Posted on 08/11/2014 3:25:19 PM PDT by Morgana
My previous columns drew attention to some of the ways pornography affects the actresses within it. Today I’d like to draw awareness to another fact that we don’t seem to comprehend:
Pornography
IS
an
AFFAIR.
Any time we bond sexually with another person besides the one to whom we’ve committed ourselves, an affair occurs. It doesn’t matter if that bond is in person or via a computer screen, a dating or married person who uses pornography is literally cheating or committing adultery.
Rather than go on about this at great length, I’d like to share two emails that I received. Lots of people email me. Sometimes I have something to offer in response. Many times I don’t. I’m not a counselor, and am in no position to give advice for many cases.
While it’s easy for me to identify with men who struggle with an attraction to porn – as I was one of them – and those who are involved in creating or acting in porn – since I produced it for so long – it’s particularly hard for me to answer emails from women who are in pain due to a husband’s porn addiction. I don’t know what to say most of the time, and I also feel so much guilt for contributing to that cycle.
When these emails come in, I’ll sometimes ask Wendy for feedback. Wendy is my amazing ex-wife, the mother of my son, whose heart I ripped to shreds with my lies, cheating, deceptions and involvement in porn production. After all I’ve done to her, especially because of all I’ve done to her, I’m honored to call her my friend – a very good friend.
When a woman recently emailed me asking for help…well, I’ll just let you read the email, followed by Wendy’s response. The first time I read Wendy’s letter in church it helped save a marriage, when a man in the audience recognized the truth of her response, drove half way across LA, apologized to his wife, and then drove back across town to come clean with his pastors about his porn addiction. I hope you find it useful, too. But first, the plea for help from a wife whose husband’s porn addiction is impacting her life:
Hello Donny,
I first want to say that I just found your blog yesterday and I sat and wept at my kitchen table as I began to read the entries, one at a time from start to finish. You have chosen such an amazing journey and I have NO doubt that God will continue to bless you and your family as he has already started to do.
I’m not really sure where to begin so I guess I will just start here…I found out a little over a year ago that my husband is addicted to pornography. It is so overwhelming for me as I am just starting to learn how deep and dark these wounds are for a man, his wife, and their marriage. I struggle every day with the fear of what’s next.
I know my God protects me. I know who I am in his eyes. But as confident as I am in that…my husband’s addiction is stripping away all that I am. I feel that I am alone in this fight because I have not really found anyone who understands or can guide and support me in the decisions and choices I need to make in order to cope with this reality.
I want to be the wife that I feel in my heart that God has called me to be…I just have no idea how right now. I have been touched by your entries about your ex-wife Wendy and all that the two of you have been through. She seems like a woman who has been through it and come out in a stronger place because of it.
My question is this…does she have a blog or email that she makes public? Does she, in any way, support wives who are dealing with this issue? I am really just looking for any kind of support from women that I can get. I want to know there are strong women praying for my husband and I. I want to know there is someone I can turn to when the heartache and sadness seem like the only things that are certain in my life. Advertisement
If she has nothing like this, do you have any suggestions for a wife who needs support? It seems like the wives are a lost casualty in this war…there isn’t much out there for us that I have found so far. We are from the (location removed) area so maybe you know of some things that I don’t.
I appreciate all the help you can give.
Keep up the fight…you are truly a blessed and courageous man of God. Thanks for your honesty.
At the time of this email, it had been years since Wendy and I divorced, but I think you can see the emotions still present when you read her response, which I’m about to share with you.
The problem with fantasy is that it is never as good as the real thing. No matter how hard a person tries to make it good.
Which is kind of what I was trying to say in #100
“You have heard that it was said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY’; but I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. Matt 5:27-28
When I was growing up, it was perfectly normal for adolescent boys to be curious and look at magazines like Playboy when the opportunity arose. The fact that we did this doesn't make it right, but it was the norm.
Today, however, children have instant and unfettered access to pornography on the internet and it is far more graphic than anything that existed in magazines a few decades ago. Additionally, girls are viewing it (if they looked at pornography in my day it was certainly a secret) and using what they see as the basis for how they should look (piercings, shaving pubic areas, etc.) and this is done without any realization that all of the women they see are Photoshopped (in the 60s, 70s and 80s photographers were able to "touch up" blemishes and make-up was used, but the women looked how they really looked). The net result is that young people today believe that what they see in pornography as the norm.
The whole "hook-up" culture is largely a byproduct of pornography because boys AND girls are viewing porn as normal. When I was in high school in the 80s, girls who were promiscuous were considered sluts, but their behavior today wouldn't even be out of the ordinary. Thirty years ago the girls who were called sluts didn't like it (and in some cases hadn't actually done what they were rumored to have done), but it kept the other girls from emulating them.
Thank you Thomas.....
Now I’m gonna throw this one in... From The Book of Tobit (Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible) Something to make you all think. This was Tobit prayer before he did the “nasty” with his wife Sara on their wedding night. Yes, you heard me correctly they prayed to God before they had...gasp....SEX!
Tobit 8 4-10
[4] Then Tobias exhorted the virgin, and said to her: Sara, arise, and let us pray to God today, and tomorrow, and the next day: because for these three nights we are joined to God: and when the third night is over, we will be in our own wedlock. [5] For we are the children of saints, and we must not be joined together like heathens that know not God.
[6] So they both arose, and prayed earnestly both together that health might be given them, [7] And Tobias said: Lord God of our father, may the heavens and the earth, and the sea, and the fountains, and the rivers, and all thy creatures that are in them, bless thee. [8] Thou madest Adam of the slime of the earth, and gavest him Eve for a helper. [9] And now, Lord, thou knowest, that not for fleshly lust do I take my sister to wife, but only for the love of posterity, in which thy name may be blessed for ever and ever. [10] Sara also said: Have mercy on us, O Lord, have mercy on us, and let us grow old both together in health.
Exactly.
My soon-to-be-ex-wife got Fifty Shades of Gray from her sister, the one who secretly (because her parents are devout Catholics and she claims to be) has drunken soirees at her house wherein she engages in her fantasy of sex with women--with her husband watching. My wife read it--the only book she has ever read in her life that was not a school assignment, literally. She started talking about it constantly and acting strangely almost immediately. About six months later, my wife suddenly decided that she was not happy and wanted to be single again. From what I understand, this is not uncommon.
I do not get the mindset that somehow sex and desiring it with your husband or wife is *lust*.
It just reinforces the whole *sex is dirty* thing as if wanting it and doing it within marriage is somehow wrong.
I am not defending "Chester the Molester" or any of Hustler's content. I found it reprehensible and repulsive! I thought I made that clear.
I am criticizing Reisman for her dishonest, misrepresentation in her "study" for including the fringe publication "Hustler" along with more mainstream men's magazines with the obvious intent to deliberately distort her data so strongly. . . and to aggregate her data in her report summary which more completely distorts the data.
A peer review of her study would strongly criticize her inclusion of non-similar publications in a the study, claiming homogeneity, when they are not. During the study period, two of the publications offered "soft" porn, with quality editorial content, while the inclusion of an intentionally "hard" porn magazine with pure pornographic editorial content is anything but homogenous comparable the other two. THAT is a major statistical flaw, intentional, and egregious, designed I believe, to achieve the results she wanted to get. Her conclusion was predetermined.
Morgana, I read through Reisman's so-called study and, although preliminary, I stand by my analysis of her "findings." I did not include a cartoon count in my estimates, but she did and put a lot of emphasis on them. Her examples were primarily cartoons from the the other magazines with a preponderance from "Hustler," which I told you was an intentionally hardcore pornographic magazine. That's what was primarily depicted in her paper. In addition, from what I read, she apparently counted any nudity that showed an uncovered frontal body as an illegal, criminal image.
One photo in Playboy that she labeled as a ”seventeen year old nude" is truly that of a topless seventeen year old Natassja Kinski from her appearance in a mainstream movie. Another Reisman found was a 15 year old Tracy Lords in Penthouse, but it was a photo of a porn star who had used a fake ID showing she was 22 years old when she was in her movies and when she modeled for Penthouse. The photograph was published before it was revealed years later that she had been underage—when she sued the movie producers because they believed her fraudulent falsified documents and wanted more money—far too late to unpublish photos taken and printed in millions of copies of Penthouse. Reisman pounced on this as though it was a deliberate act by Bob Guccione and Penthouse, rather than an illegal fraud upon them by the actress, who submitted false documents to them as well.
As I pointed out above, her totals for numbers of "criminal and violent" imagery just do not comport with reality when compared to the total number of images published unless Reisman conflated ANY image depicting nudity that showed a body part she thought should not be shown with "crime." Such nude images are "crimes" only in a few cities and counties by local ordinance which have been rightly or wrongly declared unconstitutional. That would be the only way one could get an 82% rate of such published photographs during that period. Any person familiar with the photography in Playboy would know her conclusions claiming violence and crime at that rate, or including children, are bunk. In her executive summary, Reisman makes it clear that she considers any photograph that makes a model appear juvenile to be one that is intended to depict a child, then every female model with a shaved pubis was counted as such, and also counted as "criminal" and "implicitly coercively violent." She states as much in her definition of a "child surrogate," even though the model was over 21.
As for Reisman's claims that SHE won a Libel suit in the Netherlands against Playboy: that is untrue. Reisman was not a party in the suit or even a witness. Playboy did not sue Reisman but sued a TV production company called EO for a program called Tijdsein for presenting Reisman's claims that Playboy published Child pornography in its magazine, demanding a retraction. There was a hearing in which EO was ordered to never re-air the program because of the claims. The judge found FOR Playboy on three of the claims for copyright infringement and dismissed the others, saying:
"Playboy and associates, being publishers themselves, possess ample access to the media to combat any opinion they deem incorrect."
And simply did not take it to trial.
In addition, in the Netherlands, even the mere drawing or hint of any child involved in sex—virtual pornography—is actionable which is not the case in the United States. According to Dutch law, possibly some of the cartoons may have fallen into their gray area.
Let's look at the claim in Paragraph nine of the dismissal of "the uncontested factual findings of Dr. Reisman" in the Reisman "study"—which I read when it came out back in 1986 when it was commissioned. They were hardly "uncontested." It just never got that far in the Netherlands.
Consider the following facts: Dr. Judith Reisman's PhD is in Communications. . . hardly the qualifications or expertise required for the no-bid $798,000 Federal grant from the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention approved by Alfred S. Regnery, of our tax dollars she was awarded to produce her humongous 1600 page work. For what she produced, other researchers in the field estimated it could have been done for $60,000. Reisman's work was roundly criticized on several fronts by real experts. It was just sent to the government for publication, because it would not pass such peer review, and in fact came under scathing attack for poor methodology and other issues.
By 1986, Reisman concluded her investigation of "372 issues of Playboy, 184 issues of Penthouse and 125 issues of Hustler" that found "2,016 cartoons that included children apparently under the age of 17 and 3,988 other pictures, photographs and drawings that depict infants or youths," the details of which were collected into "a three-volume report running to 1,600 pages" titled "Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler."[11] The report drew contemporary criticism in regards to its cost and quality.[10][12] Sex crime researcher Avedon Carol commented that the (Reisner) report was a "scientific disaster, riddled with researcher bias and baseless assumptions."[13] The American University (AU), where Reisman's study had been academically based, refused to publish the completed work, citing concerns by an independent academic auditor. Criminologist Robert Figlio of the University of Pennsylvania[14] stated [11]—Source
I see I over estimated the number of issues of Penthouse because she did not include the UK publication years while I did. . . but that just increases the percentage above 82%. As Judge Judy says, if it doesn't make sense, it's a lie." Reisman's report doesn't make sense.
It was finally included in the Meese Commission report on Pornography as factual data. It was there that the experts got a look at it and started realizing the major flaws in it. Reisman's flawed report became a big problem for the Meese Commission, which resulted in ridicule being piled on the whole Meese Commission effort.
As I said, Morgana, you damage YOUR position by making such extreme claims. That's what happened to the Meese commission. It may have gotten more gravitas had they left the Reisman Report and her absurdly, patently false-on-its-face, to all the millions of people who had read Playboy, on the cutting room floor.
These distorted statistics are of the same ilk as those the feminists who claimed that there was a 40% domestic violence spike during Super Bowl games which turned out to be lowest weekend for domestic violence weekend. Then later the claim was that cities that hosted the Super Bowl fans had tens of thousands of child and women prostitutes come to the cities to service the fans, and that fans watching at home used the games as pretexts to molest children. Again, those claims were so absurd they did not pass the smell test. . . but they each made front page headlines because nobody bothered to take a whiff of the stench of absurdity reeking from them. It is junk "science" like these reports from the squishy sciences that make me look more deeply into reports such as Reisman's. Reisman's report reeks of the "big lie" technique used by Liberals. . . just not from the Liberal side this time.
I am not defending any of the magazines, but decrying the accusations of photographs of child pornography where there is none. Confabulating one thing into another for an agenda is the methodology of the Left. Shoddy work is shoddy work, no matter which side does it. This was extremely shoddy work. Give me accurate, checkable, replicable work, that uses proper compatible source data, and I can respect it. This I cannot because I am familiar with the data, like millions of other men, she claims is something it is not,
Attack the magazine for what really IS in it, not for what an extremist claims to have found in her imagination, no matter how scholarly it appears. Did Playboy add to the drop in morality and unreasonable expectations about sex? Yes. So do the exaggeratedly sexualized bodies of Barbie dolls. How about the sexualized attire of grade school and pre-school girls their mothers bought for them? How about the obscenely sexualized "Toddlers & Tiaras" TV show my girlfriend calls "Prostitots?" I think you can lay a lot more of the destruction at the door of the disintegration of the family caused by our own Liberal government policies.
With that I agree but porn isn’t strictly a male fascination. As I searched the Brit papers today, this is front and center on the UK Sun:
‘I’m a mum of two and I’m addicted to porn’
Hustler, Playboy and Penthouse were the big 3. There is no denying that.
You claim that Hustler wasn’t mainstream because it was “intentionally hardcore”..... but
Today all the “mainstream” porn are online and they are all hardcore. Even Playboy-TV is hardcore.
Think about that. So Hustler wasn’t “mainstream”? but today all the mainstream porn IS hardcore.
Doesn’t that make Reisman’s point true??
Today all the “mainstream” porn are online and they are all hardcore. Even Playboy-TV is hardcore.
Think about that. So Hustler wasn’t “mainstream”? but today all the mainstream porn IS hardcore.
Doesn’t that make Reisman’s point true??
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I would have thought so... The only thing not normal is a husband having sex with his wife on their wedding night, for the first time.
yep,
the end times can hardly get here soon enough
My grandmother used to refer to that kind of talk as "wishing your life away".
Already begun my FRiend, already begun.
“So, that must include women and their “Bursting bodices and throbbing members” women’s novels, right? Right?”
Yep, those Harlequin romance novels aren’t exactly fit for children.
That's a woman?
Post of the day!
Or read "romance novels" and fantasized about the male character.
Definitely, if a wife masturbates while fantasizing about anybody other than her husband, then by the standards of this article, she's having an affair.
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