Menstuff® has compiled the following information on the continuing use of pornography. Pornography Awareness Week, Oct. 29-Nov. 5.
17:33
Is Pornography Addictive?
What sex
really sounds like versus what sex on porn sites sounds
like.
Porn-Again War
You May Be Surprised By Who's Filming And
Uploading Amateur Porn
Some tips for how to talk to your teen about
watching porn. HINT: It's not to tell them to stop.
Barely Legal: 30 Nearly
Pornographic Mainstream Films
Porn is a Conservatives'
Thing
Porn Doesn't Turn Me On Anymore. What
Happened?
Sex With Someone New --
Every Night
Teens and Porn: 10 Stats You Need to
Know
Porn & Your Teen
Find Freedom through Internet Accountability and Filtering
Pornography
Statistics: Annual Report 2015
Books
Journals
- on Child, Emotional, and Sexual Abuse and Trauma
Instead we blunder on, convincing bright-eyed teenagers to join the Silver Ring Thing, a profitable abstinence shtick developed by a Christina ministry that involves selling no-sex-please rings to kids. All for naught! Like Britaney Spears - the chastity movement's fallen spokesperson - about 90 percent of these kids wind up breaking their vows and getting it on, anyway, sans contraception.
Maybe the FBI though stop trying to deny the liido and harness it,
instead. Encourage adult sites to feature more pop-up condom ads. It
sure beats a world filled with porn police and chastity belts.
Source: Neva at the San Francisco Chronicle,
September 25, 2005
You May Be Surprised By Who's Filming And
Uploading Amateur Porn
Amateur porn website Homegrown Video (NSFW link) cataloged all video submissions they received over a six-month period. They found that almost one-third of homemade sex tapes submitted between July and December 2013 were created not in sexually liberal coastal cities, as one might imagine, but in the Bible Belt. Furthermore, 56.9 percent of videos were submitted by women.
(A representative for the site told The Huffington Post that Homegrown Video takes steps to ensure that all videos featured on the site are done so with the express permission of all parties featured. Couples are required to include a short clip acknowledging they are making a video of their own free will, are not intoxicated, and have read the site's terms and conditions when signing the release. Given the impact of of revenge porn, we're glad these steps are being taken.)
Most video submissions came from California (20.6 percent) and Pennsylvania (11.8 percent), but 10.8 percent of submissions came from Florida and 6.9 percent from Texas. Other Bible Belt states contributing submissions included North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana and Kentucky.
These results are consisten with a recent PornHub study, which found that the religiosity of an area had little impact on how much porn its residents watch. Furthermore, residents of cities with higher churchgoing rates spent 47 seconds longer per PornHub visit than their peers in less religious cities.
The data from Homegrown Video and PornHub suggests that we should
reconsider assumptions about who is watching, making and sharing porn
-- and hope that the verbal consent requirement, and high number of
women taking the lead by submitting their own videos, will make the
Internet porn landscape a safer, more welcoming place for women.
Source: www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/12/amateur-porn-filming-uploading-women-bible-belt_n_4776919.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular
The effects of porn on the brain were called "toxic" and compared to cocaine. One psychologist claimed "prolonged exposure to pornography stimulates a preference for depictions of group sex, sadomasochistic practices, and sexual contact with animals."
It used to be that if you wanted to see pornography, you had to go out and buy a magazine or rent a video. Store hours and available space under the mattress placed some limits on people's porn habits.
Now there are an estimated 420 million adult web pages online. "For the person who has difficulty stopping, more is only one click away," says sex therapist Louanne Cole Weston, PhD.
There's no doubt that some people's porn consumption gets them in trouble -- in the form of maxed-out credit cards, lost sleep, neglected responsibilities, or neglected loved ones. But Weston is one who takes issue with calling problem behavior involving porn an addiction. "'Compulsive' is more appropriate," she says.
Compulsion or Addiction
The difference between describing the behavior as a compulsion or an addiction is subtle, but important.
Erick Janssen, PhD, a researcher at the Kinsey Institute, criticizes the use of the term addiction when talking about porn because he says it merely describes certain people's behavior as being addiction-like, but treating them as addicts may not help them.
Many people may diagnose themselves as porn addicts after reading popular books on the subject, he says. But mental health professionals have no standard criteria to diagnose porn addiction.
Mary Anne Layden, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the witnesses at the Senate hearing on pornography addiction. She says the same criteria used to diagnose problems like pathological gambling and substance abuse can be applied to problematic porn use.
"The therapists who treat pornography addicts say they behave just like any other addicts," she says.
One of the key features of addiction, she says, is the development of a tolerance to the addictive substance. In the way that drug addicts need increasingly larger doses to get high, she thinks porn addicts need to see more and more extreme material to feel the same level of excitement they first experienced.
"Most of the addicts will say, well, here's the stuff I would never look at, it's so disgusting I would never look at it, whatever that is -- sex with kids, sex with animals, sex involving feces," she says. "At some point they often cross over."
Janssen disputes that people who look at porn typically progress in such a way. "There is absolutely no evidence to support that," he says.
Why We Watch
Weston says she thinks there are three main reasons why people turn to pornography: to see their fantasies acted out, to avoid intimacy in a relationship, and simply to aid masturbation.
"Sometimes people are just going to it for things they wish they could do in real life," she says. "It fills in a gap in their own relationship. They have a partner who doesn't like to do oral sex and they love it themselves, and they're in this relationship and they want to stay, so they go and look at pictures of oral sex."
In this regard, porn can be part of a healthy relationship, she says, but in some circumstances it can hinder intimacy.
"Then there are the people who are too embarrassed to explain what it is that they really would like to participate in, so they go there secretively, never having revealed to their mate what they would like to try," Weston says.
If they were to reveal their fantasy, they might find their partner willing to go along with it, and they might end up with more fulfilling sexual relationships. For some, however, that would be unacceptable.
"Some people go there because the intimacy in the relationship is as high as the person can stand it. If they were to unveil the sexual interest which is sort of their closely held secret, the intimacy would be way too high for their own ability to tolerate it, so they save it for elsewhere," Weston says.
Independent of the role it plays in relationships, people also look at pornography just to arouse themselves before or while masturbating.
"I think of porn addiction as a label that's used to put down behavior that's disapproved of socially," Violet Blue, a sex educator and author of The Ultimate Guide to Adult Videos,says. "A lot of it is shaming masturbation."
Men are thought to be more easily aroused by erotic imagery than women are, but many women masturbate to pornography, too, she says.
She moderates an online message board for female enthusiasts
called the Smart Girls' Porn Club. "I occasionally receive emails
from members of the group about different kinds of sexual problems,"
she says, but none so far have expressed.
Source: Luanne Cole Weston, PhD, sex therapist;
author, Sex Matters®. Erick Janssen, PhD, associate scientist,
director of graduate education, The Kinsey Institute. Mary Anne
Layden, PhD, co-director, Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program,
Center for Cognitive Therapy, University of Pennsylvania. Violet
Blue, author, The Ultimate Guide to Adult Videos. U.S. Senate
Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation; Science,
Technology, and Space Hearing: "The Science Behind Pornography
Addiction," Nov. 18, 2004. The Society for the Scientific Study of
Sexuality. Mayo Clinic. Third Way Culture Project. my.webmd.com/content/Article/110/109826.htm
Some tips for how to talk to your teen about
watching porn. HINT: It's not to tell them to stop.
Who hasn't watched a little porn here and there?
You'd be hard-pressed to find a person who hasn't watched some porn or who doesn't enjoy it on an occasional basis. Generationally, though, the dynamics of porn have changed. Depending on your age, your ideas of what porn is and how it's affected your actual sex life will vary. But for the newest generations of sexually active youth, things have gotten pretty extreme.
I know of whence I speak, for I have a teenage son.
So what's the big deal with teens watching porn if everyone does it? Well, they are very different from adults. And times have changed.
The problem is that teenage porn use is not just a kid getting ahold of dad's girly magazine anymore. It's unfettered access to as much porn as a kid wants, as frequently as they want it, and with the ability to escalate to more and more extreme types as their brain desensitizes to it. And unfortunately, kids' brains are still very much in their formative years even in their late teens, so it's having an effect on the actual wiring of their sexual norms.
A study published in 2014 from Cambridge University tracked the behaviors of compulsive porn users: Over 50% of men (average age 25) had difficulty achieving erections with real partners, yet could achieve erections with porn.
And that's not to mention the effect it has on women's perceived expectations of themselves and their partners' expectations of them because of porn's depictions. When even women's orgasms are shown as a caricaturized performance in service of pleasing a man, something gets really skewed in terms of what women can hope to experience for their own fulfillment.
OK, but what can we even do about it?
You could try frequent, random, and unannounced appearances in your kids' room to make them too paranoid to take advantage of "alone time." Or you could creatively find ways to make sure the family pet is always in there in the hopes that they'd be too wigged out to watch porn while Whiskers McButtonNose is looking on.
But that seems like a lot more work and way less reliable than just talking with teens about it. Here's how I did it:
I sent my son some links to a documentary about what it can do to a developing teen's brain to gorge on porn (he was about 15 at the time). I asked him to find me and talk to me after he was done watching the documentary — I wanted to let him have some control about when the conversation happened, so it could be more productive and not feel like an ambush.
When he did, we talked about the research. It wasn't the most comfortable conversation in the world, but it also wasn't the worst. I let him know I didn't think it was shameful for him to watch porn, that I know a lot of people do, and that I wasn't going to place any unrealistic expectations on him to never watch porn.
I asked him what points the movie made that really hit home for him. I noted that porn and masturbation do not necessarily go hand-in-hand (SORRY). I also suggested he may benefit from thinking about what parameters he wanted to set for himself, like:
The point really was that I can't waltz into my son's private life and think I'm going to dictate what choices he'll make. I mean, I could have had a parental power struggle that escalated into me taking away his computer and Internet unless he does what I say, but I don't think that would have taught him what he really needs to navigate this stuff — self-regulation.
So what happened with my son?
I noticed after our talk that he was spending a lot less time in his room doing ... "room things" and a lot more time with other people. He seems happier and no longer carries the ever-present sense of dissatisfaction and frustration of wondering if his real life will ever match up to what he's being told his sex life should be. He got to make a thoughtful and deliberate choice for himself on his own terms.
When you let a teen know that their porn habits today could affect their ability to have a fulfilling sexual relationship — a real one — down the road, some kids will care.
Of course, some kids just won't either. But at least this way, they're getting a chance to make a choice instead of just being railroaded into a lifetime of warped sexual norms without a shot at doing it differently. Porn companies don't care about your kids' health and well-being, so don't let them be the only influence weighing in on this.
It all starts with adults acknowledging the reality of teens' daily lives. We can do this, folks.
And for some more good, research based talk about it all, check out this really enlightening TED Talk by Gail Dines on bringing kids up in a "pornified culture." (Be warned: It's a very frank discussion about sexuality, and the f-word is prevalent throughout.)
13:47
Porn is a Conservatives'
Thing
A new nationwide
study
(pdf) of anonymised credit-card receipts from a major online adult
entertainment provider finds little variation in consumption between
states. "When it comes to adult entertainment, it seems people are
more the same than different," says Benjamin Edelman at Harvard
Business School.
However, there are some trends to be seen in the data. Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. "Some of the people who are most outraged turn out to be consumers of the very things they claimed to be outraged by," Edelman says.
Political divide
Edelman spends part of his time helping companies such as Microsoft and AOL detect advertising fraud. Another consulting client runs dozens of adult websites, though he says he is not at liberty to identify the firm.
That company did, however, provide Edelman with roughly two years of credit card data from 2006 to 2008 that included a purchase date and each customer's postal code.
After controlling for differences in broadband internet access between states – online porn tends to be a bandwidth hog – and adjusting for population, he found a relatively small difference between states with the most adult purchases and those with the fewest.
The biggest consumer, Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000. "The differences here are not so stark," Edelman says. And again, eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election--Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama.
Number 10 on the list was West Virginia at 2.94 subscriptions per 1000, while number 41, Michigan, averaged 2.32.
Old-fashioned values
Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.
Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.
To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.
States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."
"One natural hypothesis is something like repression: if you're told you can't have this, then you want it more," Edelman says.
Journal reference: Journal of Economic Perspectives vol 23, p 209
(pdf)
Source: www.propeller.com/story/2009/03/01/porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers/
Porn Doesn't Turn Me On Anymore. What
Happened?
Answer:
For some people, looking at lots of sexually explicit images can be a bit like eating their favorite food at their favorite restaurant every day three times a day. After a while, that favorite food can almost seem repulsive -- certainly not appetizing.
I'd recommend that you experiment with backing away from viewing it yourself. If you masturbate, create sexually stimulating material in your own mind. Give it some time -- a few months and see how you respond after that. Each person has a different saturation level when it comes to this issue. See if you can learn where yours is.
Source: Louanne Cole Weston, PhD, is a licensed
marriage, family, and child counselor and a board-certified sex
therapist in practice since 1983. Her work in the field of human
sexuality includes extensive experience as a therapist, educator,
my.webmd.com/content/Article/110/109828.htm
Teens and Porn: 10
Stats You Need to Know
Two years ago, several hundred college students filled out an
online survey to help researchers understand how prevalent exposure
to pornography was among adolescents. Here are some of the
results:
Teens and porn use is a serious problem today. Researchers said this sample of students had “a considerable amount of exposure” to Internet pornography, and they were particularly concerned about the degree of exposure to deviant sexual activity. “If participants in this study are typical of young people,” researchers commented, “exposure to pornography on the Internet can be described as a normative experience, and more study of its impact is clearly warranted.”
93% of boys and 62% of girls see porn before that age of 18. See more frightening porn stats
Download “When Your Chid Is Looking At Porn”
What should a parent do if he or she discovers their child has
been looking at porn online? We’ve written a free guide for
Christian parents to think critically about how to have this
important conversation. Download it now: When Your Child is Looking
at Porn.
Source: “The Nature and Dynamics of Internet
Pornography Exposure for Youth” (pdf), by Chiara Sabina, Janis
Wolak, and David Finkelhor (from CyberPsychology & Behavior,
2008) www.covenanteyes.com/2010/08/19/teens-and-porn-10-stats-your-need-to-know/
The difference between pornography and erotica is lightening. -
Gloria Leonard
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