The effects of 'adult entertainment' in relationships
There are explicit concepts in this post, so all of it will be hidden in the fold.
The post in the fold.
From No Porn Northampton Warning the site had explicit photos, explaining why porn is more then watching two people having sex.Salon elaborates on how porn muscles into relationships between people, encouraging isolation:...whether you approve of porn in theory or not, its effect will be to displace [the mate of the porn addict]. Like crack, it tends to take over, to push out other hungers that tend to nurture the human community by making us dependent on one another. Since we are dependent on each other we must be civil and loving. If we are not dependent on each other then we needn't be civil and loving. We needn't have community and family. That is the way in which any drug breaks down family and community by isolating its user. Porn isolates its users also, meeting their needs outside the social compact. The social compact becomes a commercial compact between anonymous people, while those in the actual human community are relegated to bystander status. It introduces a third party into the erotic economy of a relationship...
Writing for Voice Male, Haji Shearer relates how Jensen's arguments led him to examine porn's role in his marriage
Personally, I know using porn never left me feeling particularly proud. It was more likely to bring up feelings of shame after the fact--seldom a good sign. My reflections sparked by the Jensen article inspired a revelation: Jasmin and I strive for intimacy in our relationship. Using porn hinders that. Whether alone or with my wife, viewing porn takes time and energy away from our union and squanders it on a pseudo-relationship. Even using porn as a stimulus for marital sex is problematic because porn rarely reflects healthy modes of connection. Porn is wham, bam, thank you, ma'am--at best--and not reflective of the kind of sex I really want in my own life. No surprise, I find it easier to achieve sexual pleasure and intimacy with my wife when images of models paid to perform male fantasies are not playing in my head.
From Robert Jensen "A cruel edge: The painful truth about today's pornography -- and what men can do about it" An abridged version of this appeared in MS magazine, Spring 2004, pp. 54-58. The complete text was published as "Cruel to be hard: Men and pornography," in Sexual Assault Report, January/February 2004, pp. 33-34, 45-48 In general, today's porn goes for cruelty: Sex...has an emotional component, and emotions are infinitely variable. There are only so many ways people can rub bodies together, but endless are the ways different people can feel about rubbing bodies together in different times, places, and contexts. When most non-pornographic films, such as a typical Hollywood romance, deal with sex they draw on the emotions most commonly connected with sex, love and affection. But pornography doesn’t, because films that exist to provide sexual stimulation for men in this culture wouldn’t work if the sex were presented in the context of loving and affectionate relationships. Men typically consume pornography specifically to avoid love and affection....
We live in a culture in which rape and battery continue at epidemic levels. And in this culture, men are masturbating to orgasm in front of television and computer screens that present them sex with increasing levels of callousness and cruelty toward women. And no one seems to be terribly concerned about this. Right-wing opponents of pornography offer a moralistic critique that cannot help us find solutions, because typically they endorse male dominance, albeit not these manifestations of it. Some segments of the feminist movement, particularly the high-theory crowd in academic life, want us to believe that the growing acceptance of pornography is a sign of expanding sexual equality and freedom. Meanwhile, feminist critics of pornography have been marginalized in political and intellectual arenas. And all the while, the pornographers are trudging off to the bank with bags of money.
I think this helps explain why even the toughest women -- women who at rape crisis centers routinely deal with sexual violence -- find the reality of pornography so difficult to cope with. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime. Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as liberation.> More from No Porn North Hampton on Robert Jensen book, Getting Off: Pornography & the End of Masculinity here.
And also here too several reviews of his book, I quoted the one from Alternet. I have always been part of the collective liberal progressive libertarian value system that accepts pornography as a legitimate expression of the First Amendment...
But I've changed my mind. No, I'm not a prude, or anti-sex. Nor do I think there should be a national campaign to snuff out all porn. In fact, I sometimes watch certain kinds of porn. But what has become clear to me is that, under the guise of the First Amendment, a huge and powerful porn industrial complex has grown out of control. And a big part of its growth is fueled, not just by the internet, but by continually upping the ante, increasing the extremes of degradation for the women in tens of thousands of films made every year...
[Jensen's book] is filled with facts, data, intelligent observation and analysis, as well as examples of the raw product of an industry gone gonzo. I know this may sound like a cliche, but I guarantee that after reading this book, almost no one will think about pornography in the same way again.
I do believe the writing of Robert Jensen are a must read. This goes well with my post on "Teaching Our Children how to Swim" highlighting the increased images children see as healthy and the increase of teenage girls seeing sexual assault as normal and current marketing trends of misogyny in Hip-Hop
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