Posted on 11/11/2005 7:16:29 PM PST by wagglebee
(AgapePress) - Women and children aren't the only victims of pornography. That's what one witness told a Senate hearing on Thursday (Nov. 10) that examined the impact of pornography on America and the options for dealing with it. The Senate panel also heard about the negative trends in society resulting from Internet porn.
The issue before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution was "Why the Government Should Care About Pornography." Among those testifying before the subcommittee was the author of the book Pornified and a sociologist from Utah who is an expert in the area of Internet porn.
Pamela Paul's book offers a compilation of surveys and other research as well as anecdotal evidence of the problems porn causes. Of particular concern, she points out in the book, are stories of young children and teens accessing pornography from school computers. But Paul told the Senate subcommittee that men are also victims of the scourge of pornography.
"Men told me they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography on their televisions and DVDs -- and especially online," the author stated. "They looked at things they would have once considered appalling."
According to Paul, it also affected how those men viewed women in general. "They found the way they looked at women in real life warping to fit their fantasies," she said. "Their relationships soured; they had trouble relating to women as individual human beings. They worried about the way they saw their daughters and girls their daughters' age."
In addition, said the author, those men's lives were interrupted, their hobbies tossed aside, and their family lives disrupted. The result was a high price paid by families, she said. "Some men even lost jobs, wives, and children."
Ms. Paul told the subcommittee that her surveys found that 60 percent of women feel pornography dictates how men expect them to look and act in today's culture -- and that more than 11 million teens regularly view porn online. The effects, she said, are far-reaching.
"It is terrible enough that adults are suffering the consequences of a 'pornified' culture," she said, "but we must think about the kind of world we are introducing to our children. Certainly everyone -- liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans -- can agree with the statement" 'It wasn't like this when we were kids.'"
Researcher Jill Manning of Brigham Young University, who also is a fellow with the Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC, outlined for the senators her research showing six negative trends taking place in the U.S. as a result of exposure to Internet porn.
"Increased marital distress and risk of separation and divorce. Decreased marital intimacy and sexual satisfaction. Infidelity. Increased appetite for more graphic types of pornography and sexual activity associated with abusive, illegal, and unsafe practices."
She continued: "Devaluation of monogamy, marriage, and child-rearing. An increasing number of people struggling with compulsive and addictive sexual behavior."
Manning said the trends are getting worse. Both she and Ms. Paul urged Congress to take action to eliminate the exposure of pornography on the worldwide web.
Simply because you assert something, doesn't make it fact.
One can also claim that since violent people have almost all been milk drinkers at some point, then milk must be at fault.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Do you mean that this 54 year old male, can "safely" take up porn without getting an impulse to kill or rape someone? Inquiring minds want to know.
Ya, one needs to "correct" for noise, by plugging into the least squared analysis all of the other variables. It takes a real man to do that.
I should add, "irresistible" as an adjective to impulse.
While your response to Zulu would seem to be solid logic, the difference is that porn and smoking are not the same. Smoking is itself a damaging activity, even in the short term, with breathing, coughing and phlegm formation.
Other animals masturbate and men being so visual it only makes sense that they would do so with the aid of an image or film. This is far different than ingesting carcinogenic compounds. There is no real result from masturbation (viewing porn or creating it in the MIND) in the immediate sense.
That SOME are damaged by addiction or obsession with pornography is not the issue. Many things become an obsession and become damaging. I'd also argue that a sense of disconnect, alienation and breakdown of social bonds could lead those few predisposed souls to rape far more than pornography (see Japan.)
I don't think the relationshipo between the commission of anti-social acts and looking at pornography is in any way correlated as frequently as cancer with cigarette smoking. I looked at Playboy when I was a kid and never raped anybody nor did that warp my frame of mind. If anything, I realize the "Playboy Philosophy" is the root of many social ills plaguing us today, but you could say the same of James Bond and the way he treated women in his films.
I don not want a collection of moral pragons like Ted Kennedy and his associates making determinations about morality for me, and I want people like John McCain (of McCain-Feingold notority) to keep their cotton-picking hands off the Internet.
If they decide what is morally acceptable to publish on it, they can decide what is politically unacceptable - which indeed is what they are attempting through McCain-Feingold.
I view all of this as dangerously interconnected.
Well, you're certainly much more conversant in this topic than am I....
However, let me offer the equally plausible premise that if the individuals you name above weren't looking at porn they would have been killing more people.
You won't like that, though, since it doesn't fit into your little world too well :-)
I assume you know that your statement is complete nonsense?
Statistical analysis is irrelevant.
There are no circumstances under which correlation proves causation.
Sniffing that which they find so offensive? Hey, FReeping has its advantages. Hang around long enough and you may learn something as well.
I never knew about it until yesterday when I read this post #24.
I am not in any way supporting the Senators, particularly T. Kennedy. AFAIC, almost every Sentator and most Representatives are corrupt scum and would be better replaced by almost any ordinary person off the street.
Why not let communities decide? Nope, can't anymore. The SCOTUS (siding with pornographers and the ACLU) took that freedom away from us.
"Why not let communities decide? "
NOW I agree with you!!!!!
I couldn't care less where you picked it up. I just find it interesting how eager you appear to be to spread that which you condemn. You are way too into porn. For me, it's not about pornography, it's about liberty but you wouldn't understand that.
You didn't even attempt to refute my arguments.
And the :-) after my point about children being harmed? No big deal to you? Or you think that being molested by porn addicted creeps isn't harmful? Or little children acting out sexually because of being exposed to porn is cute and worth a smile?
I can only assume you are heartless, and consider the "right" to view porn as the supreme height of human existence.
You porn promoters try to equate pictures of naked women with what pornography acutally is as a smokescreen. If porn was pix of naken women few would care.
So in your world there are no moral absolutes.
The founders of this country and the writers and signers of the Constitution certainly would disagree with you.
Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private - and public virtue is the only foundation of republics." ---John Adams
"Reading, reflection and time have convinced me that the interests of society require the observation of those moral precepts ... in which all religions agree." ---Thomas Jefferson
"Religion is the only solid basis of good morals; therefore education should teach the precepts of religion, and the duties of man toward God." ---Gouverneur Morris
"Bad men cannot make good citizens. A vitiated state of morals, a corrupted public conscience are incompatible with freedom." ---Patrick Henry
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ---John Adams
["O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters." --- Benjamin Franklin
“We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government, upon the capacity of each and all of us ... to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.” -James Madison
"Of all the dispositions and habits which least to political
prosperity, Religion and morality are indespensable supports.
In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should
labor to subvert these great Pilliars of human happiness."
-- George Washington (Farewell Address, 19 September 1796)
Only if the irresistible impulse wasn't already manifest beforehand.. ;^)
The whole alleged nexus between pornography and sex crime is silly nonsense for feeble minds. No objective study has been able to establish the causative relationship and in fact at a number of different times and places sex crime has decreased as pornography has increased. It's actually easier to establish a relationship between more pornography and less sex crime than it is the other way around.
But no one tries to establish that relationship because it doesn't fit in with the received fantasy worldview that they want to maintain. A number of studies find it nonetheless, whether they report it as such or not.
As I said, I have no reason to refute your personal opinions
And the :-) after my point about children being harmed?
I can't tell you how tired I am of hearing every lackwit attempt to justify their personal twist with "it's for the children."
And irregardless of how many quotes you attach, you're just another idiot incapable of differentiating facts from their personal twists.
I would generally agree that it is a problem government is ill suited to resolve.
My solution? The same as drug abuse... read on, you may be offended by my Texan-like solution...
Like the druggies, the sex perverts can only continue their filthy habits by an ever expanding market to compromise the young ones. Without them to support it, they would all die off leaving no market for it at all.
Legalize everything, but don't make me a criminal for waging my private war against it. Once something compromises my children, the law means nothing to me at all.
The problem is that men need to be men, not the feminized, doped up, homosexualized porn freaks who can't get a real woman to mate with them. Men are supposed to protect their children with a viciousness greater than that of an animal.
Taking the law into my own hands? There again, it is an issue the government is ill suited to resolve. Men need to stand up and be men about it, to hell with the faggy tassle shoed lawyers screaming about some kind of civil right or courts (like the 9th Circuit) who decide it is o.k. to expose elementary school kids to sexual questionnaires. If it is prohibited to the federal government and the states, it is reserved for the People. I'm to the point of resigning myself to the only other answer - - a violent civil uprising.
1. You can't do it.
2. Irregardless of the statistical significance, correlation does not imply causation. Never has and never will.
FWIW, if you review your history, the closer that society gets to a 'state of nature' the less likely men are to have anything whatsoever to do with their children, or even to acknowledge them. The entire concept of "fatherhood" appears to be a purely socialized construct. In fact, a society must go to extraordinary measures in order to maintain a construct of fatherhood.
I know this doesn't fit in well with your rubric of 'men need to be men' but it's worth keeping in mind if one is interested in promoting fatherhood as a social policy. By ordinary standards, fatherhood is in fact 'unnatural'..
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