If you were following the Values Voters Summit, you undoubtedly heard about a shocking new development in self-abuse. According to Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn’s chief of staff, Michael Schwartz, “all pornography is homosexual pornography,” even ostensibly heterosexual pornography, because although you may be straight when you start wanking, you’ll be a five-alarm poufter by the time you conclude the transaction.
Now I’m in no position to contest Schwartz’s conclusions, since I haven’t seen the raw data from his study. All I can say is, if looking at pictures of nude women turns you gay, it’s taking a very long time. Elsewhere in the blogosphere, however, this theory has aroused a bit of ribald commentary, but Rebecca Hagelin aims to prove that the “Playboy = Gayboy” theory is No Joke, by offering up a column with the flavor — and title — of a late 1950s junior high school mental hygiene film.
I can hear the softly clicking sprockets of the 16mm projector already…
No one wants to talk about America’s growing addiction to pornography.
Most people prefer to express their feelings about it through the interpretative dance language of masturbation.
Certainly not me, but I do quite often
That’s pretty much the definition of addiction.
…because I know it is one of the greatest evils of our day.
For those of you keeping score at home, here’s Greatest Evil’s current stats:
Number 1 Greatest Evil of Our Day: Osama bin Laden
Number 2 Greatest Evil of Our Day: Iran (except for its plucky protesters, who we prefer to think of as “collateral damage”)
Number 3 Greatest Evil of Our Day: Affordable Healthcare for All Americans
Number 4 Greatest Evil of Our Day: Toilet Tramps III: The Rectal Reckoning
Like a toxic plague…
Aren’t those just the worst? Not at all like the Energy Plague drinks they sell at my gym that give you pep and zing and only a light scattering of oozing black pustules.
…pornography usage is sweeping our nation and destroying our humanity.
I share Rebecca’s concerns; in fact, I’ve been worried about our humanity since at least 2003. Fortunately, it turns out that we can cluster bomb an Iraqi wedding party and get away with only a bruise or a scrape to our humanity, but rub one out while watching Your Crack is My Snack #9, and your orgasm will lay waste to the canon of Western Civilization.
Tragically, the largest demographic consuming internet pornography is children between the ages of 12 and 17. As deadly as pornography is to the innocence and development of our children, it has a stranglehold on millions of men too.
After we lost David Carradine, Rebecca dedicated her life to stamping out autoerotic asphyxiation. Unfortunately, she only succeeded in attracting a whole bunch of other guys who are into the trampling fetish.
Walk by any magazine stand and you’ll see that although porn is difficult to avoid on the internet
The lingerie ads on Alicublog murdered my soul.
…“dirty magazines” are still a much sought-after commodity by adult males.
Really? Because when I go to the big news vendor at Hollywood and Cahuenga (AKA Raymond Chandler Square), the porn aisle is usually empty, with most of the action concentrated around the glossies and the computer and gaming mags. Now of course there are still many people without a computer or access to the internet, but when I hear that men browsing for “dirty magazines” are a growing threat to our nation’s newsstands, I can’t help recalling what most people said when Paul Reubens was arrested for jerking off in a porno theater in 1991: “There are still porno theaters? Hasn’t this guy ever heard of a VCR?” And since we’ve gone from French postcards under the counter to Pussycat Theaters, to VHS tapes, to DVDs, to adult films you can download to your iPhone, I really doubt a handful of neo-Puritans are going to be able to make Porno Prohibition work. But hey, whatever, Rebecca. Keep fuckin’ that chicken.
While in the airport recently my heart broke at the sight of so many men who spend time between flights thumbing through the pages of “soft porn” publications like Playboy. And for crying out loud, they shamelessly do so in their tidy suits in the plain site of everyone.
Business travelers should at least have the decency to strip naked in Hudson News before browsing, so their filthy thirst for nipples won’t reflect unfavorably upon Joseph & Feiss. I have to concede that she may have a point, however, since I myself am an airport porn survivor. Several years ago I was at La Guardia, killing time at the newsstand before a flight to Chicago, and I remember being puzzled by the large number of skin mags on display, thinking, “What’s the point? No one’s going to buy Playboy to read on a plane, let alone Hustler.” It only dawned on me later that they were probably most often purchased by arriving passengers en route to their hotels.
On board, I was sitting by the window, in a two-seat row, when a tall, morbidly obese man suddenly flipped up the armrest between us and collapsed beside — and partially on top of — me. He seemed coolly unconcerned that a large portion of his body was trespassing onto my seat and pressing me up against the bulkhead; but then, there wasn’t anything he could do about it, so I suppose a studied indifference was the better part of valor.
After we took off, and I resigned myself to fogging up the window for the next couple of hours, he pulled out a Hustler magazine, making me wonder if this was synchronicity, or divine retribution. He paged through it with a nonchalant thoroughness, even flicking the gatefold open across my tray table, to the point where all I could do was bat the air-brushed pudenda off my peanuts and marvel at his insouciant approach to porn. On the bright side, he was not wearing a tidy suit, which I really think made it all better.
It will probably shock many of you to hear that these “gentlemen’s magazines” have for years featured photos, cartoons and illustrations of children in sexual situations, including association with adults, animals, and sexual assault. So much for “soft porn”.
Yes, I suppose that would shock me if it were true. But then, if Playboy has been trafficking in child pornography for years, why was John Ashcroft wasting his time putting window treatments on bare-boobed statues?
When otherwise “responsible” adults are slaves to the smut
That’s my favorite Roxy Music song.
…is it any surprise that adolescents are easily addicted when exposed to porn during their hormone-driven years?
Just like they become addicted to fluoride during their cavity-prone years, allowing the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids. Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk…Ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, childrens ice cream!
We have never before raised an entire generation on porn, so we don’t know how damaging the far-reaching affects will be.
Well, we raised an entire generation on wholesome Fifties television, and they turned into long-haired, drug-taking, free-loving hippies who burned their bras and undercut our efforts to stem the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, the generation raised on porn seems rather polite and docile, with a healthy interest in consumer products and no apparent urge to protest illegal wars or occupy the dean’s office. So from a purely conservative viewpoint, we’re probably better off exposing our youth to gangbangs and bukkake, since Howdy Doody is a known vector for subversion.
A recent edition of Salvo Magazine (a publication I’m honored to serve as a pro-bono senior editor for) entitled “Silent Bondage”
Also the title of a highly successful German fetish series. Coincidence?
…paints a grim picture of the future by outlining the harms we now know our children are currently suffering due to their own pornography consumption. Salvo features the work of Drs. Judith Reisman and Jill Manning, seasoned experts in the dangers of porn.
To paraphrase Joel Robinson: “Oh, a Ph.D in Porn — that’s an easy major!”
Their research shows that the images “encourage and stimulate anger and aggression” in users and causes them to treat other people as objects. Children who use porn have a lack of interest in marriage and in having children of their own, and are at an increased risk of developing sexual compulsions and addictive behavior.
Their research also shows that looking at pictures of a nude woman is the same as smoking a crack pipe with your penis! From an abstinence-only sex education curriculum: “Pornography triggers a myriad of endogenous, internal, natural drugs that mimic the ‘high’ from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub erototoxins – mind altering drugs produced by the viewer’s own brain” – Dr. Judith Reisman
This is your brain. This is your brain on tits.
According to Dr. Manning, the type of porn viewed today, by both adults and children, is “deviant, vile and graphic.”
But there’s a downside, too.
“Young people are witnessing rape, torture, and all kinds of degrading material.”
How they got a hold of Dick Cheney’s home movies I’ll never know.
Why would anyone gravitate to such horrible inhumane depictions?
Probably for the same reason people read Day by Day.
Dr. Reisman has carefully studied and documented the effects that exposure to pornography has on the brain – it acts like a drug and can easily capture the “casual observer” and result in serious addiction, causing the user to crave greater quantities of ever more perverse images.
That’s what happened to Sid Vicious. Sadly, he didn’t realize how much he’d detoxed in prison, and when he got out and took his regular dose of lesbian porn — bam! Died instantly.
Of course, if porn is the moral equivalent of heroin, that might not be an entirely bad thing, since addicts who share their works can often spread hepatitis and AIDS, but nobody ever died from borrowing his buddy’s DVD of Barely Legal Muff Buffers.
If you suspect someone in your family has a porn problem, arm yourself with truth. This column is much to short to delve into all you need to know in order to protect your family. Visit www.SalvoMag.com where you can order the “Silent Bondage” issue and equip yourself to combat pornography’s stranglehold head-on.
Yes, Salvo Magazine is on the cutting edge of peer-reviewed, psycho-sexual research. For instance, they’d like to have a few words with that Alfred Kinsey fellow…
If you have a pornography addiction, please get help. At www.VictimsofPornography.org you can connect with counseling resources and hear the victory stories of others who have overcome their bondage.
Sometimes you can keep their counseling resources on the line for over an hour before they realize you just like talking about bondage.
It’s critical to understand that consuming porn is never just “harmless entertainment.” Your use warps your view of women and of common decency. It breeds selfishness and unfaithfulness. You might as well be having an affair with every woman you gawk at in the glow of the computer or while privately viewing that hotel room porn flick.
Really, Rebecca? Apparently you have access to much better porn than I do.
Your wife may be silent about your usage, but she’s probably dying a little each day inside. I’ll never forget the heart-wrenching words of a wife whose husband regularly viewed porn: “It was like my husband had a mistress in our home.”
While the wife’s 8-inch vibrating Steely Dan was more like a lodger who did odd jobs around the house.
If you use pornography, you use people. You have a problem. Get help.
This is your brain. This is your brain on sanctimony. Get the picture?