A National Addiction to Porn?
The phrase “porn addiction” has been repeated so often in the past few months that it’s becoming accepted as fact.
First: Obsessive porn usage is a compulsion, not an addiction. It’s an addiction only in the same sense that any pleasurable activity is worth endlessly repeating. It’s a form of escapism and should be no more illegal than me wasting two years of my life gaming in front of a computer, or “wasting” my childhood hiding out in a library instead of socializing. Some people are just hard-wired with escapist nerd tendencies. The cure for that isn’t legislation, it’s learning how to deal with your life balance issues.
Note to my readers: Porn “addiction” can be easily cured. Start working in adult. I guarantee you, after the first year you’ll be so blasé about gangbangs that you’ll have to start looking at softcore.
Richard of DamselTheater.com demonstrates the dangers of sensationalist reporting in his MySpace blog:
After watching another news show about the dangers of porn, I thought it might be fun to put together a written documentary about the dangers of sports addiction. Although this piece is tongue-in-cheek, the references are all valid links (as of today). What this shows is how one can make a compelling case about the horrors of a subject by focusing on only what is wrong. I was initially going to put this disclaimer at the end, but was afraid of too many people not going that far to see that it’s a joke…
–sort of.
Sports addiction is a growing problem in America that dwarfs any concerns that one may have about pornography. A search for sports in Google shows that there are 772 million sports sites compared to a only 91 million porn sites [...]
“Is sports addiction better than porn addiction?,” http://blog.myspace.com/richreynolds
It’s a great argument on the subjectivity of addiction. Check it out.
November 25th, 2006 at 3:02 pm
Thanks for the plug!
You’re very right that people bandy about the word “addiction” far too freely. I looked the word up and, as a noun, addiction primarily refers to reliance on substance abuse such as drugs or alcohol that have a physiological dependence. Anti-porn proponents like to use the word “addiction” because it has the connotation of out of control activity and it sounds bad. Nobody wants to be addicted. It’s a shorthand way of blowing a subject way out of proportion and becomes a rallying banner for millions of lemmings that don’t have the sense to look facts up for themselves.
I could not find an agreed on definition of “addiction” when it applies to people obsessing over something that is not physically addictive. Any hobby can be casually called addictive because it consumes a large amount of a person’s free time. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. If that pastime starts infringing too significantly on a person’s life, it starts crossing a boundary to one where it may be harmful. Even there, it’s hard to say. One could makes a case that an artist has an addiction to art because the artist is always drawing and painting. The main difference between it being a healthy pastime and a destructive one may be whether the artist can be gainfully employed. For a person improving their artistic skills, maybe it’s not a bad thing that they’re eating, drinking, and sweating art. If they have the desire and not the talent, maybe it’s not such a good thing–especially if that artist cannot support a family. It’s also a matter of a person’s life situation. A single person, spending six hours a day on videogames, isn’t hurting anybody. A married person, doing the same thing, is becoming isolated from a family and that’s potentially problematic. Change the item of attention from videogames to stamp collecting, or watching sports, or reading fiction, or watching TV, or looking at porn. It shouldn’t make a difference. The real issue is how this compulsion affects that person’s life and the lives surrounding that person. Even in this case, one has to look at the full picture to understand what is going on. If a person has a spouse that is constantly berating them, that person will withdraw into some activity to take up the time that use to be enjoyed with a partner that is no longer enjoyable to be around. Blaming this new activity is looking at an easy solution that isn’t right. Sadly, we live in a sound bite world that wants easy solutions that sound good and require no additional effort to understand.
If you want to get a chuckle, google “religion addiction”. That’s a subject I don’t want to touch with a ten foot pole. I personally know a woman, whose husband became a reborn Christian, and it put a strain on their marriage. The husband was also an alcoholic and a bit of a slacker that couldn’t keep a job and those latter issues were greater reasons for their divorce, but the change of religion added increased friction to the marriage.
Here’s a interesting tale of a woman, who accused her husband of being a sex addict. I’ll write a new blog entry on it. I wonder if you see some problems with her narrative. That’s the problem with these tales of terrible porn addictions that ruin marriages. Only one side of the story is told. The more I look at this woman’s story, the more I question what she’s saying.
http://www.blazinggrace.org/wifestory.htm
Some other blog entries I wrote might be of interest to you based on what I’ve read in your blog:
Are federal obscenity laws unconstitutional?
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=48765996&blogID=160856133
Does Porn Prevent Rape?
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=48765996&blogID=160354980
The War on Porn
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=48765996&blogID=169625596
Feminists for Pornography as Free Speech http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=48765996&blogID=89475999
BedroomBondage May Disappear Due to Credit Card Censorship
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=48765996&blogID=169643340
November 28th, 2006 at 4:02 am
[...] A National Addiction to Porn? (http://fullfrontalpolitics.com) [...]
April 26th, 2007 at 5:27 am
[...] & Politics A National Addiction to Porn? (fullfrontalpolitics.com…) Sex Positive Feminism: A Statement of Beliefs [...]
July 24th, 2007 at 11:36 am
[...] Porn is Greedy (http://www.teen-porn-site.com/blog)Sex & PoliticsA National Addiction to Porn? (http://fullfrontalpolitics.com)Sex Positive Feminism: A Statement of Beliefs [...]
April 9th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
[...] & Politics A National Addiction to Porn? (http://fullfrontalpolitics.com) Sex Positive Feminism: A Statement of Beliefs [...]