By Yu-Lin Liao Pornography – people used to talk about it in a hushed and secretive tone; boys got excited and girls got embarrassed just by mentioning it; Playboy and adult films only existed in dark corners of bookstores or video shops and customers walking by would avert their eyes. That innocent age is definitely gone. Men now discuss it openly at work or in school and women no longer rush to deny they’ve seen it. With the internet booming, you have to try really hard to avoid porn coming at you in all sizes and shapes at every turn. But exactly how big is the porn business now? Here are a few examples to show you. Earlier this year, Porn.com was auctioned off for a record US$9.5 million – not for the actual website but only for the website address. Porn’s clientele is so large that a “.xxx” domain is expected to be established before the end of 2007. Pornography has more than 50 sub-genres according to Wikipedia’s categorization. There are always hundreds of spam porn ads waiting in your email box if you don’t have a mail filtering system. Finally, about one-fifth of all the websites in the world are porn-related. The prosperity of the pornography industry brings serious concern from parents, governments, feminists, religious groups, and others. We all know pornography is not good, but is it necessarily bad? Before we demonize all porn and try to organize a witch hunt, maybe we should weigh the pros and cons objectively first. CONS: 1. Misleading. For those who are not mentally prepared – lacking proper sex education or without a healthy attitude toward both genders – pornography is extremely misleading. Every man in porn can have an erection for hours and every woman has double D breasts; sex scenarios that involve nurses, doctors, victims, murderers, animals, incest, threesomes, foursomes are constructed like they are normal while most of us know that these things happen rarely in real life. But to some susceptible and innocent minds, pornography seems real and plausible. Watching pornography thus becomes dangerous for your mental health and for your relationships with other people. 2. Addictive. Like all pleasurable things, watching porn can be addictive. Some college geeks even publicly claim they cannot live without porn. Just like food, nicotine, drugs, and alcohol, pornography is highly addictive. Without some discretion it can create tremendous problems in your life, and kicking the habit is no easy task. So watching porn is really a slippery slope, it takes great self-restraint to use it in moderation and to your advantage. 3. Immoral. In a society that promotes monogamy, pornography is considered immoral because its content usually involves adultery, polygamous relationships, not to mention incest and other more unusual plots. In some religious traditions, sex can only be used as a method of procreation, so sexual pleasure and sex-oriented entertainment is considered immoral. Scenes of crime and torture are often promoted and packaged as enjoyable for both predators and victims. Moral standards are being challenged here. PROS: 1. Technology-driving. It is a well-known fact that pornography drives the development of technology. From the printing press to DVDs to the internet, pornography plays an important role in driving new technologies to the mass market. The desire for downloading porn faster pushed the development of broadband and high speed internet access; the urge to see naked women clearer decided the evolutionary path of the video industry, from the early fight between VHS and Betamax to the invention of DVD and pay-per-view cable and satellite TV. This might be a painful truth to some people, but the fact remains: technology is demand-driven and sex sells! The many conveniences we enjoy today we owe to pornography. 2. Entertaining. Porn is a guilty pleasure for most men and now more and more women are sharing this dirty little secret as well. Some people watch it to satisfy their fantasies while others use it as a way to blow off steam. Even couples watch it together to spice things up. Sex is a basic human need so when you don’t have a steady sex partner, pornography might be a safer alternative entertainment. There’s no denying that watching porn is entertaining and fun just like any other hobby if we look at it without bias. 3. Decreasing crime rate. Studies over the years have shown that pornography has helped bring down crime rates. Countries where porn is easily available, such as Japan, the Netherlands and Sweden, have the lowest number of reported rapes, burglaries, and thefts in the world. Researchers speculate that by giving offenders a socially accepted and accessible way of regulating their own rage, sexuality, and other impulses, crime rates can be greatly reduced. In a way, pornography provides a compensation and substitution for what we can’t achieve in real life; it brings comfort to our frustration. It prevents us from acting out our wildest imaginations in public by fulfilling them in our dark bedrooms. Some scholars go even further to claim that pornography has a therapeutic effect on society. It seems like pornography is not so evil after all. What’s really causing problems is underage children’s exposure to porn. Unlike alcohol and cigarettes, governments can’t efficiently prevent children from accessing pornography due to the flourishing internet. Currently in Taiwan, parents can pay 99 NT per month to set up a screening system to block access to pornographic websites. According to Hinet statistics, there are around 90,000 families who have installed this system, and they received an average of 87,000 porn-related hits per day. That means that almost every teenager in those families is still trying to get some pornography despite knowing there’s a screening system. But home is not the only place a child or teenager has internet access. The more you try to forbid it, the more they want to see it—it’s just human nature. The best proper way to deal with porn, finally, whether you are a lover or a hater and no matter how old you are, is to have a thorough understanding about both sexes and to have a knowledge of how to treat them as human beings. a
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May 2024
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