Pornography Awareness Week

The entire idea behind Pornography Awareness Week bothers me. Didn't know we had a Pornography Awareness Week? Everything these days is reason for an awareness week. Anything that has anyone concerned get's a ribbon and it's own day, week or even month. Pornography Awareness Week is October 29 through November 5 and its ribbon is white. Why white? I have no other idea than traditionally white represents purity.

Pornography Awareness Week is sponsored by such groups as Concerned Women in America and Morality in Media. You know, the usual religious, moral right-wing watchdogs who want to constantly remind us, that because we are human beings with sexual desire we are contributing to the downfall of society. The same group of people who want the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition removed from Wal-Mart because kids might see it. Every time I hear that Morality in Media has a complaint about something, I have to wonder if they just want rest of society to conform to their standards to make their jobs as parents easier.

Again I have seen an article that reminds me that kids between 12 and 17 are the largest viewers of internet porn. Maybe parents need to start investing in block software. I know that responsible adult webmasters are familiar with RTA labeling and use it without question. I want the statistics of how many parents actually monitor what their kids do on the net. I bet it's a lot fewer than we are led to believe. Kids are smart and a lot of them know how to get past blocking software and find what they want and many parents enter into the "battle" with a defeatist attitude of "They are just going to get around it" and they don't even bother. Parenting is hard and parents need to step up to the plate and talk to their kids instead of burying their heads in the sand over teenage sexuality and pretending it doesn't exist.

Now, normally, I am quite aware of pornography, as I am sure most people are. What I am not as aware of are the so-called problems that pornography creates, maybe because I have not seen them first hand. Part of me thinks these problems are part urban legend told to help scare us into fearing sex. I have read stories on the internet about recovered porn addicts finding God and fixing their lives. Part of me wonders if these people weren't just shamed by well meaning relatives into being "good". What bothers me even more is that once these people find God, as with anyone finding God, is that they always say that they way they were living before was wrong and that following God is the only right way. Neither way is right or wrong, they are just different. I am not going to preach about religious tolerance, but tolerance goes a long way when talking about anything - even porn.

That brings us back to Pornography Awareness Week. What one person sees as wrong, others don't have a problem with. The problem comes in when those from the first group try to force their opinions on the second group in hopes of the second group coming around to the first groups' way of thinking. More often than not the first group use outdated statistics, studies, and the same propaganda they have used for the last ten years as well as the myths that have been perpetrated from that information.

Pornography promotes violence and sex crimes toward women. While I am sure that this is true in some cases where people already have some form of mental illness or impairment, this isn't true across the board. In fact study after study from outside the US as well as inside have shown that easy access to porn has caused a decrease in rape and sex crimes toward women. Here in the United States Anthony D'Amatto has built a compelling argument to support this. In his paper, Porn Up, Rape Down,

) the Northwestern University law professor states that 1980 and 2004 that rape and attempted rape incidents has dropped 85%. While there could be any number of reasons this could have happened, D'Amatto has credited internet porn with the decrease. To back this up he has pointed out that the four states with the lowest per capita net access, Arkansas, Kentucky, Virginia and Minnesota had, during this time, a 53% increase in rape while the four states with the highest per capita net access, Alaska, Colorado, New Jersey and Washington had a 27% decrease in rape. While there are those would like to state that other things has played a part in this rape decrease, the same results have proven to be true in Sweden, Denmark and Germany. In fact, it was Denmark that first reported similar results prompting other countries to look at their statistics. It seems that pornography gives people a safe outlet

Pornography degrades and objectifies women. I have yet to see any argument that can convince me of this so either people aren't trying hard enough or I just have a different way of looking at things. To grade something or someone means that you are lowering in grade, rank or status. How can a dirty movie degrade a woman more than men have done in the history of the US? For how many years were women seen as second rate citizens who were not allowed to have the same education as a man, own land or vote. It's been men throughout history who have burned women as witches, called them insane because of their menstrual cycles, and beat them for not being able to produce sons. Throughout history, women have also been grouped with children in being impressionable enough that they can't responsibly make their own decisions as well as weak, both used as argument that they needed protected against the perceived ills of the world.

If anything pornography has done the opposite of this. Women have taken control of their sexuality, a sexuality that was denied them by men, and made the decision to participate in porn and in many cases own the companies that are churning it out.

As far as objectifying women, people really need to get over their double standard that is applied here. Porn objectifies men as much as women. Women porn fans have good looking men to oogle. That fact has seemed to go unacknowledged when talking about porn. Women refuse to admit that they are objectifying men as much as men objectify women with their beefcake calendars and how they behave when they do happen to have an opportunity to see male strippers. The bottom line is women like looking men and men like looking at women. It's how we are wired. Both the men and women involved in the adult industry are aware of how others look at them and think of them and yet they have made the decision to work in porn. Can you really objectify someone who has intentionally put themselves in a position where they can be objectified? If it's not an issue to them, why should it be an issue to everyone else.

Porn gives people unrealistic ideas about sex. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. However, movies and books like Twilight give people an unrealistic view of relationship dynamics. In fact, every great love story does to some extent. Thanks to Twilight there is a generation of young women who are going to expect their boyfriends to worship them the way Edward worshiped Bella and they are going to be very disappointed when real life guys don't live up to the fairy tale. Porn has always been about fantasies, and it has never made any claims differently. It's no different than any other fantasy world created by Hollywood.

Porn destroys marriages and the family. I have a hard time believing this. Yes, I know there are people that claimed their porn addiction destroyed their marriage but when you get down to the core of the problem, it wasn't porn. It was the lack of communication of a person who chose porn as an escape to withdraw from a problem instead of dealing with it. So many times I hear people say "I thought our relationship was perfect" when they are talking about their mate leaving them suddenly. Obviously it wasn't perfect or you would still be together.

There is also the flip side. No one wants to acknowledge that porn has probably saved more than one marriage by helping put spice back into the sex life. If nothing else it gives people visuals of new positions to try (there are a good deal of people out there who have never had sex outside of the missionary position). Then there are the many educational videos put out that teach people things no one else is going to teach them about sex, down the importance of condoms to prevent STDs!

And now, with the invent of the internet, we hear about internet porn addiction. While many professionals don't even believe it exists, it is probably real. There are a good many people out there who have addictive personalities and those people can become addicted to anything from video games to drugs and alcohol. Some people have just chosen porn as their drug. People tend to make fun of sex addicts because...well...because sex seems kind of a fun thing to be addicted to and people envy anyone who gets sex more than once a day, every day. The problem is that sex addiction interferes with relationships and intimacy. It's not the sex that is the problem; it's the baggage that comes with sex. Many times in stories of recovered porn addicts they talk about sex addiction. That is the underlying problem. It's not the fault of porn that someone has a psychological problem just as it isn't the fault of beer that some people are alcoholics.

I have made adult movie reviews my career of choice. I have probably watched more porn in the last year and a half or so than the majority of the so called porn addicts. I can tell you first hand that watching porn does not make it addictive. There have been stretches of time of weeks and months that I don't even want to see another porno and just the thought of having to watch even a trailer for an upcoming release makes me want to scream. Having an endless supply of porn has not turned me into the monster that the anti-porn crowd wants everyone to believe it will. I have not cheated on my husband, nor do I want to. I have not sexually abused my children. I do not go looking for more extreme forms of porn because I can no longer get off on the "mild" stuff. Those genre's of porn are sent to me along with the high budget x-rated features. In fact, some of the more extreme forms of porn and weird fetishes do more to repulse me than anything else.

So, as Pornography Awareness Week gets ready to start, remember to take everything you read by the moral religious groups who want to regulate away everything in existence they don't agree with, with a grain of salt. For that matter, take everything I say with a grain of salt. I am just one person, I don't have a degree in psychology any more than the members of groups like Morality in Media do. Although, being a porn journalist of sorts, I probably know more about the type of people who watch porn and what they watch than groups like Morality in Media. I can tell you that much like alcohol the majority of porn consumers use it wisely and in moderation. History in general has also proven that scare tactics of propaganda are also based on the absolute lowest common denominator, the worse possible scenario that affects only a small number of a given population.