The only thing that can be said for sure about civilization and sexuality is that civilization is disturbed by sexuality and no successful uniform solution has ever appeared.
Do observe that i exclude the sexuality of non civilizations. Sexuality begins there with puberty with some fanfare and multiple partners is accepted until bonding occurs and that is also usually limited to several years. That protocol happens to be in direct conflict with what makes a civilization. That happens to require long periods of education demanding managed abstinence at the least.
Finding a superior solution is obviously desirable and what the explosion of pornography demonstrates is that education is possible and perhaps even a solution that society will be able to accept is at least plausible. Certainly we need to think about it all.
Massive research is seriously overdue and that needs to include societies that do better than most.
That is what we as humans need to do. However, the subject is so fraught with sexually charged biases that i despair of it been tackled at all. This is the problem of Marijuana times ten..
I found this illustration after i wrote this and i suspect that Piers has something useful to say on this.
Pornucopia
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/does-too-much-porn-numb-sexual-pleasure/
I don’t remember how old I was when I had my first encounter with
pornography, but I must have been around 10 – the experience is entwined
with the sound of the AOL dial-up tone. It was something relatively
benign – a close-up photo of some genitalia – and I wasn’t much shocked.
I grew up in a family not given to sugarcoating the realities of the
human condition and I’d known what to expect.
But what if I’d grown up a decade or so later, when the internet had
graduated beyond the old-school chatrooms and into the ubiquitous
juggernaut of today? My memory might have been decidedly different.
‘The widespread use of internet porn is one of the fastest-moving
global experiments ever unconsciously conducted,’ the US science writer
Gary Wilson told a TEDx audience in 2012. For the first time ever,
Wilson explained, we can track how ever-growing exposure to pornography
affects sexual practices, appetites and trends. Wilson – who is neither a
scientist nor a professor – is the founder of Your Brain On Porn, a
site that popularises anti-pornography research. In his talk, he
reiterated the site’s main conclusions: when we have pornography freely
available at our fingertips, the brain’s reward circuits go into
overdrive as they’re exposed to what he terms ‘extreme versions of
natural events’. Instead of one or two possible sexual partners, now
there are dozens, hundreds, all readily accessible in a single click.
Like any addiction, Wilson says, the result is a numbed response to
pleasure, from lack of interest in real women to erectile dysfunction.
Ubiquitous pornography undermines natural sexuality.
Wilson’s talk has had approximately 4.6 million views – and its
popularity heralds a new movement in pornography consumption: NoFap.
‘Fap’ comes from Japanese manga porn, where it is a sound effect for
masturbation. NoFap is a move away from masturbation, and the
pornography that so often forms its backdrop. The rationale derives from
a version of Wilson’s argument: when you are constantly bombarded with
heightened sexual stimuli, your virility is undermined. Your ability to
communicate with real sexual beings collapses. You become isolated –
porn, after all, is a solitary pursuit – and your emotional well being
plummets. Refrain from those stimuli, and from acting on them, and you
will find yourself rejuvenated and your sexual powers reawakened, your
emotional equilibrium restored and your happiness rising. When Wilson’s
talk was first released, the self-styled ‘Fapstronauts’ numbered
approximately 7,000. Today, there are more than 150,000.
[ a lot of asssertions made here, all of which need real testing and study - arclein ]
The NoFap, brain-on-porn arguments are the
latest in a common, critical refrain: that, for one reason or another,
pornography is bad for you. The more traditional critiques say that
pornography is inherently degrading to women – or whoever happens to be
the object of sexual activity – and fosters unrealistic expectations of
sex. It decreases the quality of real relationships and the self-image
of those involved – and increases negative sexual attitudes and actions.
Porn-users compare real humans to the fantastical images, and either
come out unimpressed and reluctant to have real sex, or, at worst,
demanding the types of behaviours they see on screen, regardless of
their desirability to their partner. One poll from the US Pew Research
Center in 2007 quantified the feeling, finding that 70 per cent of
Americans said pornography is harmful.
Do any of these criticisms hold water? It would be nice to know.
Reliable statistics about pornography are notoriously difficult to
obtain – many people under report their own habits, and many porn
companies are loath to share any sort of viewership statistics. But
according to ongoing research by Chyng Sun, a professor of media studies
at New York University (NYU), the numbers are high and rising quickly.
She estimates that 36 per cent of internet content is pornography. One
in four internet searches are about porn. There are 40 million (and
growing) regular consumers of porn in the US; and around the world, at
any given time, 1.7 million users are streaming porn. Of the almost 500
men Sun surveyed in one of her studies, only 1 per cent had never seen
porn, and half had seen their first porn film before they’d turned 13.
Cindy Gallop, the founder of the website Make Love Not Porn, told me
recently that, in the past six months, the average age when children are
first exposed to pornography dropped from eight to six. It wasn’t a
deliberate seeking. Online pornography is now so widespread that it’s
easier than ever to ‘stumble’ on it.
The actual effects of pornography on attitudes, behaviour, life and
relationship satisfaction are difficult to study, and for many years
most data have remained purely correlational or anecdotal. But early on,
there emerged suggestive inklings that those who vocally opposed
pornography’s spread might be motivated more by emotion than any
tangible proof.
In 1969, Denmark became the first country to legalise pornography. In
the years that followed, onlookers watched with interest and
trepidation: what would happen to Danish society? As it turns out,
nothing – or rather, nothing negative. When in 1991 Berl Kutchinsky, a
criminologist at the University of Copenhagen who spent his career
studying the public effects of pornography, analysed the data for more
than 20 years following legalisation, he found that rates of sexual
aggression had actually fallen. Pornography was proliferating, but the
sexual climate seemed to be improving. The same thing happened, he
found, in Sweden and West Germany, which followed Denmark’s legalisation
campaign.
[ which may have something to do with a maturing population - arclein ]
Kutchinsky concluded that the available country-level data ‘would
seem to exclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this availability [of
pornography] has had any detrimental effects in the form of increased
sexual violence… the remarkable fact is that they decreased’ – a
conclusion that has since been echoed by multiple studies of
country-level data, from nations spanning North and South America,
Europe and Asia. If anything, Kutchnisky wrote, pornography was being
used precisely as it was originally intended: as an expression of a
certain fantasy.
‘For someone with lower sex drive, porn evokes the same magnitude response as eating chocolate’
When it comes to porn, going beyond correlational evidence can be
difficult. ‘Science is so scared of pornography and sexuality, and it’s
so discriminated against, that there’s a ton of work that hasn’t been
done,’ Nicole Prause, head of the Sexual Psychophysiology and Affective
Neuroscience Lab at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),
recently told me. ‘Most of the information we currently have is not
experimental or longitudinal. Lots of data talk about correlates and
associations, but the literature is especially bad – it can’t be trusted
– because no one is doing experiments, no one is showing cause and
effect. That needs to change.’
Prause fell into sex research by mistake: she followed a boyfriend to
Indiana and found herself next to the Kinsey Institute, which happened
to have an opening for a researcher. Soon, she was hooked. Today, Prause
has become one of the few researchers in the US to study pornography in
the laboratory. A trained neuroscientist, she focuses much of her
efforts on the brain. Using fMRI, PET and EEG, Prause looks at how we
respond to pornography – and how those responses translate to attitudes
and behaviour. She has found that, in many ways, pornography is no
different to a scary movie or a bungee jump. We just view it differently
because it happens to involve sex. ‘There is a general idea that porn
is special or unique in the brain. But frankly, it doesn’t look that
different from other rewards,’ she says. ‘Lots of other things are as
powerful. For someone with lower sex drive, for instance, watching porn
evokes the same magnitude response as eating chocolate, in similar brain
areas.’
What’s more, it doesn’t seem to be the case that people become
desensitised to pornography, in the sense that the more you watch it,
the more extreme your viewing content needs to become. When Prause and
the psychologist James Pfaus of Concordia University in Quebec recently
measured sexual arousal in 280 men, they found that watching more
pornography actually increased arousal to less explicit material – and
increased the desire for sex with a partner. In other words, it made
them more, not less responsive to ‘normal’ cues, and more, not less,
desirous of real physical relationships. In a 2014 review, Prause
likened pornography addiction – the notion that, like a drug, the more
you watch, the more, and higher doses, you crave – to the emperor who
has no clothes: everyone says it’s there, but there is no actual
evidence to support it.
Prause has also studied the question of relationship satisfaction
more directly: did watching pornography negatively impact the quality of
sexual intimacy? Working with the psychologist Cameron Staley of Idaho
State University in 2013, she asked 44 monogamous couples to watch
pornography alone and together, to see how it would affect feelings
about their relationship. After each viewing session, the couples
reported on their arousal, sexual satisfaction, perception of
themselves, and their partner’s attractiveness and sexual behaviour.
Prause and Staley found that viewing pornography increased couples’
desire to be with their significant other, whether they’d seen the film
alone or together. Pornography also increased their evaluation of their
own sexual behaviour.
In the past decade, experimental approaches
such as Prause’s have finally started to grow in number – and for the
most part, their conclusions cast doubt on the perceived social wisdom
of pornography’s detrimental impact. As part of the 2002 Swiss
Multicenter Adolescent Survey on Health, more than 7,500 16- to
20-year-olds were asked about their exposure to online pornography (over
three-quarters of the males and 36 per cent of the females had viewed
internet porn in the past month) and then measured on a variety of
behaviours and attitudes. The researchers found no association between
viewing explicit material and then going on to behave in more sexually
risky ways. A 2012 review of studies that, since 2005, have looked at
the effects of internet porn on adolescents’ social development and
attitudes found that the prevailing wisdom that pornography leads to
unrealistic sexual beliefs, more permissive attitudes and more
experimentation is not founded on replicable research. ‘The aggregate
literature has failed to indicate conclusive results,’ the authors
conclude in the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity.
Likewise with sexually violent behaviours or negative attitudes
toward women. In one series of experiments conducted by the sexologist
Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii, viewing pornography neither
made men more violent nor more prone to having worse attitudes toward
women. In a 2013 study of 4,600 15- to 25-year-olds in the Netherlands,
the psychologist Gert Martin Hald looked to see whether
pornography-viewing had an effect on a wide variety of sexual
behaviours, such as likelihood of adventurous sex (threesomes, same-sex
partners for self-stated heterosexuals, sex with someone you met online,
etc), partner experience (one-night stands, age of first encounter,
number of partners, etc), and transactional sex (being paid money or
something else for sex, paying someone else for sex). He found that
frequency of pornography-consumption did indeed have an effect – but,
once you controlled for other things, such as socio-demographic factors,
risk-seeking, and social relationships, it explained only an additional
0.3 to 4 per cent of the impact. We shouldn’t dismiss the effect, Hald
says, but rather understand it in context: it is one of many factors,
each of which contributes to behaviour, and its influence is not any
greater (and often, less) than that of other predisposing elements.
The negative behaviours we blame on pornography might have emerged no matter what: porn is more symptom than cause
Indeed, in another study earlier this year, Hald and the psychologist
Neil Malamuth of UCLA looked at the relationship between negative
attitudes toward women and pornography use. They found that there was,
in fact, a link – but only if a person was already low on a scale of
so-called agreeableness. Those results came as no surprise: in 2012,
they, along with the clinical psychologist Mary Koss of the University
of Arizona, found that the only time pornography viewing was associated
with attitudes that condoned any form of violence against women was in
men already at high risk of sexual aggression. When they summarised the
data that preceded their work, they wrote that negative effects ‘are
evidence only for a subgroup of males users, namely those already
predisposed to sexual aggression’. The negative behaviours we blame on
pornography, in other words, might have emerged no matter what; porn is
perhaps more symptom than cause.
It’s a message that new research is increasingly supporting. Earlier
this year, a group from VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands
attempted to disambiguate cause and effect in relationship satisfaction:
did frequent pornography viewing cause people to drift apart – or was
it the result of their having drifted apart already? For three years,
the psychologist Linda Muusses and her colleagues tracked just under 200
newlywed couples, as part of a broader study on marriage and wellbeing.
At regular intervals, both members of every couple were asked about
their use of ‘explicit internet material’, as well as their happiness
with the relationship and their sexual satisfaction. The happier men
were in relationships, they found, the less pornography they watched.
Conversely, more viewing predicted lower happiness a year later. It was a
self-reinforcing cycle: get caught in a good one, with a satisfied
relationship, and porn was a non-issue. But lose satisfaction, watch
more porn, and realise your relationship is further disintegrating.
Muusses and her colleagues also noticed that higher levels of
pornography use at the start of a relationship did not predict a less
sexually satisfying experience later on, for men or women. ‘Our findings
suggest that it is implausible that SEIM [sexually explicit internet
material] causes husbands to contrast their sexual experiences and
partner’s attractiveness with their SEIM experiences with long-lasting
effects,’ the authors wrote.
Why, then, does the disconnect persist
between theory, opinion and social sentiment, on the one hand, and
empirical research, on the other? Part of the problem stems from the
difficulty of saying exactly what pornography actually is. The deeper I
ventured into the world of pornography, online or not, speaking with
producers, viewers, distributors, the stars themselves, the more I
realised how misplaced the very premise of that framing was: there isn’t
a monolithic ‘pornography’, just like there isn’t a monolithic
‘Hollywood film’. When we go to the cinema, there are dramas and
comedies, horror and sci-fi, thrillers and romantic romps – movies to
suit any mood, any taste, any occasion. The experience and effects of
each differ. We don’t emerge from Selma in the same frame of mind as we do from When Harry Met Sally.
But while we understand that implicitly when it comes to mainstream
cinema, we don’t see pornography with the same level of nuance. ‘We
cherry-pick the worst, most aggressive examples,’ said the media
researcher Chyng Sun.
I heard the same refrain over and over, from every researcher and
every member of the pornography industry I spoke with: pornography is to
sex as Hollywood films are to real life. Pornography is fantasy, pure
and simple. And just as any fantasy can be channelled in any direction,
so too can pornography. There are bad fantasies – Sun’s ‘worst, most
aggressive examples’, just as there are good fantasies, instances of
pornography that should pass any feminist’s muster, both in terms of
quality and the ethical standards of filming. As Coyote Amrich of Good
Vibrations, an adult retailer in San Francisco (one of the oldest such
retailers in the country) puts it: ‘Just like not everyone is a Bernie
Madoff in finance, not every person involved in porn is this terrible
person. Some are really great and have allowed incredible content and
have been supportive of male and female performers, and help people make
great careers.’
That short description goes to the heart of what makes pornography
the kind of fantasy we can feel good about versus the kind we should
actively question. It’s not a question of content but rather one of
ethics, where the number-one criterion is the treatment of the actors.
‘Are the women enjoying themselves and having authentic pleasure as far
as we can tell? Are the other people in the scene with them not saying
debasing things to them or, if they are, is it clear that it’s wanted –
yes, I want you to call me a slut, so call me a slut?’ Amrich
explained. It matters little what acts are being performed or how; we
shouldn’t be quick to dismiss something as bad just because we,
personally, don’t think anyone could possibly enjoy it. What matters is
that the people performing these acts enjoy their performance. As Jamie
Martin, who previously worked with Amrich at Good Vibes, put it: ‘If
it’s not hurting anyone, and someone is going to get off on it, why
not?’
Amrich refuses to stock any films where the ethical treatment of
actors isn’t completely clear, a stance I saw from multiple buyers,
distributors and retailers. Increasingly, people insist that the product
they host on their site or bring to their customers comes from a place
of clear desire. Not all porn is created equal. ‘We need to move past
the notion that a female performer is a victim. It’s antiquated,’ Amrich
says. ‘It doesn’t acknowledge female power, pleasure, women taking
control of sexuality. It only serves the idea that a woman who is sexual
is being taken advantage of.’
Jiz Lee, recognised as one of the leading modern genderqueer adult
performers, has been in the industry for more than 10 years, and says
ethical pornography is a priority. The single biggest marker of such
porn is that it costs the consumer something. ‘By paying for it, it’s a
guarantee,’ Lee told me, taking a break from shooting with the director
Shine Louise Houston. ‘Otherwise, it can be hard to tell if it was
ethically shot. Paying helps insure it, and helps the company be in good
standing.’ These days, they point out, the internet doesn’t just
function as a way to distribute pornography; it’s a way of gauging
quality and blacklisting those sites that don’t meet certain standards.
‘I won’t work for a company that has a poor record or is exploitative,’
Lee says. ‘And I will tell everybody else.’
In the absence of other options, pornography becomes a de facto way of educating yourself about sexuality
Ethical pornography is becoming increasingly less exceptional. The
porn industry of today is a far cry from the ‘San Pornando Valley’ adult
entertainment industry of the 1990s. There are more women in charge,
more readily enforced standards, and more accountability.
But regardless of what pornography insiders say, for consumers,
especially younger ones who are growing up with a ubiquitous internet,
the view is quite different. Unlike Hollywood, where it’s clear to
anyone that they are watching an idealised version of reality, with
pornography, that realisation is often absent. For one simple reason: we
don’t talk about sexual pleasure as children, adolescents or adults.
It’s a taboo, guilt-ridden area. In the absence of other options,
pornography becomes a de facto way of educating yourself about
sexuality. As one 2014 study of low-income black and Hispanic youth put
it, led by Emily Rothman of the Boston University School of Public
Health, quoting an interview with a porn-watching adolescent: ‘Without
porn, I wouldn’t know half the things I know now.’
The sex researcher Alice Dreger of
Northwestern University in Chicago recently live-tweeted from a
high-school sex-education class – her son’s. His teacher’s approach, it
soon became clear, was absolute avoidance of any topics other than
abstinence. Any attempt to broaden the conversation was stonewalled. And
therein lies the problem. We see pornography as a socially destructive
force, but there’s nothing inherently destructive about it. It becomes
so only when it is the one thing adolescents see as they discover sex:
they use it as a learning script. It’s not a problem of pornography as
such, but rather, a problem of the absence of a competing script,
something that contextualises porn as a fantastical, not real-life,
experience.
The way to change that – and to change the negative effects such a
misperception can have – isn’t to restrict or ban pornography. It’s to
bring the discussion of sexual pleasure to the foreground, especially in
sex-ed. ‘We need to supplement pornography with non-porn sexual
education, so that porn becomes fantasy sex rather than a real-world
template,’ Zhana Vrangalova, a psychologist at NYU who specialises in
sexuality, told me. ‘We need to give people permission to enjoy sex.
Until we do that, they will go to porn. Because you can’t kill
curiosity.’
Already, certain movements are trying to do just that. Jessica Cooper
helps run ScrewSmart, a sex-education collaborative in Philadelphia
that aims to foster open dialogue about sexual pleasure. The group meets
with students, hosts workshops, discusses porn and its role openly and
honestly. ‘One of the biggest issues for sexuality in general is
permission,’ Cooper told me. ‘People want permission to like things they
like, want what they want. We are giving them permission to say yes.
Your desires are valid, sexuality is important, what you want to do is
not wrong. Porn does that, especially to women. They need to be told,
I’m not an evil, weird creature for enjoying this.’
For some women, erotica is the mythical Viagra, a way of empowering them
Other programmes are starting with even younger children – an
important step given the ever-earlier pornography exposure that might
otherwise seep through unexplained. In Norway, Line Jansrud, the
presenter of Newton, an educational show on state TV, gives
herself a hickey with a vacuum cleaner, kisses a tomato and uses a
lubricated dildo on an anatomically correct doll model. She wants to
explain how real sex works, so that children and adolescents can
distinguish Hollywood from real life. Her target audience:
third-graders.
The effects of this social change reach far beyond sexual education
as such. ‘We’re missing important therapeutic effects of using erotica
because of taboos,’ Prause says. ‘Aroused states and orgasms do really
nice things for the brain and body.’ Erotica can, for some women, be the
mythical Viagra that has thus far gone missing, a way of empowering
them and ‘putting their brain in that mode, helping it do what it’s been
programmed to do’. There is certainly a desire for it, albeit largely
unspoken in normal circumstances: when Prause’s group placed an ad for
one of their recent studies, the response broke their phone lines. They
had to take it offline. There is also evidence that the social effects
of watching porn can spread beyond the individual: pornography has been
shown to improve acceptance of homosexuality, birth control and
extra-marital sex.
And porn has the potential to go even further. Sun doesn’t like
pornography – but it’s not actual porn she doesn’t like. It’s the social
norms and standards that led to the creation of certain stereotypes in
the first place: not a result of pornography, but rather a reflection of
the direction broader society has taken. ‘We live in a patriarchy,
where women are fundamentally objectified. We shouldn’t be surprised to
see it play out in pornography.’
We shouldn’t be worrying about whether pornography has negative
repercussions on society. We should be worrying about the kind of
society that would lead to the types of pornography we find distasteful
in the first place – and work on fixing that society rather than blaming
its inevitable result.
22 June 2015
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