Nugsy “Why is it that child pornography is scorned and the perpetrators hated and hunted down by the media but when a pornographic model comes 'of age' pornography is suddenly not only condoned but celebrated by Australian society?”

I am not sure if it is celebrated but it should certainly be tolerated.

As to your comment

“Yes, they may be adults over the age of consent but that does not mean they are in a position to make sound decisions benefiting their emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual wellbeing. Obviously NOT!”

Oh I so totally agree. So many lack the basic decision making skills!

Hence, we end up with a KRudd government.

That surely proves how some folk have an impaired ability to make sound decisions.

I suppose you think we should disenfranchise them too?

Not stop at denying them the right to make their own decisions in terms of their “emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual well being” but at the same time, deny them the right to make a decision to who will govern, in their name and for their own good!

Yeah well get this.

I will always support the limitation of government power especially in the arena of censorship

We all, occassionally, make poor decisions for ourselves (I know I have made some “doozies” ) but the mistakes we make for ourselves are invariably lesser and more easy to correct than when government makes the mistakes on our behalf.

And at least we “grow” as individuals, from the decision making experience.

All that censorship does in deny us that growth opportunity.

“Let us not stop speaking against what is so detrimental to our communities.”

Absolutely Agree and I am doing that here and now. Censorship is what is detrimental and the greater risk to our quality of life

I can choose to ignore pornography,
I do not get the choice to ignore censorship.

That pornography is destructive should be plain to all, and I have most certainly experienced its harmfulness in my life. The overwhelming majority of those who consume pornography are men, and by and large the objects of their lust-fantasy are women, many of whom end up being nothing but impersonal sex-things for use in personal and selfish gratification. And because women are typified as such, those men who regularly consume pornography end up with a twisted perspective of women and their value: women become less human - with all their innate value and worth - and more sex-fantasy objects; no longer so much as someone's daughters, sisters, mothers, friends, but a thing to gratify sexual desires, fantasy or real.

Pornography is harmful, and is truly profitable only for one group: the multi-billion dollar sex/pornography industry.

It concern me that so many people are willing to countenance censorship.

I also suspect that the plethora of new posters have come a-runnin from some kind of anti-pornography website, but I suppose that's neither here nor there.

I'd like to give you an example of what can happen when we allow our government to dictate issues of censorship, instead of giving the population the freedom to choose.

How many of the advocates of pornography censorship, are aware of the Chinese cultural revolution?

Chairman Mao effectively decided that sex was immoral, and was only to be undertaken as a means of procreation. Men and women were made to dress in an identical fashion, and marriages were selected by the government.

Is this an acceptable alternative? It created misery for a generation, which is still being felt, but now the country is moving toward a more sexually free culture. Still, knowledge of STDs and some pretty basic sex education remains a mystery for many citizens.

So why do I bring this up?

This is a precise example of restrictive social engineering - that's what's so important here, because at the core, what Mao was attempting, and what the censorship lobby are attempting are identical.

The idea is, to change what people want.

You, are trying to change people. You want to alter them. You want to make them have less of a sex drive.

You believe you have the right to dictate to other people what they should be like.

Social engineering is not acceptable, when there is no choice involved. Social engineering takes many forms - I don't mind advertisements for things like healthy eating habits, etc, because I'm free to refuse - but the alternative, would be banning junk food.

Regardless of what YOU or I think or porn, it's not up to us to make that decision.

Because people watch porn, they're not automatically going to commit rape - therefore, those people have the right to watch it, if they're not hurting anyone.

That's the endgame here. It really is that simple.

Gee Grodo, I'm impressed by your ability to post so many ignorant generalisations in one paragraph. It's like you have paid any attention at all to the discussion in this and other threads or the evidence provided which seem to run contrary to your shrill assertions.

It would do yourself, Nugsy, and Yindin well to actually research the issue properly - if you're capable of working out that what if something is not to your taste it doesn't mean that it is morally wrong.

Yes Turnleftthenright, it is that simple! Pornography does hurt people. Exactly the reason it should be stopped. How can you deny that it hurts everyone associated with it? You can not intellectualize something that affects the core of a person? Think of the issue in the first person. What would it be like to be used in porn? What would it mean your life was like?

Lev

‘It would do yourself [Grodo], Nugsy, and Yindin well to actually research the issue properly - if you're capable of working out that what if something is not to your taste it doesn't mean that it is morally wrong.’

Statements admonishing people about their research-challenged status do nothing more than give the speaker a sense of self-righteous superiority. Frankly, I believe research has become the misguided Delphic Oracle of modern society.

As the author chillingly shows, research on pornography can be compromised by many variables, including the gender politics of the funding body, the researchers’ objectivity, the methodology used and the selectivity of content. Likewise, much of the research on pornography in current Western society is conducted within the context of a culture in which women still remain unequal to men and are far, far more sexualised in the public domain than men are. These factors alone render many pornography research outcomes less than useful.

TRTL

At the time of the Communist and Cultural Revolutions in China, the West was not exactly a garden of promiscuity and free love. According to my mother, sexual repression was so bad in the 50s that many of her friends believed you could get pregnant just from kissing. She herself didn’t even know that the vagina and urinary tract were two different anatomical orifices until after she was married.

Also, you are judging censorship within the context of a totalitarian society, one that was totally devoid of the healthy checks and balances of democratic societies. You portray censorship as having an automatic endgame of complete and total social engineering – discounting the balancing motion of social pendulums moving forward and back.

In recent decades the pendulum has moved way too far towards excessive levels of pornography and an all-pervading presence of it in the public domain. It’s time for the pendulum to fall back again.