Children grow up addicted to online porn sites: Third of 10-year-olds have seen explicit images

By Gerri Peev

A 'guinea pig’ generation of children is growing up addicted to hardcore internet pornography, MPs were warned last night.

Four out of five 16-year-old boys and girls regularly access porn online while one in three ten-year-olds has seen explicit material, a disturbing cross-party report reveals.

It also cites figures showing that more than a quarter of young patients being treated at a leading private clinic are receiving help for addiction to online pornography.

Disturbing: The cross-party report reveals four out of five 16-year-olds regularly access porn websites

One appalled MP revealed that her son had told her that swapping hardcore images on memory sticks between pupils at his school is ‘absolutely rife’.

There are fears that the rise of internet pornography is leaving teenagers unable to maintain normal relationships and even increasing their susceptibility to grooming by sexual abusers.

Yesterday the backbench Tory behind the study, Claire Perry, demanded that internet providers offer parents a simple way of filtering out adult content.

Even very young children can accidentally stumble across pornography, the report for the Independent Parliamentary Inquiry into Online Child Protection said.

Last night Miranda Suit, founder of campaign group Safermedia, told the inquiry: ‘This generation is going through an experiment. No one knows how they will survive this unprecedented assault on their sexual development. They are guinea pigs for the next generation.’

Warped: There are fears readily available internet pornography could damage teenagers' ability to maintain normal relationships

David Cameron told MPs yesterday that he had called technology firms together to offer a ‘choice of blocking all adult and age-restricted content on their home internet’.

But the Prime Minister has been left frustrated by the unwillingness of the major internet service providers to force new customers to ‘opt in’ to adult content as opposed to the current system of ‘opting out’ by installing their own filters.

Miss Perry’s report also revealed that the privately run Portland Clinic in London reported that 26 per cent of young people coming to it for psychological treatment were hooked on internet porn.

And Tory MP Andrea Leadsom revealed that her own son had told her that ‘handing around very hardcore porn on memory sticks is absolutely rife at his school’. The mother of three fears regulators are ignorant about the availability of porn through internet-ready TVs, calling the internet a modern-day ‘Wild West’.

Appalled: Backbencher Claire Perry (left) was behind the report, while fellow Tory MP Andrea Leadsom (right) said porn swapping was rife at her son's school

Over 60 per cent of 11 to 16-year-olds have internet access in their own rooms, compared with 30 per cent six years before. Alarmingly, 41 per cent of seven to ten-year-olds can access the internet from their own rooms, more than a fourfold increase on previous figures.

The report suggested 12 per cent of young teenagers were involved in sharing intimate images of themselves, which were often circulated around the class when a relationship broke up.

One child abuse counsellor told how victims were desensitised with sexually explicit images by their ‘groomers’.

Tink Palmer, of the Marie Collins Foundation, said porn could be ‘a vehicle for perpetrators who wish to harm children online to encourage them to enter into that sort of fantasy and then often meet them offline.’

She said well over half of young women victims of grooming and abuse she encountered were from ‘middle-class’ families living in ‘very comfortable’ homes.

One recent study found that children from the middle classes were more likely to have access to internet porn.

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Women write dirty books for other women to read. Bill Bennett blames men

By JAMES TARANTO

It's about as difficult as finding a spire in a haystack, but Bill Bennett has been reading the New York Times and discovering evidence of cultural decline. In a CNN.com essay, he picks up on recent columns by Maureen Dowd and Frank Bruni and reaches the conclusion that, as the headline puts it, "Hookup Culture Debases Women."

Dowd's column, Bennett writes, "looks at E.L James's 'Fifty Shades of Grey,' a trilogy of erotic, bondage-themed fiction":

Dowd cites the remarkable success of the trilogy among Generation X women--the contemporaries, allies and beneficiaries of the modern feminist movement. And yet, the narrative flies in the face of women's progress. For example, a contract that the girl signs with the man stipulates that "the Dominant may flog, spank, whip or corporally punish the Submissive as he sees fit, for purposes of discipline, for his own personal enjoyment or for any other reason, which he is not obliged to provide." If this is progress for women, what would regression look like?

Bruni's column is more meandering, but he begins with a similarly themed TV program, HBO's "Girls." As Bennett explains: "In this unglamorous, dull version of 'Sex [and] the City,' [Lena] Dunham stars as a contemporary, twenty-something woman playing second fiddle to the bizarre, dominating sexual fantasies of her boyfriend":

Bruni goes on to grapple with Dunham's loveless sex scenes and wonders whether today's onslaught of pornography and easy sex has desensitized men to the point where they view women, to recall the words of an earlier day, only as objects. Even the act of sex itself is boring to some men unless it is ratcheted up in some strange, deviant fashion--all at the expense of the thoroughly humiliated and debased woman.

In the act of degrading women, men are also degrading themselves.

Now wait just a second. How does an essay about "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Girls" turn into an anti-male screed? Both are written by women for women. Dowd notes, but Bennett omits, that the real first name of author E.L. James is Erika. As for "Girls," Bruni points out that Lena Dunham "is not only its star but also its principal writer and director." And if it's anything like "Sex and the City," no heterosexual man will ever watch it except as a favor to someone of the opposite sex.

We don't dispute Bennett's contention that pornography is degrading to women, but it takes no courage or insight to say so. "Fifty Shades of Grey" and "Girls" sound degrading too, but Bennett seems to shy away from confronting the fact that this degradation amounts to female pornography--produced by women for the entertainment of other women. In postfeminist America, it's so much easier and safer to scapegoat men.

Female and male pornography are very much two sides of the same coin. While the former tends to be literary and the latter visual, neither has much pretension of being high art (except when such pretensions are useful in First Amendment cases). More interestingly, both present a similar sexual fantasy world, in which women are submissive and men dominant--though because each sex is interested in its opposite, female porn emphasizes the male-dominance aspect of the fantasy and male porn the female-submission aspect.

Bennett, Dowd and Bruni all puzzle over the seeming contradiction between the success of feminism in "empowering" women and the cultural products of which the trio disapprove. It should be noted that neither dirty pictures nor dirty books ("romance novels," as they're euphemistically called) are anything new. But it may be that they have become more graphic, more popular or both. At the very least, it is clear that the sexual fantasies of men and women do not conform to the feminist ideal of relations between generic and equal "persons."

This conundrum stumps Bennett and Bruni, but Dowd has a bit of an insight:

Helen Fisher, the anthropologist and Rutgers professor, warns keening feminists: "Let's not confuse the bedroom and the boardroom. This is the world of fantasy and play." In the animal kingdom, she says, females surrender and males dominate, with female robins looking for the male robin with the reddest breast and best leafy real estate.

We Homo sapiens follow the same pattern, known as female hypergamy (mating upward). In the 1970s, anthropologist Heather Remoff studied the mating habits of American women. She published her findings in "Sexual Choice: A Woman's Decision" (Dutton, 1984). "What does a woman want?" Freud famously asked. Remoff conducted in-depth interviews with a demographically diverse group of 66 women to come up with an answer.

Based on these conversations, Remoff developed "profiles" of 261 men who had been their sexual partners. She asked the women, among many other things, what attracted them to these men: "Out of a total of 45 traits that were coding possibilities, 23 were mentioned frequently enough that I consider them to have a general association with male sexiness."

Here's the list, along with the percentage of men who were described as having each trait (obviously each man had multiple traits): good-looking (43%), intelligent (40%), good income potential (40%), control of social resources (37%), food provided (36%), control of material resources (36%), protective toward female (35%), male older (30%), male dominant toward female (28%), confident (26%), well-educated (23%), good build (23%), aggressive (22%), generous (22%), accurate focus (21%), chemistry (21%), eye contact (19%), baby fantasies (18%), outstanding talent (17%), high status (16%), tall (16%) good with children (15%), female's parents approved (5%).

The attraction to most of these traits is a manifestation of female hypergamy--especially "good-looking," which turns out to have quite a different meaning for women than for men: "Every woman responds to a man whose looks correspond to her particular stereotype of power," Remoff observes in a passage she italicizes.

Of the 23 traits associated with male sexual success, Remoff identifies eight as being particularly associated with reproductive success. That is, these traits were commonest in the 43 men who fathered children by the women Remoff interviewed: good income potential, control of material resources, male dominant toward female, well-educated, generous, baby fantasies, good with children, female's parents approved.

Women's desire for powerful men conflicts with feminism's pursuit of female power--a pursuit that has been official policy since 1964, when Rep. Howard W. Smith of Virginia, a segregationist who was also a feminist, amended the Civil Rights Act to add the words "or sex." For nearly half a century, the federal government has made a priority of increasing women's income, educational attainment, status and control of social and material resources. At the same time, mainstream culture has encouraged women to be more assertive and men more sensitive. Male dominance is a thing of the past.

This effort to equalize the sexes has created a sexual disequilibrium. For a high-status or powerful woman, a higher-status or more powerful man is hard to find. Although that works out nicely for the highest-status men, it is much more difficult for the average man to make himself an attractive prospect for women. Result: a lot of lonely people of both sexes, and an eager market for pornography of both the visual and literary kinds.

Bennett concludes his essay by observing that if men and women want "deep sexual satisfaction," the best place to find it is "in what is often called, derisively, traditional marriage." No doubt that is true. But Bennett seems focused on the effects rather than the cause of marriage's decline. He seems to think that the ideals of feminism and traditional marriage are compatible: "In the 1970s we were told to respect women, treat them as more than sexual objects and treat their humanity the same as ours."

In truth, the feminist ideal inevitably corrodes the marital one. Look again at that list of eight male traits that make for reproductive success, which in the 1970s, when the out-of-wedlock birthrate was much lower than today, was a good proxy for the propensity to marry. With respect to at least four of them--income, control of material resources, education and dominance (arguably also generosity)--feminism has sought to elevate women relative to men, thereby making men less attractive to women.

With some exceptions such as the late Rep. Smith, women have been the driving force behind these revolutionary social changes. It won't do to blame men for the decline of marriage and the degradation of sexual culture, except perhaps to the extent that they have taken the path of least resistance and acceded to feminist ideology rather than challenging it. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what Bennett does in his essay.

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From Playboy Pornographer to Christian pastor: the unlikely story of Donny Pauling

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It was the very same day that pornographer Donny Pauling was called in by Playboy and offered $4,000 a day to produce a new lesbian reality series, that he unexpectedly found himself at a moment of crisis.

Pauling had already made millions from pornography over the past eight years, ever since he began shooting porn part-time behind his wife’s back. But $4,000 a day was unprecedented, and there was something about the offer that made Pauling feel that if he took it, he was making his final commitment to the porn industry, and there would be no going back.

As he was driving home after that meeting at Playboy, suddenly he pulled over to the side of the road, and began praying. “I was like, God, it doesn’t matter what I do, you bless me,” Pauling told LifeSiteNews.com in a telephone interview. “And basically what I was saying was, ‘Thanks for the new porn contract.’”

But, he says, “as crazy as it sounds,” after this prayer he immediately felt as if he was “hit with electricity.” The feeling was so powerful, and so unmistakable, that Pauling says he knew beyond a doubt that it was God.

Pauling had already been praying occasionally, after encountering members of the radically unconventional XXXChurch, who make it their mission to reach pornographers, porn stars, and prostitutes with the message of the Gospel. But it was several days after the experience in the car that he says he finally decided to give his life to Jesus, and to leave the porn industry. That was in September 2006.

On September 28, 2006 Pauling wrote on his personal blog: “I’m scared. I really, truly am. Terrified. Petrified. All of those things.” But, he added, “I feel a huge sense of relief and happiness for the first time in a LONG, LONG time.”

The making of a porn producer

While Pauling clearly remembers his first encounter with pornography – it happened in third grade, when he stumbled upon a porn magazine - he doesn’t trace his subsequent problems with pornography to that experience.

It wasn’t until after he got married that addiction reared its head. That was in the early days of the Internet - and easy access to pornography. Pauling found himself spending more and more time online looking at porn, either when he was at work, or late at night, when his wife was asleep.

He became so taken with what he saw that he decided he wanted to produce porn himself. Pauling was self-employed, and worked at his own private office, so it was easy for him to start recruiting girls and doing photo shoots without his wife knowing.

It wasn’t until Pauling physically cheated on his wife for the second time, three years into producing and selling porn, that he finally came clean with her. He called her from a porn convention and told her about his secret life.

“She flipped out,” he says, and that was the end of his marriage.

But now that porn was no longer his dirty secret, Pauling was free to devote himself full-time to producing smut. After his marriage fell apart he moved into his office, quickly found himself another girlfriend, and in the very first month doing porn full-time, he made $50,350.

He was hooked.

How to get out of the porn industry

Pauling ultimately worked as a porn producer for over eight years. During that time he says he made millions of dollars, lived a non-stop party lifestyle, recruited hundreds of girls into the porn industry, and was completely and utterly miserable.

In the first place, he couldn’t ignore the fact that his life’s work was literally destroying lives, especially those of the models he recruited and initiated into the brutal world of porn. When asked now if he finds porn appealing, Pauling responds: “There’s nothing appealing about a girl curled up in a corner sucking her thumb because her mind is so blown by what she’s been doing.”

But it also didn’t help, he notes, that he was motivated in large part by a burning hatred for Christians and Christianity.

The former pornographer traces this hatred to his strict upbringing as the son of a Pentecostal pastor, during which he was taught a “legalistic” definition of God (“God was just a set of rules and regulations,” he says) and witnessed the abject hypocrisy of many of the Christian leaders his father knew.

After he started making porn, he relished running into some of his old Christian friends, who would ask what he was doing. “I loved throwing porn in their faces,” he says.

But things began to change after he met members of the XXXChurch, who every year would set up a booth at the Las Vegas porn convention, and hand out bibles emblazoned with the words “Jesus loves porn stars.”

“Instead of being outside protesting and holding signs telling people that God was going to send them to hell where they would burn in torment,” members of XXXChurch “were inside setting up booths, doing makeup for girls,” Pauling said. “And instead of judging them, they told them that they were beautiful and that God loved them, and that there was nothing they could do that could change that, and that He wanted more for them.”

Eventually, Pauling says, he came to realize that if he were to be a Christian, “this is the kind of Christian I would want to be, and the kind of Jesus I would want to serve.”

The transformation didn’t happen overnight – in fact, it took over several years - but he credits the “love-based” approach of XXXChurch with bringing him to the point where he was able to send up that confused prayer in his car, and to listen to the response.

After that mystical experience in the car, “I quit, and I just walked away,” he says. “I knew it wouldn’t be easy, because I had a lot of bills. So I lost everything I owned. I had property I foreclosed on.” His girlfriend of five years also left him for a manager at Playboy.

“But I was never more at peace, even though it was a tumultuous time.”

How to beat a porn addiction

After leaving the industry, Pauling enrolled in school to become a pastor, and started up an Internet marketing company. He has also travelled the world speaking to millions of people about the reality of the porn industry, and about how to beat addiction.

He says he is convinced that the same “love-based” approach that brought him out of the industry is the same approach needed for those who are addicted to porn, and want out.

“So many people don’t ask for help because they’re sitting there feeling guilty about their actions, saying, ‘there I go, I’ve done it again,’” he says. “I think that they need to realize that, although sin does separate us from God, He still loves them. It doesn’t matter what they’re doing. His love doesn’t change. It’s not conditional.”

Practically speaking, Pauling urges those who are addicted to porn to be completely open with someone they can trust, and then to set up a system of accountability – someone they can talk to regularly about their struggles with addiction.

The trick, he says, is simply never to give up. “I’ve had people come up to me and say they heard me speak two years ago, and they haven’t looked at the stuff since,” he says, “but that’s not realistic for everybody.”

“It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, He’s still there to pick you up and put you back on your feet.”

Pauling compares the experience of overcoming addiction to that of a child learning to walk. Just because the child falls over and over again, he says, doesn’t mean the father tells him walking just might not be for him.

“God who loves us that much is not looking for a reason to send us to Hell, he’s looking for every reason to bring us to Him,” he concludes. “So just stand back up. Stop letting your guilt get you down.”

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Carolin Berger, German porn star nicknamed Cora, dead after sixth breast enlargement surgery

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Via Facebook

German porn star, Carolin Berger, died on Thursday from complications during her sixth breast enlargement operation.

The sixth breast enlargement was just too much for one German porn star.

Carolin Berger, better known as Cora, died on Thursday afternoon from complications suffered during her sixth breast augmentation surgery.

Berger, 23, wanted to increase her bust from a 34F to a 34G.

The tattooed film star, who garnered headlines as a contestant on Germany's "Big Brother," had been put in an artificial coma at the Hamburg University Hospital on Jan. 11, the BBC reported.

It's believed that Berger suffered two cardiac arrests after the surgery. According to reports, she decided to go under the knife to keep up her publicity.

"The brain damage was too great," her husband, Tim, told The Sun. "Her blood pressure dropped steadily, physiological functions gave out — then she went to sleep quietly."

German cops are investigating the anesthesiologist and the surgeon who performed the operation.

"The senseless death of 'Big Brother' star Cora shocks the whole of Germany," read Bild, the country's tabloid.

"[Her] frail, 48kg [106 pound] body struggled against death for 224 hours. She lost. Cora is dead!"

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Feminist Naomi Wolf Complaints That Porn Makes Average Women Less Apealing

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The Porn Myth

In the end, porn doesn't whet men's appetites—it turns them off the real thing.

• By Naomi Wolf
• 
  

At a benefit the other night, I saw Andrea Dworkin, the anti-porn activist most famous in the eighties for her conviction that opening the floodgates of pornography would lead men to see real women in sexually debased ways. If we did not limit pornography, she argued—before Internet technology made that prospect a technical impossibility—most men would come to objectify women as they objectified porn stars, and treat them accordingly. In a kind of domino theory, she predicted, rape and other kinds of sexual mayhem would surely follow.

The feminist warrior looked gentle and almost frail. The world she had, Cassandra-like, warned us about so passionately was truly here: Porn is, as David Amsden says, the “wallpaper” of our lives now. So was she right or wrong?

Not Tonight, Honey. I'm Logging On.: Internet porn is everywhere; even "nice" guys are hooked. So where does that leave their girlfriends? By David Amsden (October 20, 2003)

The New Position on Casual Sex: The rise of Internet dating has brought a sexual openness (not to mention one-night stands) to the younger generation not seen since the seventies heyday of Maxwell's Plum. But can there be too much of a good thing? By Vanessa Grigoriadis (January 13, 2003)

She was right about the warning, wrong about the outcome. As she foretold, pornography did breach the dike that separated a marginal, adult, private pursuit from the mainstream public arena. The whole world, post-Internet, did become pornographized. Young men and women are indeed being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training—and this is having a huge effect on how they interact.

But the effect is not making men into raving beasts. On the contrary: The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as “porn-worthy.” Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

Here is what young women tell me on college campuses when the subject comes up: They can’t compete, and they know it. For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own (let alone with speech that goes beyond “More, more, you big stud!”)—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.

For two decades, I have watched young women experience the continual “mission creep” of how pornography—and now Internet pornography—has lowered their sense of their own sexual value and their actual sexual value. When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman. There were more young men who wanted to be with naked women than there were naked women on the market. If there was nothing actively alarming about you, you could get a pretty enthusiastic response by just showing up. Your boyfriend may have seen Playboy, but hey, you could move, you were warm, you were real. Thirty years ago, simple lovemaking was considered erotic in the pornography that entered mainstream consciousness: When Behind the Green Door first opened, clumsy, earnest, missionary-position intercourse was still considered to be a huge turn-on.

Well, I am 40, and mine is the last female generation to experience that sense of sexual confidence and security in what we had to offer. Our younger sisters had to compete with video porn in the eighties and nineties, when intercourse was not hot enough. Now you have to offer—or flirtatiously suggest—the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene. Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax—just like porn stars. (In my gym, the 40-year-old women have adult pubic hair; the twentysomethings have all been trimmed and styled.) Pornography is addictive; the baseline gets ratcheted up. By the new millennium, a vagina—which, by the way, used to have a pretty high “exchange value,” as Marxist economists would say—wasn’t enough; it barely registered on the thrill scale. All mainstream porn—and certainly the Internet—made routine use of all available female orifices.

The porn loop is de rigueur, no longer outside the pale; starlets in tabloids boast of learning to strip from professionals; the “cool girls” go with guys to the strip clubs, and even ask for lap dances; college girls are expected to tease guys at keg parties with lesbian kisses à la Britney and Madonna.

But does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multi-billion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.

The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

So Dworkin was right that pornography is compulsive, but she was wrong in thinking it would make men more rapacious. A whole generation of men are less able to connect erotically to women—and ultimately less libidinous.

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.

“For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”

After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.

Other cultures know this. I am not advocating a return to the days of hiding female sexuality, but I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time. In many more traditional cultures, it is not prudery that leads them to discourage men from looking at pornography. It is, rather, because these cultures understand male sexuality and what it takes to keep men and women turned on to one another over time—to help men, in particular, to, as the Old Testament puts it, “rejoice with the wife of thy youth; let her breasts satisfy thee at all times.” These cultures urge men not to look at porn because they know that a powerful erotic bond between parents is a key element of a strong family.

And feminists have misunderstood many of these prohibitions.

I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Compare that steaminess with a conversation I had at Northwestern, after I had talked about the effect of porn on relationships. “Why have sex right away?” a boy with tousled hair and Bambi eyes was explaining. “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone,” he said. “I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.”

“Isn’t the tension kind of fun?” I asked. “Doesn’t that also get rid of the mystery?”

“Mystery?” He looked at me blankly. And then, without hesitating, he replied: “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”

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Bozell Column: The Diseases of Pornography

Source.

Derrick Burts, 24, started working as a porn-film actor in June. By October, he'd contracted the HIV virus. The AP story on Burts contained this jaw-dropping sentence: “He said he began to have doubts about the business after contracting chlamydia, gonorrhea, and herpes in his first month of work, but was convinced to keep working.”

Burts claimed "I wasn't stupid or oblivious, I knew what was out there. But it's not something you think about when they fill your head" with lucrative offers and promises that the work is safe. Lured into the porn world with the promise that he looked like money, Burts concluded his greed was unwise: "Making $10,000 or $15,000 for porn isn't worth your life."

Michael Weinstein, head of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, took up the Burts case. While he insisted his group isn't anti-porn, “we are astounded that the multi-billion-dollar film industry and its fig leaf of a clinic could not even get it together six weeks after his first HIV-positive test to link [Burts] to appropriate follow-up medical care."

Lawyers for the porn industry's clinic, the Adult Industry Medical Health Foundation, which performed the HIV test on Burts, insisted any claim he was not properly treated is “not truthful and self-serving.” But the California Department of Public Health just denied its application to operate. Once again, the porn industry looks shady.

Burts says the clinic told him he contracted the HIV virus at a gay porn shoot in Florida, but the clinic told the press that he must have become infected in his personal life. Translation: Who are you going to trust, a porn star? Or the porn industry? This evolving story comes six years after up to 14 porn actors tested HIV-positive, forcing several porn companies to close.

Porn moguls obviously want the "talent" to feel safe, but they don't want to film scenes with condoms – for monetary reasons. The pornographers at Vivid Entertainment said when they became a mandatory-condom company for nearly seven years, they saw their sales drop nearly 20 percent.

Pornography isn't just unhealthy for our culture; it's unhealthy for the “talent” that stars in these films, with the endless carousel of sex partners. It should be only a matter of time before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (or their California equivalent) starts investigating – unless, of course, government officials are too afraid of appearing like squelchers of a Howard Stern version of “freedom of speech.”

It's ironic that our news media are such evangelists for "safe sex" with condoms, and very critical of anyone who's anti-condom as a menace to society, but they haven't forced that Latex gospel on the porn industry, despite the obvious threat of fatal sexually-transmitted diseases between strangers on the set.

Then there's the gay-porn industry – which as a rule requires condoms in films, but doesn't even HIV-test their stars. Without much irony, Jay Barmann of the San Francisco blog SFist reported “The HIV status of gay porn performers is a particular taboo subject, with a kind of don't-ask-don't-tell attitude proliferating in the industry, which mostly tries to keep performers safe by requiring condom use and which fears bad publicity from performers revealing their statuses.”

In response to this environment, the porn company Treasure Island Media recently took the shocking step of promoting a gay couple with one HIV-negative and one HIV-positive partner having “unprotected” sex as "role models." Paul Morris, the company’s owner, spoke of demolishing "the HIV-positive closet" and pledged "We will not allow reactionary individuals and organizations to dictate our behavior.” HIV and AIDS are “more or less manageable,” he said. “The real battle is against prejudice, ignorance and unfounded and useless fear.”

Barmann, no anti-porn “prude,” was shocked for the public health and for the rights of actors. “Say what he will about battling prejudice and fear, Morris stands to benefit financially from the unprotected sex his performers agree to have, and he is nonetheless an employer who knowingly puts his workers in harm's way.”

Our media just found it wildly controversial that the Pope might hypothetically suggest a male prostitute using a condom may be trying to show a health concern for others. But somehow, there is no controversy or debate when secular sexual progressives fail to crusade against pornographers on something so contrary to their own condom-promoting “safe sex” philosophy. The old AIDS slogan was “Silence equals death.” Who will speak out before the next greedy Derrick Burts gets infected?

Just how stupid are the Derricks of this world to get involved in death-trap industries like this?

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-bozell/2010/12/11/bozell-column-diseases-pornography#ixzz17uQ7EpTU

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Dead Porn Stars Memorial

Pornography kills the soul and the body.
www.shelleylubben.com

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Feminism, Pornography, and Choice

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/08/24/feminism-pornography-and-choic/print

By Nathan Harden on 8.24.10 @ 6:04AM

Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality
by Gail Dines
(Beacon Press, 256 pages, $26.95)

You may think you know what porn is. But there is a good chance you don't. In particular, if you are a woman, or if you grew up in the age prior to the Internet, the word "pornography" might evoke images of a blushing Playboy centerfold, or perhaps some flimsy-plotted film with a delivery man, a desperate housewife, and just a bit more sex and nudity than an R-rating would allow. In reality, mainstream pornography today is far more brutal, more graphic, and more violent than most could imagine if they hadn't seen it for themselves.

In her new book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, Gail Dines draws on years of research to reveal just how extreme the porn industry has become. She takes readers deep into the world of hardcore porn, describing one nightmarish scene after another, full of men punishing and humiliating women sexually on camera.

The material she covers is truly shocking, and, often, difficult to read. I physically gagged more than once while reading her descriptions. Every sort of bodily waste and fluid, and every conceivable method by which a woman's body can be pushed to the limit, often at the hands of two or three men at a time, is commonplace in today's porn.

Forget about Hugh Hefner and his silk pajamas. These days porn is dominated by Gonzo filmmakers. In the Gonzo genre, the emphasis is on "real" rather than scripted scenes. Such films are cheap to produce. In the Internet age anyone with a camera and a computer can sell porn to the world. In order to stand out, porn producers are coming up with ever more extreme material. If the girl is crying, vomiting, or even bleeding, that's Gonzo gold. According to Dines, it is not uncommon for pornographers to film close-ups of the injuries that have occurred to the girl's body, once a scene is over.

Dines argues persuasively that porn today is not simply about men looking at naked women, or watching sex acts. Rather, the goal of much of it seems to be to depict the maximum amount of humiliation for the girl on screen. One website proudly offers its customers the opportunity to "access total degradation."

Almost as disturbing as the abusive material itself is the fact that so many men view it as a turn-on. Like drug users always looking for a more powerful fix, porn addicts are often shocked by how quickly they became desensitized to porn, seeking out increasingly bizarre material that they once found distasteful.

The average age of first exposure to porn for American males is eleven. Internet porn now serves as a de facto sex education for America's youth. To suppose that porn is mere fantasy, with no effect on the real world, is simply not credible. Dines reports that many young women come to her, complaining that their boyfriends expect them to act out the humiliating scenes they see in hardcore porn.

Dines is a feminist. She makes no effort to hide the fact. Her fierce opposition to porn is motivated chiefly by her objection to the sexual inequality it depicts. However, as a self-described "progressive," she finds herself uncomfortably aligned with social conservatives on the issue of pornography. Consequently, she has the tiresome habit of gratuitously singling out conservatives for attack, as though she were anxious to reassert her liberal bona fides. (Gee whiz, did you know Mitt Romney sits on the board of Marriot Hotels; and Marriot sells porn on pay-per-view?)

Dines also seems to have a problem with capitalism. Pornography is "first and foremost a business," she writes in one weighty passage, as though that fact alone were enough to damn the enterprise. Admittedly, smut peddlers are a greedy lot. But Dines never says exactly how Karl Marx might save our sexual culture. Once again, her main point seems to be that she is not a conservative.

It is easy to see why Dines and other anti-porn feminists have a hard time reconciling their "conservative" views on porn with their liberal views on personal choice. Feminists, after all, have been saying for a long time that a woman should be able to do whatever she wants with her own body. The question is: if a girl allows a man to urinate on her on camera in exchange for a thousand bucks, can a feminist really approve the transaction merely on the basis of the girl's consent?

Porn pits the principles of choice and equality against one another. As a liberal, Dines believes the basis of morality is the unrestrained freedom to choose any sort of lifestyle one desires. As a feminist, she also believes that gender equality is an inviolable moral standard.

In her epilogue entitled, "Fighting Back," Dines articulates feminism's moral confusion thusly: "We need to offer an alternative way of being, a way to envisage a sexuality that is based on equality, dignity, and respect." (This is her expression of equality-based morality.) She goes on to say, "Such a sexuality cannot be scripted by a movement because it belongs to individuals and reflects who they are and what they want sexually." (This is her expression of personal choice-based morality.)

Choice is the holiest word in feminism. To comprehend a moral order that originates outside the domain of personal choice, one must acknowledge a higher law -- one above human will. As a liberal, the very idea of a revealed moral standard conflicts with Dines's commitment to personal choice. Dines understands that porn is wrong; but I don't think she really understands why.

What is wrong with porn is that it debases the modesty and dignity of the human beings who make it, as well as those who consume it. In the sixties, feminists spent so much energy throwing off the strictures of religion and tradition. They never realized that chastity itself was a form of power. They never realized that the moral restraints they discarded were vital to the equality they so desperately wanted.

"Bras are a ludicrous invention," declared Germaine Greer in her 1970 feminist hell-raiser, The Female Eunuch. Two years earlier, the mythical burning of the bras at the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City had signified feminists' rejection of the strictures of male-dominated society -- especially in the realm of sexual mores.

The disappearing bra soon became a metaphor for feminism itself. The image is all too fitting. No metaphor could better capture the way in which feminism has left women exposed, when all along it was supposed to bring their liberation. By embracing sexual liberation as a fundamental tenet of the women's movement, feminists embraced the irreconcilable aims of getting under men and getting out from under them at the same time.

Feminists preach moral self-determination as an article of faith. The porn-saturated culture we now live in is, in this sense, of half their making. And for the same reason, Dines is unable to offer any real solution to the problem she articulates. Nevertheless, her book deserves attention because the porn industry is currently doing hardcore damage to an entire generation of young people, both conservative and liberal alike. If you have a strong enough stomach to read Pornland, you will gain a new appreciation for just how poisonous pornography is to our sexual culture.

Letter to the Editor

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Nathan Harden blogs about higher education at National Review Online.

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British Government Offers Teens Jobs on X-Rated Websites

Original

Posted by Van Helsing at 8:00 AM | Comments (2)

Big Government can help us in so many ways. Admittedly the massive burden of taxation and regulation it imposes drives millions out of work. But not to worry, bureaucrats are always there to catch you when you fall. They can even help you find a job consistent with their own liberal values:

Some government-run unemployment offices in Britain are offering teenage job seekers a chance to make more than $1,000 a week on x-rated Web sites, the Birmingham Mail reports.

The newspaper says the "job with a difference" is being advertised at Jobcentre Plus offices in Birmingham, Warwickshire and Shropshire by an adult recruiting agency, Faceclick.

The agency encourages applicants to engage in sexually explicit conversations with customers and to perform "activities that you feel comfortable with" when naked in front of a camera, the newspaper says.

There will never be a lack of demand for dirty websites, so long as the world is so full of overpaid bureauweenies with too much time on their hands.

It gets worse. In Germany, a woman was told she would be cut off from the government teat for failing to accept a job as a prostitute.

No matter how many broken crutches Big Government generously bestows (paid for with our own money), it would be infinitely better if it never broke our legs in the first place by crippling the economy.

On a tip from MP.

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