protecting" implies something that's dangerous in the first place. But no-one has established that. All we've established is that some people *don't like* looking at certain things and are so self-centred that they want to make it a thought crime for other people to do so!. It's they who need to think outside the self-box, not those who resent their freedoms being violated for no good reason.

So seeing that you cannot defend your argument as it relates to adults, you fall back to the ole stand-by "What about the widdwe chiwdwen?"

Well the children are the children of their parents, and the responsibility for parenting them is on the parents. The parents should control what they watch, and if they can't be bothered, there is *no ground* for bullying and threatening and violating the liberties other people minding their own business.

Picture the scene: the Reverend Fred Nile is at home one night, quietly pootling on his computer, looking up the Lives of the Saints, or the Sermons of the Pious, singing a little ditty of serene contentment "Tum tiddle bom pom", when all of a sudden
"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhh!" his eyes a-pop, his tonsils a-wobble, he JUST HAPPENS to click on a picture of a donkey phucking a woman.

Sorry but the whole scenario you are conjuring is just complete bullsh!t.

What are these intolerant meddling know-it-alls even doing surfing these sites in the first place?

And if it's so corrupting for other people to look at them, what about the poor government employees who are going to be looking at this stuff all day long? Who's going to "protect" them?

It is vicious nonsense from start to finish. These people should be jeered and laughed to scorn, not humoured by restricting other people's liberty "just a little bit".
Posted by Peter Hume, Thursday, 15 September 2011 7:04:46 PM
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