Saturday, November 9, 2013

Porn: how sex is being used to ruin our kids

   It seems like I am not the only one who is taking a critical look at the use of pornography to satisfy the physical urges of young people and their genitalia, primarily young males. There is undoubtedly a physical response which could essentially be called addiction to the regular viewing of modern pornography. When this is combined with a little bit of neurological understanding about how the brain gets used to associating images and feelings, then building a mental connection between the two, it makes sense that young people's understanding of what is sexy is based on the ridiculous portrayal of sex in porn. 
http://www.vice.com/read/cindy-gallop-make-love-not-porn-interview?utm_source=vicefbus
I can't say it better than this person^.

Or this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU



then check out:
makelovenotporn.com

Also there is this infographic to support the significant of this point.
http://i.imgur.com/4ZFORrf.png 

Also.
http://www.nofap.org/


   When I say ridiculous, I mean truly terrible. I can think of maybe 1%-5% of porn that does not obey the same standard of acting and directing. Essentially, there is an intro where the actors are in some situation and then they inexplicably start touching and groping each other. There is very rarely any serious flirting or acknowledging of person hood here, just some pre-sex dirty talking. this is the first step in the objectification of sex and its objects: a penis and a female body.
   Before I talk about the innate problems with the differences between the gendered object of sex, I want to make a shout out to the obvious power dynamic ubiquitous in heterosexual porn. Its entire focus is to please the penis-owner. Or rather imply such, because the showing of a penis-owner's face or body language (other than the use of hands or thrusting) is strictly taboo. From what I can tell, the proof of pleasure exists in the overplaying of sexual act by the female body. Essentially performing a service for the penis, but rather than the actual sensations being the media, audio and visual stimulation are required to perform the act of pleasuring. So when real life physical contact ends up not being a visual / audio experience, the expectations of visual and audio inputs lead to a strange lacking in the moment.
   But here is the worst part: when a person spends years with the only access to physical contact or sexual behavior comes from the internet, it becomes normal; not only normal but desired. And when a male desires something out of his interaction with a female, the result is all to often the content of that desire without the real consent of the female. I am by no means an expert of gender dynamics, but I have observed and read for a few years now, and there is at least one thing I can say: Female-bodied people are taught from an early age to concede their own desires to the desires of the male-bodied people around them. 'Taught' may imply a direct conveyance of information, but there are many ways to teach a behavior. Often times adults will brush off a comment or deliver a reprimand for a behavior displayed by a child without a second thought. But to the child, that was significant. Oh you mean I'm not supposed to like pink? Oh you think its odd that my friends are all female-bodied? Well that doesn't sound good so tomorrow I am going to leave those friends and hang out with the other male-bodied kids. I don't want the teacher to tell my parents that I'm odd. This is form of systematic teaching, or programming humans, that subtly and without recognition, teach kids to behave within the structure of our 'society'. This is one of the driving causes behind the thing called 'rape' culture.
  OK, so sex, it took me a long time to realize what i meant to me. I mean, it took me a while to figure out what living meant to me, or breathing, or eating, but sex has taken me longer to figure out. This my be partially due to the fact that I didn't start thinking about it until I was like 12 or so, and that was the period of my life where I would search the internet for answers and examples, which were all porn then. I didn't see anything wrong with it (despite my dad looking at my search history and giving me a stern talk about how porn is 'degrading') for another 6 or 7 years. That is about the amount of time it took me to start to have sex. I specifically remember my first regular partner, with whom I would act out scenes of porn I really liked. I would focus on my imagined audio-visual performance, disassociating from the physical sensations in order to recreate my experience of sexual contact from the previous half decade of experience. The act of disassociating from yourself during a physically intimate moment disrespects the partner and the self, in other words, it is highly problematic.
   I have heard from all to many female-bodied friends of similar experience. Typically during experiences where consent was not established and actions were taken that did not align with the desires or expectations of the female-bodied actor. It is ubiquitous in accounts of long periods of sexual abuse, especially when family members are involved. When the person who cares about you most is also the person who does strange and uncomfortable things to you.
   Given my experience with sex and with porn I am hugely thankful for my friends and partners who have guided me to see sex as physical intimacy and to recognize and critique the roles we decide to play when being sexual. In many ways, I now feel like I understand role-play foreplay because it provides another perspective and outlet for the sensations and emotions of the moment. But really, I need to figure out how to stop the feedback-loop of watching porn because it is a self-supporting cycle of societal propaganda. And its teachings are effecting the socially insecure more than anyone else.

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