Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Porn Did to American Culture?

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 114 posts

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#51

Post by loeg »

standardUser wrote: post #39

This reads like a discussion form the 90's when the porn industry, and most media, were tightly controlled by small number of dominant players that set the norms (whether we liked it or not). I know a lot of people who have created porn in the 2010's and onward and none of them have any connection whatsoever to that porn industry of yesteryear. This feels like a strained attempt to stain the independent porn of today…

Not advocating for the article/interview in any way, but: if anything, I think the porn industry is more consolidated today than it was in the 90s? MindGeek owns all of the brands.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#52

Post by loeg »

whatnow37373 wrote: post #35

Not buying it. She just states “porn shaped society” without anything to prove it. Seems absurd to me on the face of it. Are men objectifying women? Yes. Have they done this since the dawn of mankind? Yes. I could easily claim the reverse. Society shapes porn. It’s a reflection, not the other way around.

Presumably to be explored further in her unreleased book. But yeah, certainly this interview is not interesting on its own.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#53

Post by hiatus »

sepositus wrote: post #6

I've been helping young men escape the clutches of porn for over a decade now (leading what you might call recovery groups). Never once have I found a single story that ended well (but that's more or less expected given the groups I run). It all starts with an introduction to porn and ends with an addiction that seems to slowly transforms their brains in unpleasant ways, objectification of women being the primary one…

> ends with an addiction that seems to slowly transforms their brains in unpleasant ways, objectification of women being the primary one.

Can you speak to other transformations you've observed?

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#54

Post by sepositus »

palata wrote: post #41
sepositus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You claim I think this is your problem. I didn't make a claim. I provided a personal story about running these groups and how objectification of women was a common result of a porn addiction (something the individual being interviewed mentioned). I was simply providing some anecdotal evidence that agreed with the interviewee. I wouldn't make an absolute statement about my experiences for the same reasons you're usi…

Genuinely interested: when people say "video games make people violent, just look at this violent person who plays violent video games". Many times I don't particularly see a causation, and I know a ton of people who play video games and aren't violent. Are we sure that porn "molds" people like that? Or is it a claim similar to the ones against video games?

I'm sure there have been studies done, but I don't know them off the top of my head. I'm speaking from personal experience here (since apparently I need to spell this out in my comments): I would say that violent video games _may_ play a role in someone who then proceeds to go down the path of "violence porn." But usually, there are other factors drawing them to that place (i.e., bullying).

Likewise, I've often seen porn used as a tool to deal with other subsurface issues. The high of the hormone rush brings temporary relief, but like most highs, it requires more and more for it to stay the same.

Interestingly, no one in any of the comments so far has provided any anecdotal experiences of porn resulting in the opposite effect on someone. I don't doubt it happens, but it seems more people are focused on attacking my statement rather than engaging in a conversation. I'm happy to hear more stories.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#55

Post by loeg »

thraway79879s8d wrote: post #38

It would probably be way healthier to ban porn and legalize prostitution, than ban prostitution and legalize porn. Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person. The interview repeats the common aphorism "sex sells", but it should follow it up "sex sells other things". Sublimated desires into other categories this way doesn't seem good either.

> Much harder to get into the dehumanization mindset trap in person.

What are you talking about? Sex workers are routinely beaten / degraded / killed at higher rates than other people.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#56

Post by standardUser »

loeg wrote: post #51
standardUser wrote: post #39

This reads like a discussion form the 90's when the porn industry, and most media, were tightly controlled by small number of dominant players that set the norms (whether we liked it or not). I know a lot of people who have created porn in the 2010's and onward and none of them have any connection whatsoever to that porn industry of yesteryear. This feels like a strained attempt to stain the independent porn of today…

Not advocating for the article/interview in any way, but: if anything, I think the porn industry is more consolidated today than it was in the 90s? MindGeek owns all of the brands.

I don't see how it matters what one company owns or doesn't. When dozens of studios ran everything, it didn't matter than there were dozens of them or just one since they all set similarly stifling requirements. What matters is autonomy and creative freedom, of which there is now dramatically more than ever before both in porn and across all media.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#57

Post by Noumenon72 »

> One of the specific things I’m noticing now is the mainstreaming of really ugly, regressive treatment in politics and mainstream culture—not just of women but of immigrants, gay people, trans people... And my theory for why it’s happening is that certain kinds of porn have inured so many people to cruelty.

Besides being a complete stretch, has anyone even showed that men generally watch porn with cruelty? It's never on the front page, and it's kind of aberrant when hyper-enthusiastic "partners" are on offer.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#58

Post by Yutrentu »

mystraline wrote: post #22

The article claims porn, and sure, that's a part. The bigger issue here is outmoded predominant protestant christian views of 'morality'. And that percolates all through the rest of USA culture, including into advertisements and commercialism. Their view of sex is as a sin, so its shamed, hidden, and secretly desired. All these things have popped up with all these pretty terrible results. Sexuality is 'tittalting' so…

[flagged]

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#59

Post by thraway79879s8d »

nerdjon wrote: post #16

I should be very clear here that I am a gay man, so I don't really have exposure to much of what is talked about here even if I have heard about it. What I find interesting is that it seems to equate critiquing porn with critiquing the treatment of the people in porn. Those are 2 very distinct things, you can have issues with treatment within the industry without going down a prudish anti-porn route. Personally I fee…

The issues at play are really fundamentally about heterosexuality.

The gay male money-free casual sex market "clears" --- grindr does in fact work. The (unpaid) heterosexual casual sex market will never clear regardless of app design, there are simply not even women interested in not enough casual sex for it to be any other way.

Whether its 2024 voters freaking about inflation (despite it being lower than in other countries), or the rise of the manosphere since hetero dating apps, Americans in particular are very consumer oriented society that freaks out when consumption desires get impeded. Somewhere, between many culture forces (porn, 1990s-2010s sex positivity, hookup culture discourse divorced from reality, hip hop lyrics (?!) the end of the Hayes code (?!), straight men's "needs rising in the hierarchy" rose to include much more casual sex than previous generations aspired to....and now the cat is out of the bag.

A lot of the discourse around this reminds me of say, gentrification discourse. There is a wish that the demand would just go away, that we could rewind the clock to when straight men were less horny, or fewer wealthy professionals wanted to live in the urban core. Neverminding that the former is a lot more sympathetic a goal than the latter, it feels like pipe dreaming divorced from actual tactical thinking about the size of the problem and therefore what remedies are actually sufficient. Actually rewinding the clock is, at least, really hard.

Capitalism has been invading the domestic sphere for decades. It's the same process as, say, less home-cooking and more takeout or restaurant trips too. (And in that case, freeing women from the kitchen is unambiguously good!)

In the housing case, the moral and correct answer is "just build more dense housing" --- allow supply to meet demand. In the straight casual sex case, the analogous answer is "just legalize prostitution", but the morality is admittedly less clear cut. Personally, I think we should try it, as all the other answers seem deeply seriousness given the scale of the problem. Better to do something that might actual work, then half-ass things that will certainly fail while the problem gets worse.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#60

Post by blueprint »

mystraline wrote: post #50
blueprint wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah "possessiveness" has absolutely no basis in anything reasonable, let's villainize it too while we're pretending not to alienate anything about ourselves lol

I should have expected that my general attack on protestant Christianity's views on sex would get a sarcastic response. And no, possessiveness in regards to other humans is honestly really bad. It may every so often feel good for a moment, in a 'they want me' sort of feel. But that has a really bad tendency to go off the rails and turn violent quickly. There's ways to do sexuality and relationships healthy. Possessiv…

Who cares about my tone, how about actually understanding the argument itself, which is based on science instead of your attempt to externalize your own religiosity?

I suppose you think you know better than thousands of psychologists who have explained the difference between adaptive and maladaptive. or perhaps you know better than billions of years of evolution. just because you don't understand how to bond with someone adaptively doesn't mean that there is no way to bond with someone adaptively. There's a reason why we want to make sure that our partners are actually bonded with us and trustworthy. It doesn't have anything to do with oppression. But your externalization and automatic presumption of pathology tells me a lot about what you must have experienced and what you never got to experience.

Post reply on HN