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

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

#61
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, intimacy and passion for each other is beautiful, but it is hard for two complete strangers to fake it. Sex is great, but it is an order of magnitude better when it is an expression of love. It is like eating a hamburger vs a fancy French meal. In both cases you satisfy your hunger. But the experience of getting there makes all the difference.

It is called acting, and the television/movie industry seems to have figured it out. Of course, you do not want strangers, but rather long-standing co-workers, but this is as true for porn as it is for acting and coding. Even if, for some reason, intimacy and passion could not be faked, you could just hire couples.

Couples have been hiring themselves for a while now :-)

A lot of couples don't mind publishing their intimate scenes for the world to see. I'd rather young people watch other people in action than professional videos which seem to have gone so plastic/mechanical/unrealistic.

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

#62
post #49

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.

Plenty of countries in Europe don't have 'replacement' birth rates, yet porn is accessible there as well.

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

#63

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…

The games industry too is notorious for sucking in young talent and burning them out, there's always the next batch of naive graduates.

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

#65
post #25
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.

To nostrademons: Yepp, it would appear that any mention of expert-luring, possibly with some kind of fuzzy match, triggers the auto-kill sequence.

Wonder if synonyms of a homonym are acceptable?

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

#66

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 type of social criticism is fan service to people who want to believe they are better than the upcoming generation. If we were having too much sex, there'd be an article saying that too, eliciting the same response from the same people.

see: any article which uses the word "millenials".

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

#67
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Careful. Sex is an agreement, not a choice. There are lots of people in this world who would like to have sex but for whatever reasons cannot or do not. Abstinence is also a focus of countless religious traditions. I would hesitate to tell any of those people they lacked in personal development.

Personally, I think it is crucial in personal development because, as you put it, it is an agreement, not a choice. There are some lessons to be learned from getting somebody to agree with you on something.

Certainly. However, there are many things where people are expected to reach agreement. It's not clear that this has to be the matter on which they learn it.

Indeed, considering the harm that can result, it's probably better if they learn to reach agreement on some other matter first.

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

#68
post #36

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.

I wonder how many problems in the middle east would be solved by bringing em' easy access to porn...

It might as well be the other way around. Perhaps these men already have easy access, and are now frustrated that they cannot find women who can live up to their expectations (the real women are often covered by a burqa, after all).

Also, porn is known to be capable of messing up marriages, so I guess it will certainly not solve any problems related to normal family life (which is what we want these men to pursue), and the morals that come with it.

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

#69
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…

Perhaps you can explain to me what "objectification of women" means? Does it mean being attracted to their bodies? So what would be an OK thing to be attracted to - their ability to recite the digits of PI perhaps?

To me it seems that the "anti-objectification" campaign only seeks to replace one attractor with another. So maybe less pretty women would prefer to be measured by their IQ? Why is one better than the other? Or is it generally not OK to be attracted to somebody - or only once you are married and officially in love?

I'm not saying that I like everything that is done in porn, just that I don't understand what "objectification" is supposed to mean? And it seems ridiculous to me to presume men should not be attracted to the female body. So we should just as likely want to have sex with a horse or a hedgehog as with a woman? "American Pie" was just fiction - at least I personally was never tempted by an apple pie, because the looks of "the object" matter.

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

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The pope is bound to be a foremost expert on porn and sexual attraction.
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