A while ago I posted a piece about sex abuse and the role of the British media. By coincidence I found the following edited article by Janice Turner, published in The Times in July 2013. She headed it, “Men are also the victims of porn”
Women and children are not the only victims of hardcore porn. It also ruins the lives of men. Five British prisons have been dedicated solely to housing sex offenders. The rate of convictions has doubled in a decade, and there are thought to be a further 50,000 people at large, viewing illegal images of child abuse. These men were not born monsters. The typical trajectory of an online paedophile begins when a man looking at legal porn finds himself aroused by images of young-looking girls (many supposedly “18 and legal” sites feature girls who look prepubescent). Click, click, click – the man, previously unaware of his own desires, goes from grown women to “barely legal”, to child porn. Around 15% of men who look at child porn go on to commit physical abuse. The remaining 85% do not. But if they are found out, society will never trust them again. They may lose their jobs, families and friends. Since Operation Ore began in 2002, 33 of the men arrested for viewing child porn have killed themselves. This is what internet porn does for men: “grooms them into criminality, abuse and damned lives”.
For the life of me I cannot understand why any porn whatsoever is tolerated on the web. To claim, as male libertarians claim, that it is “free speech” only shows how sick some sections of society have become. Epicureanism stands for respecting women and children, in fact, everyone. Watching young girls and women being casually used and degraded is no way to encourage adolescent boys to respect the opposite sex and to become loving partners in later life.
” I would like to see all people who read pornography or have anything to do with it put in a mental hospital for observation so we could find out what we have done to them”. Linda Lovelace
If we were to ban porn, as you suggest but most people oppose; what would stop it from becoming like the war on drugs where the government spends a lot of money prying into peoples private lives and violating their rights, trying in vain to purge a periceved wrong? The number of men who watch child porn is negligible, and those who watch adult porn extremely unlikely to commit crimes as a result.
15% of people who watch porn regularly go on to assault women. Rather a lot, although it must be difficult to establish cause and effect. I absolutely agree with your comment about the so- called war on drugs, which is why I agree that a ban wouldn’t be effective, and would be yet another way of ripping off the public, to little effect. Porn is basically deadly boring. I guess, like me, most men have been curious as some point and have looked. I found it demeaning, dull ( after about a minute) very badly done and generally disgusting. I like women and hate to see them used as objects. This is surely an Epicurean ( or normal?) reaction. What it points up is the lousy upbringing the 15% have must have had, their unhealthy attitude to the opposite sex ( and for all I know, their mothers?), and their apparent inability to form kind, equal and loving relationships. Look at porn for a moment – curiosity is natural – but don’t go back there.