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.
Well, I guess you don't know that the Children's Internet Protection Act that requires library filtering was upheld by the Supreme Court 6-3.
You're welcome. Your screen name says all anyone needs to know about you, your defense of a so-called'right' to pornography confirms that.
Really? Thank you for taking the time to share such a deeply profound insight.
One can also claim that since violent people have almost all been milk drinkers at some point, then milk must be at fault.
Clearly the simple example I used was too complex, so I'll try to make it even easier for you. The poster I was replying to claimed that because the causal hypothesis didn't produce the anticipated result in all cases, the hypothesis was disproved. This is logically faulty reasoning in that even a success rate of only 0.001% might be sufficient to statistically validate a causative effect with a sufficiently large sample size. Given your response, a better example to illistrate this point might have been that airplane crashes cause fatalities even if not every airplane crash results in a fatality.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Again, thank you for sharing such priceless profundity. And I really appreciate you putting it in bold so I wouldn't miss it.
I understand the point you are trying to make and I agree that I could have chosen a better example. I do disagree with your counter example and point, however. Certainly smoking is dangerous, but I would argue that it is less dangerous than the "use" of pornography, even in the short term. The real problem with smoking from a public health perspective is how safe it is. People can smoke for decades with no significant ill effects. Masturbation to an artificial portrayal to women, however, can immediately change electroencephalography measured brain patterns and subsequent social behaviors. Where we might agree is that smoking and "using" pornography are addictive. I'll leave our disagreements about the causes of Japan's social ills for another thread.
Excellent! That's why I chose it of course..
...your defense of a so-called 'right' to pornography confirms that.
I don't think that there's a 'right' to pornography in the U.S. Constitution, which is what I presume you're referring to. So much for your reading comprehension and telephathic abilities!
He was punished for being innumerate and hostile to the alchemy of statistics, and that is just and right.
And I would argue the opposite. Either assertion is unprovable in this discussion, so we will both have to defer on this point.
I looked at Playboy when I was a kid and never raped anybody nor did that warp my frame of mind.
Even if you aren't personally thrown into an epileptic fit by strobe lights doesn't mean that strobe lights don't induce epileptic fits. Causal relationships do not have to be universal. Although I believe that pornography does induce some people to commit sexual assault, no one here is arguing that it causes everyone who "uses" it to become rapists.
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 do. Mass depictions of forced sex and brutality toward women hurts our society.
I don not want a collection of moral pragons like Ted Kennedy and his associates making determinations about morality for me...
Every law is a moral statement. Short of living in total anarchy, the question for any law is whether the benefit is worth the cost. Deciding these questions is the proper role for our elected officials (as opposed to their usual activities of self-enrichment and power consolidation).
I want people like John McCain (of McCain-Feingold notority) to keep their cotton-picking hands off the Internet.
Although there is a certain whimsical nostalgia in making the Internet into a lawless wild west, it never has been and never will be. Virus disseminating, credit card hacking, and smut spamming should all be prohibited if the Internet is to have any real value. It was created and is still funded by the American taxpayer, and every American should be able to use it (including children).
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.
They already do. Try posting a list of abortion providers and see what happens to you. There would be nothing wrong with requiring that "adult content" be adult verified or confined to an .XXX domain.
I view all of this as dangerously interconnected.
Just as I view the rise of pornography and the increase in sexual violence to be dangerously interconnected. The libertine ideal is always empty.
Nope. When did that happen?
June 12, 2004
He had his day in court already, admitted on the air it was the wrong thing to do.
The big difference between Limbaugh and Clinton, in case you have not noticed, is that Limbaugh never had his finger on the nuclear trigger.
And since you bring up Clinton (albeit not in the context of this thread), let's focus back on the issue before us... PORNOGRAPHY...
Clinton really didn't tell a lie when he said ‘I never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’ Clinton equivocated. Equivocation is deception, but it is using a truthful statement to reach for a false conclusion.
Sex, according to the standards of mammalian biology and human anatomy occurs with a male and a female during the act of coitus. Everything else is perversion (cunnilingus, fellatio, sodomy, etc...).
So, our pervert president Billy Boy was preoccupied with his pornographic obsessions, the homo sexualized acts with a virtual child (Miss Lewinsky) and would (according to Lewinsky's testimony) go into the bathroom to ‘finish himself into the sink’ in an auto erotic manner. All the while, on one occasion, Yasser Arafart (child molesting filth that he was) was waiting in the Rose Garden.
What do many of the porn addicts do while they watch that perverse filth?
Oh, the irony of it all!
Are you really Larry Flynt, here to confound and confuse the issues?
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little jeremiah: psychological dynamics ping...
Debate? There is no debate with you on this topic. Does your wife know you're here posting links to sites with descriptions of debauchery? Would you read what's on those sites in Sunday school?
My post was no ad hominem, it was merely an example, exaggerated to drive home the point, of what you did. I'm not surprised that you failed to comprehend that as you are unable to understand the concept of liberty which is what this is all about.
The anti-porn gestapo have absolutely no problem with the concept of barging into my living room to determine if I have any unapproved reading materials. Yet those same "decent folk" would shout tyranny if the nutrition nazis ever get what they want which is to come into my kitchen to certify what I'm serving for dinner.
And here's the connection for all of you dimwits who think this is about pornography: They both claim the right to circumscribe my behavior, i.e., take my liberty, because its for my own good.
The difference between you and me Harry (vis a vis this debate) is that you are a tyrant and I'm not.
Eeuuw - thanks for the visual. No, actually, thanks for the clear light of reason.
No, the difference is that he appreciates and follows the vision of the orginal Founders of this country, whereas you, because of your twisted desires to watch prostitutes having sex (and who knows what else), have imagined that the First Amendment protects such perverse obscenity.
You want to be a slave to your mind and illicit desires, and Harry wants to be a free man.
You don't realize (because your mind is covered with illusion) that what you call "freedom" is really abject slavery. You want to mandate your immorality in the false name of "freedom", in a manner which is exactly in opposition to the original purpose and vision of the writers of the Constitution.
It's you and your pals the pornography producers and the ACLU who want to turn our country into a cesspool.
Frankly I don't give a flying you-know-what about what you do in the privacy of your own home. It's none of my business. What is my business is sharing the fact that it IS harmful in many circumstances.
Btw, I was speaking of two people who are parents of our 7 combined children. The addiction to porn didn't happen overnight. With my ex, the first thing he did when cable became available, was to sign up for the Playboy channel. When VCRs and video tapes became available, he amassed a very large collection of porno tapes. Not only was I disgusted by having to sit through some of the grosser ones, we were late on our bills, and I had to make do with little money for groceries. You see, my ex was screwing around behind my back the whole 19 years, and dating is expensive. It really went nuts when we got our first computer, and online access.
My bf's business is his own, and I'm not going to share how devasting his ex wife's porn and methamphetamine addiction has been to him and his 3 kids.
You can just go to hell.
Hahahaha! You have to admit that that commercial is pretty funny : )
That's the spirit! My life hasn't been ruined by porn so I deserve to spend eternity in damnation.
Do you own any Negroes?
Damn skippy! That's the whole problem. American men are being turned into weenies. Thanks to the feminazis and the courts, men are more endangered than spotted owls! Men are no longer allowed to do their jobs as head of the family, and our society is rotting out because of this.
Oh I see your logic now...
Slavery OK so Perversion must be OK..
Wrong + Wrong = Right!
Thanks for clearing that up for us.
You are the one who is delusional. What people think of as their freedom to consume french fries and burgers when and where they please is really abject slavery to their dangerous and harmful food addictions -- or so the nutrition nazis would have us believe.
Your pornography phobia is as irrational as theirs. But like all good liberals you are only looking out for what is best for me. Screw what I think; what do I know compared to you and the other busybodies. It's only my life. What could I have to do with it that is as important as what you want me to do?
It's you and your pals the pornography producers and the ACLU who want to turn our country into a cesspool.
The difference between you and me is that I don't demand you jump into the "cesspool." I have more respect for you and our fellow citizens than you do for us.
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