As with so many issues, such things are complex in a society and have both good and bad sides to it.

I think they are bad because shows a fiction that does not happen in reality. I guess porn, like most of social media (Instagram or Facebook), tend to overacting fantasies of normal people. It depends of the age of the audience. I am nearly 24 and when I see porn I understand they are just actors.
But the problem begins when is seen by 14 or 15 years old boys. Scenes where the actress makes a role where she ia cheating her boyfriend or she is having sex with the teacher can impact badly in their brains. Probably this is why somehow has increased these two aspects:
1. Use of prostitution when they get older. 2. Sexism in more of the actions towards women (for example when they see a pretty girl with a top they tend to think she is easy as porn videos)

To eliminate this taboo topic we should improve our sex educational system.

but do you think the good outweighs the bad? Because I honestly don't know

I think so many people see porn as a way of exploiting people, but I am not sure that the people who are involved feel exploited. I do believe that many people who are against it see it as a way of fuelling unhealthy sexual fantasies. However, that attitude seems a bit outdated now. I am inclined to think that most people who use porn may be using it as an outlet because they have so little in life.

I have never bought any porn and my funny experience was going into a local shop and asking if the shop had a music magazine called 'Uncut' and the shopkeeper became really angry and indignant towards me. I think that he thought that the magazine was was some kind of gay porn of uncut penises. However, aside from actual porn there is the whole spectrum of the erotica and the erotic in the arts.

I don't think porn is the cause of "pornification". I think marketing is.

Statistics say that 25 percent of all internet searches are related to porn. — TaySan

All this unwanted sexual imagery was one of the (many) reasons I quit social media. — TaySan

Perhaps you and I are a small minority. But I notice a related phenomenon that might be called "food porn". Here in the UK at least, fast food and ready meals have come to dominate. Cookery used to be taught in school as 'domestic science', but no longer. people do not cook very much, or make jams and pickles or pies or cakes. At the same time the number of cookery programs on the media multiply endlessly. Every house has to have an enormous new kitchen full of gadgets and cupboards and surfaces. And it never gets used, because people live on delivered pizzas.

Thing about food-porn is it is completely tasteless and has no nutritional value. It does not satisfy, and so people stuff themselves with junk food and become obese.

Pornography is similarly unsatisfying and sensually impoverished, and it similarly arises in conjunction with a decline in physical relationships, of which it is a mere image. Because there is no touch, no smell, no actual stimulation of another body, it has to be more extravagant and extreme than reality. Every contact must be orgasmic because it is only the image and there is no actual contact. Extreme images of various kinds and crude mechanical stimulation substitute poorly for the complexities of a real relationship, and become an unsatisfying addiction exactly like junk food.

Is it the pornography itself that's the problem or the people who miss use it the problem?

What do you think. Is porn bad for us? — TaySan

How would we know if it was bad for us?

Through philosophy. And I have a lot of stuff for contemplation now, lol

I just haven't heard anything yet that suggest that it is bad. Plenty of journalism suggests it is bad for some of the 'artists' involved. Interesting Martin Amis essay A Rough Trade on the subject.

thanks!

I think they are bad because shows a fiction that does not happen in reality. — javi2541997

Most fiction does not happen in reality. To show that porn is bad because of that, first you must show that fiction is bad. I think.

Is it the pornography itself that's the problem or the people who miss use it the problem? — Huh

I think the main use of pornography is its facility to generate an ambience of autoerotica. So what would be a miss use of it? Using it as a basis of God worship? Using it as a guide to build nuclear silos? Using it as an instruction set to put to gether IKEA furniture? Using it as a basis for creating tax laws on international trade of electric bicycles? What? Using it as a pattern for funeral arrangements?

Whatever someone would think it's miss use would be.
Like your generous examples

Ha! Good point!

Most fiction does not happen in reality. To show that porn is bad because of that, first you must show that fiction is bad. I think. — god must be atheist

Could be but porn still be a taboo fiction topic because most of the people are not ready to see two (or even more) persons completely naked making obscene scenes.. It this true in most of the films it appears sex scenes but it is just regular. Porn is there to satisfy people’s fantasies

Pornification: the prevalence or normalization of sexual themes and explicit sexual imagery in popular or mainstream culture. — TaySan

Nothing new under the sun, except that people think it is. Thing is, it used to be natural. Now it's about the money.

There's nothing wrong with pigs as animals. They're relatively clean and certainly intelligent. They suffer in image because of how they're kept and treated. And to be sure not everyone is charmed by 400 lbs. of pig. Which means that pigs are a time, place, purpose, and use problem. The same with pornography. As with many things, it would be improved by well-informed controls, and at the moment there are some. Where I live, New England, USA, pornography is not an evident problem. Nor guns, nor civilian Covid response. Drugs, yes. All of which means that we here, while not perfect, are as a group pretty sensible (the US state of Vermont has I think zero gun laws, and New Hampshire few, but also near zero gun problems - go figure).

So it seems to me that pornography, as depiction of what people do, really is itself not a problem. Instead the problem is people and communities. If the presentations of some pornography seem offensive, and the community takes offense, let the community be clear as to what, exactly, offends them, and within law and reason constrain and control what offends them.

What do you think. Is porn bad for us? — TaySan

My take on this is the same as my take on any “thing” being good/bad. No thing is inherently good/bad. That said, it certainly can lead to problems with addiction, and can contribute to sexism, objectification, etc. But the fix, in my opinion, has more to do with fixing society as a whole. The US is largely a country of overstimulated, instant gratification addicts who have no semblance of self-control or discipline. It is also a sexually repressed country where sexual feelings, fantasies, etc. are encouraged to be kept secret. I think it takes a certain amount of maturity, for example, to understand that just because you’re turned on by over-sexualized women being objectified, doesn’t mean it’s ok to objectify women in general, or treat them as sex objects. I think a large percentage of people who consume porn lack this maturity, but better education could maybe help in this regard.

Porn is not harmful. There is only good porn and porn that doesn't do it for us.

One statistic that helps us understand pornography is that porn video rentals in hotels are rarely played longer than 5 minutes. They come for the climax, then turn it off. On the other hand, authoritative web sites like CinamaBlend (somebody said they were authoritative) say that people are watching more Netflix than porn. They perceptively observe that more people are getting porn on the Internet (customizable) rather than from video rentals.

People watch porn as fuel for their erotic fantasies. Let's face it: in reality, our experience is that many sex partners are not wildly exciting over the long run. Some people are a lasting turn on, but most are not. This isn't due to any deficiency -- it's just the lack of novelty. (This from a gay male point of view.)

One problem with porn is that a lot of it isn't very good -- I am not referencing the camera work, lighting, sound, or--god forbid--plot. It's just not engaging most of the time. That's true of a lot of movies, produced for the broad population. It's bad art. It's a rush job.

Just for historical context, porn has been around for a long time but in the US it was hard to get until the late 1960s, thanks to Supreme Court rulings. Here is a satiric piece by Tom Lehrer (the Harvard mathematician turned humorist) on SMUT (ah, the adventures of a slut; I don't know what compares with smut...). This piece predates the ruling that opened "the flood gates".

I think a major reason that pornification is as heretic a topic as it is is because western society is a majority monogamous culture. I see the concept of "true love" being popular to be proof that our society idealizes and strives for a monogamous relationship that is continuous, as in: staying with one partner for life. Since undying loyalty to your partner is essential for this, porn is bad because it's hard to draw the line of where you are loyal to your partner and when that loyalty ends. Are you cheating on your partner by watching from a screen? What about VR? Will watching porn become an obstacle to developing real relationships?

These are the reasons porn could be bad in a religious sense.

Changing perspectives, a key factor to note is that visual porn, which I assume to be the primary topic here, is primarily consumed by men, as compared to romantic porn by women. You can imagine the former to be in the form of videos and pictures and the latter to be in story telling (50 Shades). As long as we are targeting porn for men specifically, it's reasonable to assume that the root problem of this conversation is male behavior.

I need a fact check on this but one idea is that porn was a driving factor in the development of the internet today. The reason the internet and its surrounding technologies was developed to this point today is because of men's desire for porn. The point being, porn is a viable substitute for men's biological desires for women, which should be men's ultimate biological goal. This desire, is what pushes men to work and develop so that society can progress.

So readily available porn that eliminates the need for men to work hard and develop things for women is problematic, though how much is debatable. It seems that a real relationship is preferred over purely porn, but is largely subjective and depends on you and your partner.

Some statistics show that countries that allow porn seems to have much lower rape crimes than countries that don't. This makes sense, as men can blow off steam more easily, there is less need to commit crimes for it. This seems like objective data that shows porn is good (Again fact check is good).

At this point I'm just throwing out ideas, but I want to finish with a heavy personal concern I have for porn. Namely, that people who are indulging in porn frequently seems to have a need to pursue more and more extreme and specific porn, seemingly getting radicalized in the process. Many of these are harmless but some are unsettling. Porn can be facilitating people to enjoy murder and torture sexually. Then the question becomes: can there be a point where porn is not enough, and they'll act on it in real life? I'll link a picture of a meme with a bunch of terrible porn tags and you can choose to look up these tags at your own risk.



A counterargument is that these people would've derived pleasure from it without porn but I'm not so sure. I hate thinking about it but I'm curious what people have to say about it.

There’s a huge debate going on in Australia right now about sexual harassment in politics. There have been a number of scandalous incidents, not least a political staffer alleging she was plied with drink and then raped in a Minister’s office in the House of Parliament, after hours (not by a Minister but another staffer).

Meanwhile many women have come forward alleging harassment both inside and outside politics. A young activist put out an appeal and thousands of girls came forward saying they had been raped while drunk or had been forced into acts or had had explicit videos posted against their will by school-age boys.

Many say that porn is a factor in these behaviours. Porn depicts women engaging in all kinds of performative sex acts. Performers undertake these acts willingly - or so we are told. But it normalises these behaviours, it conveys the understanding that this is how girls like to behave. And men are highly suggestible, especially when driven by their dicks. As a man, I've always found porn irresistable, since I first encountered in travelling in Europe in the 70's (back in the day when it was firewalled into red-light districts and sold in plastic sleeves.) I do my best to resist it, as basically I think it's immoral, no matter how pleasurable, but it's a struggle.

Porn is causing untold problems in modern culture, but liberalism has to defend porn as 'freedom of expression' - you barely hear a word of criticism about in the media. There's no greater insult in Australian popular culture than being labelled a 'wowser' (puritanical or censorious). Porn is freedom, and censorship is Hitler. That's the message.

And porn is everywhere - every school child with a smart device can presumably gain access to endless porn. It deeply conditions the mind, burns neural pathways that can't easily be over-written, and gives a thoroughly unrealistic, but endlessly seductive, view of what sex is. One of the anti-porn movements that has sprung up says that porn destroys the capacity for sexual intimacy, and I think that's true. There needs to be more awareness of it, a discussion of how pervasive it is, and how destructive it can be, especially on the forming of intimate relationships.

What do you think. Is porn bad for us? — TaySan

I reflected on this last week. First there were the Grammys, which people complained were raunchy. Then a few days later a sexually repressed guy in Atlanta killed 8 people because he was visiting massage parlors for sex but was a Baptist and he was wracked with guilt.

And I thought to myself, well maybe the raunchification of society is a bad thing. Bad example for the kids and so forth. But extreme sexual repression leads to murder. Often. The guy in Boulder didn't have a girlfriend either.

So I would say that if the choice is between too much sexual license and too much sexual repression; I'll take license every time. God gave us sexuality and when you repress it, bad things happen. Worse things than when you flaunt it all over the culture.

This has been on my mind so thanks for asking.

God gave us sexuality and when you repress it, bad things happen. — fishfry

Do you think that this idea is something inherited from Freud?

Do you think that this idea is something inherited from Freud? — Wayfarer

I think the consequences of sexual repression are perfectly obvious. But perhaps you're asking if these consequences are only perfectly obvious because of a century of Freudian thinking permeating culture. Perhaps. But I don't think he invented our powerful unconscious drives. He described and made us all more aware of them.

In modern times it was Martin Luther who first had the insight.

There’s a huge debate going on in Australia right now about sexual harassment in politics. There have been a number of scandalous incidents, not least a political staffer alleging she was plied with drink and then raped in a Minister’s office in the House of Parliament, after hours (not by a Minister but another staffer). — Wayfarer

You haven't really made any connection to porn. You could just have easily made a connection to conservative governments and how they construct female identity and treat women. Or how politics leads to abuses of male power or whatever. I suspect the real explanation for this is a very old problem men have with how they treat women and it is found everywhere, from politics to retail supermarkets. It greatly predates internet porn. As someone in late middle age I can confidently say that women were far more likely to be harassed and coerced by male predators 30 years ago.

There's no greater insult in Australian popular culture than being labelled a 'wowser' (puritanical or censorious). Porn is freedom, and censorship is Hitler. That's the message. — Wayfarer

That's not a message I hear this much in Australia (it's where I am from) I hear this point sometimes about attempts to curb gambling or drinking, but porn rarely comes up (so to speak) in Australian public discourse. Porn has hardly been mentioned since the current examples of political misogyny were uncovered.

For the record, I suspect that porn does distort some people's behavior but this is an intuition I hold that is not supported by evidence I am aware of.

Don’t know if it’s a scientific discovery so much as a cultural artifact.

For the record, I suspect that porn does distort some people's behavior but this is an intuition I hold that is not supported by evidence I am aware of. — Tom Storm

One place I have found informed commentary on it, is on the ABC Religion & Ethics site, for example, this article on the meaning of consent.

//also the work of Melinda Tankard Reist.//

What do you think. Is porn bad for us? — TaySan

If it's good, why is there an outcry against it? If it's bad how did it become a multi-billion dollar franchise?

Because things that feel good short-term can cause damage long-term.