Pornography : Prosumer in our era

Well, who hasn't visited a pornographic websites before?

Recently, there's bunch of news about hollywood celebrities' home-made porno is leaking outwards onto the internet. This is nothing new for us. It seems that internet become the biggest 'exporter' for pornographic materials. Through new media platforms such as the Internet, we get exposed to millions of sexual materials that challenge our sense of morality and the discourse of identity.

As mentioned in class before, pornography is the leading economic driver for internet growth. I am arguing here that how pornographic changes our identity, perspectives and our society today. Sex has always seen as a taboo, and pornography has always been identify as a taboo because it is sex that is divorced from its original emotions, which is 'love' (Geoffrey Gorer). The society before our era treated pornography as something that is shameful, guilty and filthy. But with the invention of internet and its ability to reach billion of people, the discourse of pornography seems to be going through a drastic change. Our world is bombarded with informations, images, topics and conversations about sex. This is due to the change of media platform through out the years; pornography were originally circulated within the public through traditional printing medias, such as books, papers and et cetera. But when it switch to operates on internet, it floods the world and reach out more widely than it was on printed medium.

This widespread effect has an impact on us in a macro and a micro ways: such as our society on a macro level; as well as our identity on a micro level. Pornography are no longer exclusive to be produce only by big film companies, but at this stage, the notion of 'prosumer' emerged and more and more normal, ordinary people in the society started to produce their own pornography materials, and they actually become products that other people can buy online. That links to my second point, where our identity and relationship with online pornography has been re-constructed. The traditional notion of intimacy no longer have the same meaning, as more and more individuals started to share their intimacy relationship online with billions of other people; and individuals in the society are most likely to get their sexual impressions, educations and stereotypes from online pornographies. Thus, online pornography structured our relationship as well as our attitude with and towards sex.

What really struck me was the increasing amount of homemade pornography materials nowadays. Internet can easily circulate products, informations and so on easily. Therefore, individuals in the society get exposed to different materials that they have never encounter before. Internet re-shape our sense of intimacy, and construct sex as something that does not comes with any consequences, and it can be derived from emotions. In the end, sex becomes a product on the internet, and everyone can just buy it without much thinking. The frightening side of this is that, sex no longer seen as something that is just between two person or a private matter; new media platform offered us a way to commodify even our sexual intimacy.

Online pornography have shifted our perspectives and identity in a subtle but drastic way. We no longer view sex as a taboo, and sex can become a commodity to be buy and sell. The anonymity features of internet also contribute to the fact that anyone can buy or sell anything obscene without worrying one's identity getting exposed.

An advise for people that decided or going to publish your intimate moment of you and your partner : once your material get online, it will never go offline...FOR LIFE.

Internet pornography

It is no surprise that pornographic sites on the internet in the past few years made pornographic contents widely available to anyone regardless of age with access to the WWW. Because of the high availability and large quantity of online pornography, many parents fear cyberporn will cause greater social harm than traditional forms of pornographic materials such as magazines, DVD and so on. Concerns about explosion of cybersex have given rise to a moral panic (McMurdo 1997). So, it is reasonable to expect that exposure to the highly interactive internet pornography may exert a greater influence upon adolescent and children permissive sexual attitudes and behavior. According to the some experimental research, the influence of exposure to internet pornography was greater than that of exposure to traditional forms of pornographic contents. Indeed, young children and adolescent have to be protected from those harmful pornographic contents.

I guess many people believe that regulation is the only solution to protecting children from cyberporn. But, internet is hard to regulate or control. Moreover, it is unclear to define what the porno is and who is responsible? Some people might think that porno is an art but some do not. For adult entertainment industry, it could be a serious business for them. We need to consider the difference between harmful material such as sexually explicit and illegal material such as child pornography.

In my opinion, so far, the best answer for the censoring internet pornography is the conjunction of self-regulation and new technology such as filtering or censoring software and rating systems. Also, awareness actions for parents and teachers are crucial. From now on, we have to find out something less restrictive ways to protect child without infringing on the rights of adult such as the applications of newly developed illicit content filtering technology.

"Think of the Children!"

There is no doubt about how the internet has altered the way in which relationships are formed and how we interact with each other, yet it seems that the general consensus is that the mass distribution of internet porn is purely bad for you. Negative terms like ‘addiction’ and ‘epidemic’ are frequently used to describe the attitude towards internet pornography. Dr. Phil’s free online relationship advice says that users of internet pornography reflect behavior that is “perverse and ridiculous intrusion…it is an insult, it is disloyal and it is cheating”, which is very much the typical conservative view that is regularly reinforced in popular media. Aside from the raging conservatives who claim pornography is ruining adult relationships, the major concerns are related to the vast accessibility and distribution of child pornography as well as the readily available explicit material to anyone at any age material that many critics argue to be corrupting society’s morale. It is easy to blame the internet when increasingly younger digital natives are exposed to such content that feminists against often argue perpetuate the objectification of women and create unrealistic expectations and standards of beauty.

Pornographic materials are merely illusions; fantasies that temporarily fulfill human sexual urges by the repeated act of downloading, watching and fornication. How is this any different from women or men fantasizing about other women or men during sexual intercourse with their partners? Perhaps for some, oblivion is bliss. Despite the allegations against pornography, there are couples who watch porn together to maintain a healthy sexual relationship and marriages that have been saved by allowing mutual playful experimentation. Recent findings by Milton Diamond regarding the correlation between the use of pornography and the reduction in sex-related crimes have also sparked many enthusiasts. Through research on jailed rapists and non-rapists, Diamond discusses relationship between the widespread of pornography and decrease in sex crimes that suggests that recreational users of pornography in its entirety allows for harmless diversion; no STDs, no infidelity and no ‘morning after’ scares. The studies found that many high sex offenders were the ones who had a strict and repressive religious up-bringing, whereby the surveyed rapists and child molesters were found to have consumed significantly less porn than the control group of normal males. Maybe easy access to porn isn’t such a bad idea after all.

Might As Well Face It You're Addicted To.... Porn.

Out of everything available in the world today is porn really that bad? Who are the people hurting? If you're addicted to drugs then you can kill yourself or others with the habit, the same goes for alcohol or cigarettes. So who are these people hurting with their "porn addictions"? Looking at some of the factors that help label anything as an addiction I came across these, "recurrent failure to resist impulses to engage in a specific behaviour," as well as "pleasure or relief at the time of engaging in the behaviour," so does that make every 16 year old boy an addict as well? It seems slightly on the ridiculous side to me. Perhaps we as a society are still uptight about sex in the first place and that's why such an overt expression of sexuality like pornography is so frowned upon by people the world over. I think we just haven't ever really moved on from those Victorian era sensibilities that meant a women who chose to stray from her husband was looked on as sick or evil, or that enjoying sex was a crime.

The young married couple who were trying to cope with the husbands "porn addiction" sort of baffle me if im being honest. What if the wife didn't have issues with pornography? Would his daily porn habit go from being a dirty little secret to something they did as a couple, or perhaps even become part of their foreplay? It seems to me that the only reason it was looked on by that couple as bad, dirty or even an addiction is because the wife took an issue with it. What if he had been doing something else on the computer? I don't know about anyone else but I play Tetris at least twice a day to either relax or if I'm bored and have nothing better to do.... and sometimes when I should be doing something like working on university assignments for example. What if he had been playing Tetris instead? Would he have been addicted to Tetris instead of porn, or wouldn't it not have been as big of a deal because society doesn't really frown upon Tetris the way it does pornography.

Jobs for the (Play)boys

Yes, I'm a frustrated headline writer. Anyway, apropos of this week's topic, here's an interesting piece on the rather awkward way in which squeaky-clean Apple and squeaky-but-not-so-clean Playboy have come to a mutual arrangement for the iPad.

Addiction or Ridiculous?

Don’t you love that feeling you get when you feel that you’ve gone to a lecture that actually stimulated your interest and aroused questions in you that you probably wouldn’t have thought to ask before.

Call me a nerd if you will but that was exactly the feeling I felt after today’s lecture on Sexuality and Intimacy Online. It finally prompted me to actually write my first blog.

Pornography.

Porno.

Porn.

However you like to call it, questions were raised in class about the seriousness of an addiction to pornography. A mini-documentary style video about a married man who is addicted to pornography was played and many class members, myself included, giggled and chuckled while watching. The reason for my giggle and chuckle was prominently because of the very serious and ominous tone that the reporter was using during the whole clip. As if he had just recently overcame some sort of disease that put their family through traumatic hell. This of course caused a debate to stir in class as to whether or not addiction to porn should be treated like any other addiction such as drug or alcohol addiction.

An addiction is an addiction and should be treated as such, no matter the subject matter. Today we seem so desensitized to anything remotely close to sex that some will lose grip on what is normal and what is abnormal in relation to sex. The TV show Friends gives a good example of what happens to you when you start to watch too much porn. Watch 3:52-4:46.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8y_XELbssc

I personally believe that porn is all well and good in moderation just like anything else. But when you start to think that any girl in a uniform will just rip your clothes off for you, well that’s when you know there is something weird.