I found this question on Slashdot to be sad commentary on the acceptance of porn.
“I have a nephew who is very young, but who has the techie gene — he found the Gruffalo on youtube before anyone knew he could spell. Now he’s almost 4, and I was thinking of giving him my netbook (Acer running XP), which i hardly use any more. So of course I will be deleting all the porn, but what should I load up on it? Are there tools/apps that I can load up on it to protect it and him from things he shouldn’t see until college? Also, what apps or games could I load on it that a 4 year old will get some use out of?”
First there is the nonchalant “get my porn off” and then the concern to keep his Nephew from porn, at least until college. Reading some tech blogs and listening to some tech podcasts there seems to be a great openness to porn even among techie women where the subject is always seen as something almost humorous. Or that porn is just something age appropriate and that viewing it before a certain age should be stopped, but that after that age it is something just fine. I was introduced to forms of porn and dirty jokes at a young age by my father and it was quite damaging to me and certainly not something that became acceptable when I became an adult. The damage by porn is something that is becoming quite well researched in its effects, yet it is now something that our society just accepts or jokes about.
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Sad, isn’t it that porn is so easy to find, even if you don’t want it. I was appalled a few years ago to get pornography popups while reading a Greek Orthodox website. I hope they fixed it.
Recently, I opened a download folder on my computer. I ‘d never looked at it before, because don’t download things. It took me a half-hour to delete all the porn that had accumulated there. My sister said this could happen if someone were to hack in upon finding I’d left the computer on, something I do to allow for my anti-virus program to do its thing while I sleep.
Where I once worked, they’d had so much trouble with unwanted porn that they installed a firewall that blocked access to any site with the word “girl” in it, even “Girl Scouts”.
It’s interesting to read this since I just had a similar experience. I like reading the webcomic xkcd, and the writer has recently had several guest authors. The first one was Jeph Jacques who writes web comic called “Questionable Content”. Out of curiosity, I started reading the archives and found a recent story arc all about porn, treating it as a normal thing:
http://questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1795
I found myself very disturbed at normalcy given to porn there.
Sad but so true and at times I ask my God if we’ll ever catch UP
God Bless our efforts
Having given talks on pornography and sexual addiction (I am a licensed counselor by profession), I can tell you the eefects are far-reaching. Men using porn can recall images that were long seared into their neural makeup long ago. It is almost impossible to quantify or establish cause/effect relationships, but my sense is that porn has accounted for serious disturbances in marriages and many divorces. It would be possible to poll men who have experienced divorce vs those married and but once and their use of porn. But the use of porn is so widespread that the differential impact of porn might not appear.
It may be that porn often alludes to the social, ineptness of the technical nerd or geek, the way online RPGs, anime, warez, home brewed apps and *nix allude to the same, although porn is much more damaging, I agree. Often enough, slashdot similarly makes mention of its members never experiencing female companionship or residing in their parents’ basements. It may be seen as a joke in that sense, a self parody. Often this could be a satire of one’s own state – especially if one really does use make us of porn and knows the immorality of it or other examples listed above.
I recall recently there was a news story about a group of sociology researchers who were trying to do a thorough study on men who had never consumed pornography. They had to cancel the project because they couldn’t find any.
As much of a problem as pornography is, it is the consequence of our culture of sexuality separated from monogamy. If you can have a one-night stand, or no-fault divorce, or “open” relationships, there is no longer any reason pornography can be considered immoral, or even problematic.
Until we can begin to shift the rest of our sexualized culture back to traditional values, I’m afraid the porn problem will only get worse.
Is the slashdot community any worse than other demographic groups (say construction workers) on this issue?
I think Catholic speaker Steve Wood commented that porn seems to be a big problem even amongst Catholic men who bring their family to mass, support pro-life work, participate in preparing their kids for sacraments, and go to daily mass.
I count myself part of the geek community, and there is certainly a strong impression that pornography is an accepted part of the subculture, though exactly how much stronger it is than in the rest of the culture is hard to say; certainly the tendency to self-parody is greater, and that may be the reason for all the jokes about it. About society at large and the prevalence of pornography I cannot say, but what I seem to see amongst such groups as the otaku subculture especially is a soul-crushing loneliness with no spiritual capital to deal with it effectively.