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What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

economist.com

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Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#51

Post by sandworm101 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #48
sandworm101 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The porn industry does have some specific practical issues. Probably the most is the reliance on very young actresses. Most start while under 20 these days. People that age are too trusting. They get put in bad contracts and don't know their legal rights. For example, I had one girl come to me an say that a studio was claiming to "own" her real name, forbidding her from working under that name with anyone else. They…

Interesting. I don't know the specific wording, but how much of a contract holds up if one side doesn't hold up their end (not paying the other party). I know it's all down to what's in the specific text, but.. certainly morally, when you quit fulfilling your end of the bargain, I don't feel much of a need to uphold mine. Yes, I'm older now, but I know I felt that way even as a kid. That particular story just bugs me…

The game is to promise the girl whatever gets her to the set, make the film, then look for whatever reason you can come up with not to pay her. Often there is no enforceable contract. In this particular case, the signed contract was with a fictitious company that had nothing to do with the filming or distribution (a sham 'talent' agency). All it took was a phonecall from someone familiar with the many rules regarding adult films. They paid as soon as they knew she was willing to seek help.

In these situations they wrongdoer doesn't face attorney fees. They pay instantly, but they win in the long run because so many wronged actresses just disappear from the industry rather than put up a fight.

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#52

Post by noonespecial »

Synaesthesia wrote: post #33
elorant wrote: post #23

From my point of view online porn looks boring because it objectifies women too much. It’s just so mechanical nowadays. Whenever I happen to view porn from the eighties it looked much more natural. But then again I guess back then porn actors where only a few dozen and they knew each other quite well so this allowed some kind of intimacy to grow between them. Now porn has become a commodity, there are thousands of ac…

The problem with pornography is not that it reveals too much of the woman, but rather that it reveals too little.

Really like that quote. I was thinking, G. K. Chesterton, or maybe C. S. Lewis on a good day, but it actually seems to be from Pope John Paul II!

“There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.” --Pope John Paul II

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#53

Post by nostrademons »

lsc wrote: post #25
marvy wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lsc: your comment is marked [dead].

Oh man, I would find a shadowban, especially over something so overtly political so amusing! Of course, it's probably just a technical glitch.

I suspect that the word "masturbati_n" triggers an auto-kill filter on Hacker News. There are 3 comments on this article that are all dead, all 3 include that word. Probably too many threads that got derailed by complaints of "intellectual masturbati_n".

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#54

Post by vilhelm_s »

mc32 wrote: post #49
reader5000 wrote: post #11

It is very easy to find sexual release with internet porn. More difficult with a real life woman. And therein lies the collapse of western civilization.

There may be something to that, given porn in Japan has been prevalent for longer, albeit, pixelated and they are going through population contraction due to many people of reproductive age being kind of indifferent to real sex.

Is it really the case that porn has been prevalent in Japan for longer than in e.g. the U.S.? I imagined they are about the same.

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#55

Post by mtgx »

sandworm101 wrote: post #16

So kids are forgoing realworld sex. When did that become a bad thing? My whole school life I was 'encouraged' to avoid sex, alcohol and every other vice at all costs. Going to a party on a friday night was a bad thing. Sex, whether through disease or pregnancy, would destroy your life. This is still the mantra, although nobody then told me that sex would send me to hell. That part is new. So why are we not surprised…

This is exactly why I'm not so worried about overpopulation or even immortality. In fact, it's going to get a lot "worse" when you know you're immortal. Why would you have kids by 30 or 40 then? Heck, why have kids by your 1,000th anniversary?

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#56

Post by nyc_cyn »

jqm wrote: post #44

It might be worthwhile to examine this phenomenon in a larger context. For example, I know a girl who is obsessed with watching sticky sweet romantic shows and movies like "twilight" and "the bachelor". The romance portrayed in these shows is extremely unrealistic and I feel it gives her unrealistic expectations of romantic relationships. Certainly there are no shortage of young men smoking too much marijuana and wat…

Well said.

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#57

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #39
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The porn industry does have some specific practical issues. Probably the most is the reliance on very young actresses. Most start while under 20 these days. People that age are too trusting. They get put in bad contracts and don't know their legal rights. I would argue this is not specific to the porn industry. For instance colleges rely on students being too young and naive to really understand the student loan th…

Ditto the music industry with teen pop stars, the professional sports industry with dreams of the major leagues, the tech startup industry where only a small fraction of startups will succeed, all of academia where you have dozens of Ph.Ds competing for each tenured professor job, the legal industry where thousands of deeply-indebted fresh-faced associates seek to make partner, and every corporate hierarchy. As they…

[deleted]

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#58

Post by bnegreve »

Kenji wrote: post #2

The boys used to have smutty magazines hidden away, now they have their hidden explorer folder. Same thing - different times. The relentless moralizing about sexuality and pornography disgusts me more than any sexual practice I've ever heard of or seen.

> The relentless moralizing about sexuality and pornography

There is no moralizing in this article, just people trying to understand the impact of online pornography.

Why is this disgusting?

Re: What is online pornography doing to sexual tastes and youngsters’ minds?

#60

Post by awayaway1337 »

Now let me tell you my side of the story:

I'm a 19 year old male and I'm completly incapable of connecting with others on an emotional level. However, that wasn't always the case, I clearly remember having "feeling" (what ever that is supposed to mean now) when I was about 12 or 13 but it has slowly withered away. I realized this when one of my teachers in high school mentioned that I'm a very hard person to excite, that is even given "exciting" news I would just shrug it away as being nice, but inside I felt empty -- even now I feel absolutely nothing, like being drunk.

Now, its not that I'm anti-social, no, I can "talk" to people and intrigue them (a by product of my pseudo-isolation is that it allowed me to get quite good in some areas) but this is something that I learned to fake: how to behave and what to say when someone is feeling sad, or happy, or whatever -- but in reality I don't care about you or your problems or how you feel, I'll just manipulate the situation and person into a favourable state to benefit me later on and that means that I have to through certain social rituals (comforting someone, compliments, etc) and manipulating truth (lying) comes naturally (not naturally enough however; I got called out on it once. Once.).

Recently however I realized that no matter what I do, I'll never be able to connect with someone on an intimate level because I always put myself first (and I have a few rationalization of that, e.g. living in a capitalist society etc.) and I know for a fact that when people get "close" to me they see through me (I have a few friends that see me for what I am and cautiously accept that, with an occasional confrontation here and there). So how am I supposed to achieve a sexual release without pornograpy? Sure, I've gotten black out drunk and had sex, but that is the same thing, if not worse than pornograpy, because no real intimacy happens there either, and getting super drunk is not something I want either (it just makes the fake social interactions even faker as me on alcohol is not me).

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