The harm to millennial women
Cue the prudish guy, talking about how sex, drugs, and rock and roll have ruined the world. Hardly. I’ve become more of a lifestyle libertarian. I’m all about less government intrusion (unless it exists to prevent people from victimizing others or hurting or exploiting children) and more about live and let live (as long as you stay on your side of the fence). Do your thing, but don’t hurt others while doing it. Don’t pester me or put myself or my family at risk with your behaviors. Want to drink beer to near-unconsciousness? Go ahead; just don’t try to drive a car. Like weaving your motorcycle between cars on the highway at 95 miles per hour? Great. Just don’t hit anyone or cause an accident before you misjudge the curve and sail into the bushes to an uncomfortable stop. Want to overthrow the government? Good for you! Please stay locked in your parent’s basement until the feeling passes and don’t blow up their house with your homemade bombs. Want to post sexually-provocative pictures or videos of children? Enjoy prison. It’s loud in there and you may feel quite uncomfortable, having to sleep with one eye open, as many large and angry males stop by your cell to discuss the errors of your paraphilia.
And speaking of pornography, can we discuss the idea that every depiction of the human form from then until now has de-evolved from “I am here,” to “art,” to pornography?
It’s convenient to blame the Internet for the amount of x-rated traffic. Estimates suggest 30% of all data on the web is related to pornography. Pornographic images take up six times more bandwith than Hulu movies; have more traffic more than Netflix; more traffic than Twitter; and about half as much traffic as YouTube. But the WWW is not the only source to blame for the constant, unstoppable expansion of the human body captured in various acts of sex.
Follow this evolution: The first human drawings were found about 40,000 years ago, in caves in Sulawesi, Indonesia, El Castillo in Northern Spain, and Chauvet in France. They depicted animals and stencils of human hands. Not too long after this expression of art, of “I exist,” showed up on other cave walls, there became images of naked people or people having sex.
From cave drawings, we moved to the human form as art in sculpture, papyrus, and on to canvas. From there to naked people in sculpture, canvas, and on paper, and then to people having sex, in art sketch books. Sketch books became flip books of cartoons. Flip book cartoons became flip books of people having sex. Dirty flip books were the early dirty “movies.”
The first photographs of people, following the artistic lead of Henri Cartier-Bresson in France and Matthew Brady during the Civil War, soon degraded into people having sex in still shots. Moving pictures moved from the 1915 Klan movie “Birth of a Nation” to peepshow reels for two pennies, of people having sex. Silent films became silent porn. Talking pictures became talking porn films.
The porn film business gained a huge following with the introduction of the Betamax video camera and accompanying tape cassettes in 1975, allowing people to move from watching sex movies in seedy theaters filled with creepy characters, to the comfort of their homes. Betamax died when the VHS video cassette overtook it. Videos invaded the home, just around the time porn became a pay-per-view staple in nearly every hotel room on the planet. The porn cassette tape died when DVD technology arrived. DVDs started to slide when the Internet porn “tube sites” (huge collections of free clips) began to flourish. Paying for porn became getting porn for free on the Internet, which led to interactive sites, where people watching can now request the adult performers do various things by pushing menu buttons on their PC screens, tablets, or smartphones. Nanny cams and cheap video cameras turned into web cams for porn and profit, which got even easier to shoot and playback with even better smartphone cameras with video features.
What’s next? Those same robots that build our cars on assembly lines are being retooled to offer a near-human “girlfriend experience” to users with enough money. Technology evolves, porn evolves, and the boom and bust cycle continues, as one popular porn tech medium rises and crashes, only to be born again another way. Virtual reality porn, using over-your-whole-head cameras are in development, allowing a near-3D experience. As comedian Dennis Miller so wisely noted many years ago, “If some guy sitting at home can make love to a supermodel for $19.95, it’s gonna make crack cocaine look like decaf.”
“Who cares?” say some people. “It’s just the way things are, Steve. Technology evolves and porn technology evolves. We all agree the global sexual exploitation of children is horrible, illegal, and something we should diligently address. But you can’t stop all porn, so there you go; it is what it is. It’s been around for so long because people like it. It’s far too late to put the naked genie back in his or her bottle.”
I don’t buy the throw-in-the-towel response to the constant onslaught of porn on our various screens. It’s not just about the imagery depicted; it’s about the impact on our culture and our perception of each other as sexual objects, opposed to emotional beings. As a consultant, I’m always trying to address the “impact on the business.” What is the emotional “business impact” of all porn, all the time, on our youngest adult generation, Gen Y, a.k.a. the Millennials?
My conversation with a female colleague who is a university professor tells a sad tale. She has tremendous rapport with her female students and they meet with her regularly, alone and in small groups, to talk about their lives on and off campus. They tell her that the men they meet all seem to have the same expectations: that they “perform” for them like the women they so often see on their computer or phone screens. Few of these guys seem to have much sexual maturity; they have been schooled on what to do, how to do it, and how to objectivity women, based largely on their constant exposure to porn. No one expects chivalry to make a comeback, but how about the inescapable conclusion that porn has turned many young men into insensitive apes, with little to no capacity for empathy, unrealistic physical and emotionally hurtful expectations (“Do this for me or I won’t date you”), or any real knowledge of the concept of consent?
My college professor knows what she knows about the impact of porn on her female students as they try to navigate their way safely through the adult dating world. If porn is inevitable, shouldn’t our message be that just like “Word of Warcraft” and “Hunger Games” are not real, what people do in porn movies doesn’t have to be “real” for women who don’t want to replicate those experiences as well, just to be in a dating relationship?
Origin : https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-act-violence/201504/everything-ends-pornography
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