Maybe this post would have been better off being called the ‘P’ words and Marriage, (purity and patience are other ‘p’ words that would fit this article nicely) but I’m not too fussed.
Pornography.
There I’ve said it.
One of the things I cannot account for is the age of the reader, so I endeavour to make sure what I’m writing is not coarse, vulgar, profane or obscene. Yet in certain matters that need to be addressed certain words have to be used and the matter at hand is pornography. What follows is the entire blog post a friend of mine – Andy Kind by name – posted recently in response to an article that had been circulating giving readers the impression that pornography is good for society. I was so impressed by the article, I asked for permission to repost it here, which he graciously gave me. Hopefully the rest will speak for itself. I will warn you however that the tone of the piece whilst not being gratuitous can be graphic, so bear that in mind.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
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(AK’s Note) I wanted to respond to an article which is doing the rounds at the moment. I’ve written it as an open letter to Anna Arrowsmith, the author.
Hello Anna,
Thank you for sparking debate with your most recent article. Debate is good, and everyone is entitled to their view. That doesn’t mean of course that people’s opinions are equally as valid or informed. They are not. Your opinion on the matter of ‘porn being good for society’ is so completely distorted and hopeless. Let’s try to be systematic and go through your article. I shall do my best to treat the article as a piece of journalism, and not the biased propaganda of a woman who makes money from the UK porn industry (although while we’re on that note, Comedy is the greatest and most difficult art-form, Moss Side is the best place to live in the country, and Arsenal will win the Champions League this season). So, here we go….
You say: Women’s rights are far stronger in societies with liberal attitudes to sex – think of conservative countries such as Afghanistan, Yemen or China, and the place of women there. And yet, anti-porn campaigners neglect such issues entirely.
You’ve drowned the baby in the bathwater there, I think, by deliberately conflating 2 separate issues.
Banning porn in this country would not make one iota of difference to women’s rights, and allowing it certainly doesn’t liberate women. The reason women have unequal rights in the places you mentioned has nothing to do with sexual repression, and you know that – as do the anti-porn campaigners who neglect your argument.
Next…
A recent study by the US department of justice compared the four states that had highest broadband access and found there was a 27% decrease in rape and attempted rape, and the four with the lowest had a 53% increase over the same period. With broadband being key to watching porn online, these figures are food for thought for those who believe access to porn is bad news.
Sorry, what? You could just as easily argue that the people with the fastest broadband had quicker access to websites that said: ‘Don’t rape women – it’s wrong’, whereas the hicks with slower broadband got bored waiting for the page to load and decided to get a bit of low-level molesting in to pass the time. Oh, and the people who still did commit rape – what sort of bandwidth did they have?
You then write: Likewise, porn keeps many marriages going.
How many? Compared to how many it ruins? Numbers? Come one, you clearly love a statistic – let’s have one here, please.
How many couples do you know whose partners have identically matched libidos? Not many. Porn is an outlet for the sexual pressure built up in such relationships and also for (mostly) men who feel that communicating or finding a woman to have sex with is very difficult to achieve.
I agree that lots of couples have different libidos. I’m with you. But then you invest the word ‘outlet’ with a connotation that it doesn’t have, suggesting that an outlet is a positive thing. ‘Outlet’ is a neutral word. It hints neither at goodness or badness. Do you tolerate hooliganism? That, after all, is just an ‘outlet’ for young men with difficult home backgrounds. Of course you don’t. But then again, you don’t make money from hooliganism, do you, Anna? (Sorry, I couldn’t resist it – I needed an outlet).
Rape could potentially be an ‘outlet’ from the same ‘sexual pressure’ – or are those statistics you mentioned in the previous paragraph there to suggest that exposure to porn doesn’t ever lead to men exerting their power on women with impunity? Isn’t that, in fact, what porn is?
So, let’s talk about porn and marriage.
Any successful marriage is built on one thing and one thing only: self-sacrifice. Now, you might say that it’s love, but love is self-sacrifice – it’s the placing of someone else in the pecking order before you.
Porn is about the opposite. It is self-serving. It is all about me. Nobody looks at porn and thinks, ‘Well, I’m taking one for the team, here. Good marriages are built on selflessness – they look outwards to the other person. Porn is about selfishness, looking ever more closely inwards.
Marriages fail because, almost invariably, at least one person in the couple decides s/he cares more about him/herself than their partner. Affairs are self-serving. Porn is self-serving. Love is self-sacrificial. Spot the odd one out.
There’s more. The marriage vows that most people take contain the phrase ‘forsaking all others.’ Now I’m sorry, but masturbating over the image of naked women does not constitute forsaking all others, does it? Of course, I’m not saying this doesn’t happen within marriage – that men don’t look at porn. What I am saying, resolutely, is that we cannot claim for one second that this is what marriage is about, or that it somehow benefits the marriage. And if you don’t think that marriage is about forsaking all others, you don’t understand what marriage is.
When a man looks at porn, he isn’t thinking about his wife. He is thinking about another woman. And himself. That is infidelity: nothing more, nothing less.
I’m not really interested here in the argument that porn is degrading to women, or that it’s someone’s daughter on the screen. I’ll leave that to other people, although it surely is pertinent. Nor could I care less what the government has to do with this. I’m interested in talking about what porn represents within a relationship, and what it does to a relationship.
You continue:
Many feel the need to keep their porn use a secret from their partners for fear of upsetting them.
Yes, of course. Secrecy and deception. And how are you going to claim that this is good for marriage or society? What’s the point in ‘keeping marriages going’ if it’s all built on lies?
One man wrote to me recently saying that he had suffered cancer of the face, which left him heavily scarred and almost completely without confidence after a subsequent divorce. He said that chatting to webcam porn stars kept him from suicide.
That is dreadfully sad about the cancer, and suicide would have made it even more poignant and desperate. But I don’t read that and think, ‘thank goodness porn was there to save the day’. I think, ‘what a shame he didn’t have proper loving relationships to fall back on, that he had to retreat into a self-perpetuating fantasy world of lust and self-gratification.’ What a shame that his ‘outlet’ wasn’t something that gave life, not just prevented death.
Because this isn’t just an issue confined to marriage. It relates to single men, too. The old adage chimes that looking at porn and masturbation ‘isn’t hurting anyone.’ This, of course, is not true. It hurts the person doing it. Porn, like smoking or drinking or gambling or lots of other things, can become an addiction. The question of whether any of these are ‘good for society’ (and by society, I mean ‘people’, not the economy), is again for another debate.
But porn can and does become an addiction, and in those cases it does hurt people. Porn is a world where you have control and power. A world where you can have whatever you want whenever you want it. But that isn’t the real world.
I know men who have been addicted to pornography for years, thinking that it was OK, that it wasn’t harming anyone. Then, when they finally met the woman of their dreams (if you’ll allow me to be twee), and got into a serious relationship, engaged and married, they found that she wasn’t enough. The love of their life wasn’t satisfactory. She wasn’t airbrushed; her breasts weren’t perfect. She wouldn’t sit there smiling playfully while they furiously masturbated. Their lust for porn had totally spoiled the joy of sex.
I know other men who are at an age where they are in danger of remaining single forever; men who have lots going for them, and who have admirers of their own age. And yet, they chase after girls half their age, fooled into thinking that they are attainable, because on-screen, they are attainable. Their outlet becomes their trap.
Porn as an ‘outlet’, like drinking or gambling or fighting as an ‘outlet’ doesn’t confront a problem – it hides from it. If there’s sexual pressure within a relationship, why not talk about it? Why not work through it together? Marriage is difficult and throws up loads of problems – or, at least, mine does – but that’s ok. The first outlet, the first line of relief in any marriage, should be the spouse. Surely?
What is sex? How would you define it? Is it the giving of yourself to another person? Or is it the taking of pleasure from another person, for yourself? Those are 2 very different approaches, and I know which one porn engenders.
One couple approaching me to tell me that one of my scenes resulted in the lady’s pregnancy.Canonise this woman immediately! I’m sorry, Anna, but a selection of cute vignettes and a couple of interesting but carefully-chosen statistics, does not make for a convincing argument.
I’m not claiming you’re on your own here. Excruciatingly, I am probably in the minority here. But I think you, and all the people who have supported you in the comments below your article, have tragically misunderstood what porn is about, and what it isn’t. And more than that, what a loving relationship is about, and what it isn’t. You say in your final paragraph that we need to protect children from accessing porn by having better measures in place. That’s like saying we need to stop a war starting by building a bigger army. And besides, if the children are our future, they are the future of the porn industry as well, so what’s the problem? Seriously, where’s the problem?
There is a lot of sexual desire out there that needs an outlet.
This, I think, says it all. It’s that word ‘need’. That is what our society is driven by, isn’t it? We don’t want to give or give up. We don’t want to sacrifice. We just want. We want to have and to take. We need to have and to take. It is all about me. And so, Anna, maybe you’re right? Maybe porn is good for our society, because it trains people to look inwards, to be selfish, to take and control and exert power. To think about number one. That’s the money shot.
Not for me, though, thanks.
With my body I honour you. All that I have, I give to you.
Do you see the conflict, Anna?
Life With CD 