CARNAL NATION

I don't know about you, but I would say that the rights of women to not be exploited, objectified, beaten, and dehumanized trumps the "right" of people to view pornography.

Quit clutching your pearls. Those two things are only related by a misogynist, shaming system that marginalized sex workers and forces sex work on the marginalized. Correlation is not causation. Ask any statistician. You can spew as many statistics as you want, but it doesn't mean anything except to polarize and galvanize social conservatives and to put money into the pockets of lobbyists and politicians. Right now the right of women not to be exploited, objectified, beaten, and dehumanized doesn't trump jack on the social conservative agenda, anywhere. Porn is a dog whistle issue and I refuse to bark -- so should other people.

So, just going on what you've put out here...

Poor neighborhoods need jobs and have higher crime rates and lower police presence, wealthy neighborhoods need property value and have higher police presence and the residents have little impetus to be involved in crime. Guess which neighborhood gets the porn outlet and the crime? The rich folks don't even have to drive down to get it anymore.

100% of strippers have an extremely high chance of working for a terrible employer in the presence of men who don't respect a woman's right to say no. Having never been a stripper and only rarely having had my right to say no respected, I'm certain that most of those men didn't respect a woman's right to say no when they walked in there. The problem is not that they are taking off their clothes.

Alaska and Nevada both have areas of unusual cultural/sociological profiles which involve large numbers of risk-seeking men within an elevated culture of entitlement and a high number of migratory or temporary residents with less investment in following the law and maintaining a safe community.

Compulsive internet porn use is a symptom, not a cause. It is also a charge to which most 'moral' judges -- no matter what they do in the privacy of their own homes -- are going to be sympathetic; or else. A judge who blows off a charge of 'compulsive internet porn use' is going to look very, very bad in public. Also, what are the affiliations and goals of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers?

Correlation is not causation. Again. Also, a piece of media does not have the be violent in order to be blatantly objectifying, abusive, and damaging. "Nonviolent" is a planted cue; people shouldn't fall for it.

What's the "adverse habit" rate on coffee, alcohol, junk food, gossip sites, Twitter, World of Warcraft, and other stimulating/numbing activities?

Pornography has been controlled by a misogynist culture. But pornography -- by the definition -- does not have to include misogyny. The studies you cite are linked to entitlement and misogyny and socialization, not material depicting people having sex. There is a difference. There is also a possibility that people who feel entitled to a woman's body to begin with are more comfortable with consuming porn from an industry that is largely -- not inherently -- based on using women's bodies as masturbatory aides. Further, higher incidents of rape reports have nothing to do with the actual number of rapes being committed. To suggest so is to completely ignore the complexities of the intersection of rape culture and law enforcement.

Don't get me wrong. I loathe most of what parades around under the label 'pornography'. But that is a symptom of a very disturbed culture. Filming people having sex, taking photographs of naked people, those things are not inherently "bad" or "bad for" anyone at any point in the production. I'm sick and tired of a product being blamed and shunting responsibility away from where it belongs, on the shoulders of people who perpetuate this disturbed culture -- often not even because they believe in what they're perpetuating but because out culture has very effective and exploitable ways of establishing hugely unequal power balances.

Don't blame the product. Blame the culture. Stop assuming that correlation is causation. This whole list of statistics doesn't once actually address what's happening between men and women and sex outside of this boogieman people call 'porn', the politics of race and poverty, rape culture and oppression and the real agenda of social conservatism, or anything that matters. Porn hysteria is just bait.

Dude,

don't forget about how women were threated in the 1500s, the 1600s, the 1700s and the 1800s. You rock and your info is up to date!!!! (by the way, I'm just being sarcastic, you're an idiot.)

100% of strippers surveyed in 1999 said that they'd experienced physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal harassment, and offers for prostitution while on the job. (K. Holsopple)

I would be verrrrrry interested in seeing the exact text of that survey. I worked as a stripper for over two years, and I never experienced physical or sexual abuse. Verbal harassment, on the other hand, is a matter of definition. I suspect the original survey listed a number of scenarios with yes/no "has this happened to you" options, that were later defined by the surveyors as "verbal harassment", whether or not the strippers would have defined them as such.

Of course, the other possibility is that the surveyors sought out seedy dive bar strip clubs to find their survey participants.

Offers for prostitution? Sure. That happened plenty of times. But I fail to see how that's horrifying enough to be listed along with physical or sexual abuse.

Your argument reeks of statistical dishonesty. Seriously, I can smell it from here. You have only given correlations, not a single causation, not even a correlation most likely to be the cause.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

There is a reason that that amendment is first.

BTW, the handle "Anonymous451" is strangely appropriate here, seemingly taken from "Fahrenheit 451", a book about book burning. Most porn may not exactly be high literature, but campaigns by the state to clamp down on the marketplace of ideas inevitably lead to the same place.

Maybe you don't think burning the work of Lizzie Borden and Rob Black would be such a bad idea, but if the governement gets to do that, what's to stop them from burning the work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Henry Miller?

Porn doesn't cause low self-esteem. A girl who is (miraculously) raised in modern US society with her self esteem intact until adulthood is not going to suffer emotional trauma from watching porn (or from knowing her husband watches it). A girl whose self esteem is damaged as she grows up, who never resolves her self-image issues, is going to feel inadequate compared to any woman she feels represents the "ideal" she doesn't measure up to, whether they're performing in a porn movie or appearing on the cover of Cosmo.

Seriously ... why doesn't watching porn give men such horrible anxiety about their penis size that it renders them impotent? Why don't men who watch porn become bulimic workout freaks, because most of the men on screen are buffer and trimmer than they are? Because, by and large, men aren't as susceptible to judging themselves harshly against unrealistic expectations. Football fans don't develop inferiority complexes because they can't throw a ball like their favorite quarterback either.

Porn is not an "addiction". Addictions are chemical dependencies that cause physical withdrawal symptoms. Porn is, at worst, a bad habit. Do some men spend way too much time looking at it? Sure ... but they could just as easily be spending too much time playing World of Warcraft, or drinking at the local bar, or building model railroads in the basement, or any number of other escapist pastimes. As someone else already pointed out, porn is a symptom, not a cause.

dev null

Awww muffin... you don't think you look good enough? Here's a fucking tissue. You can't argue against porn because you want a self-esteem boost. Just because your husband was looking at porn doesn't mean he didn't love you and appreciate you all the same, that's not the way it works. Porn is just a fantasy, not a substitute for human relationships and if your fragile ego can't deal with that it's your own problem. Just because I read Harry Potter and, admittedly, wish I go to Hogwarts doesn't mean I'm going to drop out of University.

And you're retarded if you didn't get that he's making fun of WRAP, that's the whole point of the article. Honestly? "I envied the dead"? Stop being a melodramatic bitch and get it through your head that there are much more pressing issues in todays world. Also, your husband still probably watches porn (I'd say like 75% chance).

Porn showcases a wider variety of bodies than magazines, movies, or TV, all of which most people (of both genders) spend more time surrounded by, and focused on, than porn.

Sure, most Vivid contract girls have a similar age range and body type, but take just a couple of steps outside of that arena and you're faced with a wide array of races, body types, ages, and even - if you look a little harder - gender presentations.

I personally know of several extra-fluffy camgirls who thought of themselves as unattractive until they heard (first from other female performers, then from their male customers) that yes, in the anonymity of the adult internet, guys will admit out loud that they find thick women and BBWs ridiculously attractive. And I'm not only talking about fat fetishists.

Part of the problem here is that an entire gender is letting their self-esteem and confidence remain fragile, rather than examining it and encouraging it to be both healthy and realistic. Yes - self-esteem and confidence are fragile by nature, that's not a gendered admission. Yes - we live in a culture that feeds and encourages that in both genders, and doesn't expect or value female confidence the same way it values male confidence. But we can be big girls and not remain open to every negative influence the world throws at us. There are ramifications when we look to media to set our self-esteem - whenever we look outside ourselves to set our confidence.

This goes right back to those BBW camgirls. After a while of working in this business, they see that every single person has different opinions and standards of attractiveness. They practice and develop the skills of turning others on. They succeed - and receive positive feedback from good clients - and succeeding in a task develops confidence. Their confidence radiates. Once the idea of society's judgment as an oppressive monolith has been broken, it's harder to go back to basing your sense of self-worth on prevailing media ideals.

Or, to put it another way: we live in a society that doesn't value sex work or sex workers. Sex workers have to set our self-worth internally, or we don't survive. It's a skill that can be learned.