Two SMH columns on porno culture
Point-counterpoint over porn in the Sydney Morning Herald. Simon Castles writes, With porn so in your face it's time we started talking about the problem.
Whatever our feelings about porn culture, I think we kid ourselves if we believe it doesn't exact a toll. Porn takes its pound of flesh just as it gives it. We are all diminished, deadened, by the constant barrage of sexual imagery — not just from hard-core sources, but also from the advertising and media industries, which become more porno every day.
Sexual imagery chips away at us, as transitory thrills give way to something more depressingly permanent. Something that really should have a name - like perversion fatigue.
Tim Ferguson responds, What the market wants the market gets: pornography by the tonne.
Pornography is now beyond the control of its friends or foes. Freedom of speech is a side issue here. In Western society, it is the freedom of the market and the power of the consumer that govern all. Most of the 8 million porn sites exist because there is a vast, insatiable market for them.
Pornography makes money because people like watching other people having sex. If people wish to "gorge" on porn, do we care?
If too much exposure to it decreases their enjoyment of the real thing, doesn't it serve them right? Isn't it their business? And if it is our business, what can we possibly do about it?
Castles expresses most concern over spam and exploding popups and other ways that porn is called to the attention of people who didn't seek it out. I'm somewhat sympathetic on this count. Porn should be readily available to those who want it, and easily avoidable for those who don't want it. The problem lies in the online porn industry's decentralized nature — thousands of individual entrepreneurs, low barrier to entry, easy anonymity. (That decentralized nature also allows for the enormous creativity around the industry's periphery.) Most pornographers deplore spamming and don't do it. Porn spammers are isolated small-time operators frowned upon by the responsible folks in the industry, just as responsible people in other industries would hate to be grouped with the mortgage spammers, xanax spammers, stock tip spammers and so on.
Ferguson gets it right. Lots of people like pornography, and most have no problem fitting porn (or alcohol, drugs, gambling, TV, gaming or any other source of transitory thrills) into a balanced, productive, moral life. Free markets and freedom of expression and the internet collude to make it easier for annoying people to annoy us and easier for self-destructive people to find trouble, but their overall impact on modern life is overwhelmingly positive.
