This website seems to give a balanced view:

http://www.sexscience.org/publications/index.php?category_id=440&subcategory_id=336

I am wary of those who approach this subject from an overly religious point of view. Their minds are already made up and nothing is likely to change their attitudes. Anything to do with sex, except within bounds which they are conditioned to find acceptable, is sinful and harmful and should be discouraged and, if possible, banned outright.

Definitions of pornography vary with the individual. I don't regard non-sexual nudity as in the least pornographic. Some would say that there is no such thing as non-sexual nudity and that all nudity, except between marriage partners, is sinful and should be banned. I consider this to be a learned religious attitude and something which should not be imposed on the rest of us.

I will draw some analogies of unjustified religious interference:

We all regard abortion rates as too high. The extreme religious answer is to push the chastity line and ban legal abortion. What actually works is the Dutch model, ie teach young people about sexuality, teach them to accept responsibility and make contraception easily available. Australia currently seems to be stuck with a poor compromise which demonstrably doesn't work.

My area has had a legal clothes-optional beach for many years. Every so often, the local religious right try to have it closed down, sometimes using lurid allegations. After a sensational letter to a local paper several years ago, I phoned the police and council and they both said the freebeach was quiet and trouble-free. Ever heard of "bearing false witness"?

Some months ago, there was an application for another so-called adult shop in our city centre. This caused an outcry in council and the local press, which I would say was deliberately staged. Apparently we already had two, which obviously weren't causing a problem, because most of us probably didn't even know where they were situated.

There were dire predictions of sex attacks etc if we got another "sex shop". Guess what, we now have it and it's had no effect on the local crime figures.

Runner wrote:


"This is one of the dumbest articles I have ever read. Ted Bundy serial rapist and murderer said before being put to death that he had not met one fellow sex offender who was not into pornography. Anyone with any contact with sexual offenders in prison will confirm that the offenders are almost all involved in pornography."

This stream of logic closely resembles that of King Arthur in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, or for those who can remember it the discussion on logic on the vinyl LP from that movie.

Or to paraphrase, Nicole Kidman is a woman, but not all women are Nicole Kidman.

Just because sex offenders are into pornography doesn't make everyone who is into pornography a sex offender.

I would venture to say that somewhere around 95% of males have willingly looked at porn sometimes in their lives, many for a second or third time even.

However, except for redical feminists, few would argue that all men are sex offenders.

As for pornography for women, 'The Bold and the Beautiful' and 'The Young and the Restless' don't seem to be losing ratings.

See my article, "Could it be that pornography prevents rape" at www.obcenitycrimes.org (Porn Problem & Solutions page).

Sex one of the deadly sins. We don't spend much time on things like greed and gluttony. If we did we could certainly send a few politicans to purgatory.

We live in a society which seems to have almost a schizophrenic attitude towards sex. In some ways it is liberal and in others extremely inhibitive.

In most religions sexuality is something to be suppressed and certian practises banned.

The discovery of the ancient city of Pompeii and the at the time shocking frescos which adorned the walls. So pornography has been around a long time. The invention of the camera and the movie camera socalled 'blue' films followed very quickly.

It doesn't matter whether you ban pornography or not, because there will always be a black market

Morality in the Media !

Whose morals?

Note that 100's of people looking at kiddy porn have been caught because of the internet, we have laws.

Could it be that the incidence of rape is going down because....

Men are dating less for fear of getting accused of 'date rape'.

The definition of rape is changing

Or false claims of rape are on a downward trend.

Improved surveillance techniques make it more difficult to make make a false rape allegation

Improved forensic techniques in proving, disproving that a rape took place.

DNA testing has freed innocent men imprisoned for years.

According to Naomi Wolf, porn is shutting down mens'libidos completely..

http://newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/index.html

If you have trouble with the link a critical POV is here..

http://www.leftist.org/haightspeech/archives/000064.html

The article is, like most of Wolf's work, unintentionally hilarious.

I agree with Wolf in that men in the US and elsewhere in the western world are losing interest in western women but I think it has more to do with personality than pornography.