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What Porn Did to American Culture?

theatlantic.com

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Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#81

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

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…

That was my first thought: any woman can easily get into any level of "production" now and get direct profit from it, and also leave it without much stigma, sharing the same platform with non-nude celebrities. She can also control the amount of experience that is delivered to the "fans". It's incomparable with the situation from the 80s/90s.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#82

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #57

> 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 neve…

I believe it's the core of the argument of the author: she wants to link porn to cruelty at several places without offering any argument in favor of it.

Paradoxically, I could offer a starkly different argument - it is women who prefer BSDM if you look at the sales numbers of certain books.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#83

Post by mvdtnz »

pseudalopex wrote: post #78
ta12653421 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no link/source here, but IIRC the most selected content by female users of PornHub is "FemDom", if i remember this correctly does this somehow relate to your idea?

Lesbian was the Pornhub category most viewed by women in 2024. Female domination was none of the top 15.[1] [1] https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2024-year-in-review#gender-...

I'm not sure I trust this analysis, at least the gender breakdown. They don't say how they determine if a viewer is male or female, but they make the claim that 38% of viewers are female, and well over half in some markets - this just doesn't seem credible to me.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#84

Post by swat535 »

davidmurdoch wrote: post #76
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…

> Their view of sex is as a sin Interesting perspective. But this is actually what Protestant Christians believe: https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/ad-fontes/5-surpri...

Right, there's a popular idea that Christianity is somehow anti-sex, but that's not really accurate if you look closely at the tradition itself. The Bible doesn't condemn sex, in fact, books like Song of Songs celebrate it in pretty vivid terms (just to name an example though one could dig up much more..).

What Christianity actually critiques is sex outside of marriage. The reasoning is that sex is viewed as the most complete form of love between two people, and so it belongs within the lifelong commitment of marriage. Even then, it's worth noting that sex isn't at the center of Christian moral teaching. "Sins of the flesh" are taken seriously, but they're considered less grave than sins like pride or cruelty, something C. S. Lewis explains very clearly.

It's less about being "anti-sex" and more about believing that something so powerful deserves a proper framework.

We can argue about the moral framework of Christian values, of course and many have, thoughtfully, but it's important to at least critique what Christianity actually teaches, rather than a caricature of it.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#85

Post by sepositus »

pseudalopex wrote: post #73
sepositus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I've updated the original comment since so many people are getting tripped up over this. As I've said in another thread, this can pretty easily be implied by my comment, so it wasn't stated out loud. But I've added an aside to make it more clear.

Your original words did not imply you were aware of the selection bias. Don't blame others for your mistakes.

I had no intentions for people to take my view as objective reality, and no where in my comment did I assert my take was purely objective. I think people are just used to others putting their thoughts out as facts and make the wrong assumption. But that's not my fault :)

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#86

Post by sepositus »

hiatus wrote: post #53
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?

Sure, another common one would be a warped view of sex. A lot of these young men get into relationships and often want to do some "things" that the other party is usually not comfortable with. The problem is they become less capable of "getting off" with the less risqué acts and it's usually then that they realize how porn has altered their perspective on reality.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#87

Post by -__---____-ZXyw »

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.

I think "society shapes porn" was totally true up until the point where it no longer was.

Porn shapes society the exact moment when the majority of young people get the majority of their beliefs and views on sexuality, romance, relationships, gender roles, sensuality, etc, from porn. This isn't true of all groups of humans everywhere, but it's definitely true of many societies right now already, and I would say obviously so.

None of this is meant as a "moral panic" type point. I'm just saying, there's no point hiding from the reality that young people get their views on sex from online porn, and that has major effects on them and the whole of society.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#88

Post by alganet »

How many incidents involving sex affected the american perception on its institutions?

Of course, declaring that in an interview would be impossible. However, it is obvious. Anyone should be able to make that connection.

Is porn to blame? If it is, then any other kind of sexualization platform also is (you can think of it, I don't need to name it). It's hard to trace a line that doesn't leave you in a place of hypocrisy.

American culture adopted porn as a word, outside its original realm. The expression "action porn", for example, puts the practice into a everyday word, normalizing it. This kind of expression has gone through many entertainment industries and iterations.

The combination of sexual repression and porn is dangerous, the dangerous part being the sexual repression. That repression has also became part of the american culture, and in much higher doses than porn.

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#89

Post by bradlys »

thraway79879s8d wrote: post #59
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 co…

[dead]

Re: What Porn Did to American Culture?

#90

Post by bradlys »

maroonblazer wrote: post #47
k__ wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I recognized its pernicious effects on me" What effects did it have on you? "made me aware of the extreme perversions" Such as?

Not the parent, but for me, porn served as a kind of supernormal stimulus. It became difficult to become aroused with my partner when I had a practically infinite variety of virtual women to choose from, doing an infinite variety of things. Quitting porn was one of the best things I did for my sex life.

I hear about this sometimes and I just wonder if the post-nut clarity makes you recoil. If I was finding my partner less attractive to the point of finding it challenging to become aroused around them, it certainly has more to do with them than it does with whatever I am watching.

I’ve never experienced this even in the slightest and I’ve definitely had moments where I was unattractive to my partner and not having sex with them and substituting with porn. It was cause they were being a jerk and I didn’t wanna fuck them. Shocker.

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