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David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

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If you believe watching porn won’t hurt anyone, you’re wrong

By David McElroy · May 31, 2015

Hot Girls wanted poster

When I was 19 years old, I’d never seen any porn, but as a hormonal teen-ager with a normal sex drive, it sounded like a wonderful forbidden fruit. So I decided to buy a copy of Playboy to see what I had been missing.

I was nervous about it, but I went into a convenience store on Green Springs Highway in Birmingham and asked for a copy (since it was kept behind the counter). This was the first and only time I’ve ever bought any porn.

At first, I was amazed at what I saw. These were physically perfect women who were clearly ready to have sex with me — or pretty much anyone who would pay them, presumably. But after the initial rush of hormonal excitement died down, I quickly realized that the pictures didn’t arouse me in the same way that my own girlfriend did.

Let’s be honest. The women in the magazine were physically perfect in a way that my girlfriend couldn’t be. (I didn’t understand at the time that not even those women were actually physically perfect.) Physically, everything about them was just right. But I realized that I was far more attracted to my own girlfriend and to other women who I knew — women who couldn’t possibly be that “perfect.”

Why?

It didn’t take me long to learn something that I’ve never forgotten.

When I’m attracted to a woman, it’s to an entire woman — personality, intelligence, values, conversation, etc., in addition to her body — so I see women in porn (or at strip clubs) in about the same way that I see fake food made out of plastic. There’s nothing appealing to me about a filet mignon made out of plastic, no matter how realistic it looks. In the same way, there’s nothing appealing to me about just the shell of a woman, which is what you get in porn.

I watched a new documentary Sunday that magnified my longstanding feelings about porn. “Hot Girls Wanted” debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is available on Netflix now. (If you’re logged into a Netflix account, you can watch it here. Otherwise, you can see a trailer for it here.)

The film follows the lives of several young women who have been recruited to travel to Miami to live while they’re shooting porn for various production companies. I found it profoundly disturbing, not because I was unaware of the exploitation, but because it is heartbreaking to watch naive young women do emotional and physical damage to themselves for money. I’m not going to say too much about the documentary because I strongly urge you to watch it for yourself.

Producers have the right to make porn. Men and women have the right to participate and be paid for having sex on camera. (I’m still unclear how it’s different from prostitution, though.) You have the right to watch films depicting people have sex and (in many cases) being degraded.

But that doesn’t make it right — and that doesn’t mean that you’re not hurting yourself and others when you go along with it as normal and acceptable.

This isn’t about politics or rights. It’s about people and a culture. It’s about how people are becoming desensitized to straightforward sex and they’re craving cruder and cruder depictions in order to become aroused. It’s about how people are becoming more coarse and destroying their ability to understand and experience real intimacy.

Most people in our culture seem to be confusing sex for intimacy today, but they are two entirely different things. Two people can have sex without having any real intimacy — and two people can have real intimacy without having sex.

The best relationship — especially in the bounds of a marriage or other committed relationship of your own definition — has both. But what I observe in listening to others is that this hedonistic view of life and sex which comes with porn leaves people starved for real intimacy.

The documentary mentioned that nearly 40 percent of online porn depicts violence against women. A growing trend in porn today is something called “facial abuse,” in which a woman is violently forced to perform oral sex — and the real purpose seems to be to push her hard enough that she throws up. It’s intentionally degrading to the women, and the women in the shots understand that. They hate it, but they take the money.

How can a man who watches women being degraded help but come to see women in a different way? How can it not affect the way he treats women? And how can it contribute toward the sort of trust and emotional intimacy that make relationships work?

There is more sex in our culture than ever before in history, as far as I can tell. All of the boundaries have been shoved aside. Anyone who doesn’t mindlessly jump from bed to bed is seen as something of a prude. But as the limits on sex have fallen, the walls between people seem to be rising higher, especially in relationships which should otherwise be close. My own anecdotal observation is that those who watch the most porn, go to the most strip clubs and have the most random, meaningless sex are the people who are the loneliest and most desperately in need of intimacy.

Even if you have absolutely no moral objection to porn — and even if you don’t care about what it does to the performers themselves — it seems to me that you should be concerned about the emotional effect it has on you if you watch it. And the saddest thing is that when you watch porn, you seem to deaden your ability to be aroused by normal relationships, so you need to push more and more boundaries to be aroused.

To me, it says a lot when much of what we see as “sexy behavior” in modern culture amounts to a woman “being bad.” Think about that. It says that we have trained ourselves to get aroused — and probably men, more specifically — when a woman is doing something she shouldn’t do. When she is doing something wrong. When she is doing what old-fashioned people used to call sin.

I don’t want a relationship with a woman who is doing something bad or even pretending to. I don’t want my wife to dress provocatively in order to show her off to other men. And I question the emotional and psychological maturity of those who do want that. I question what kind of commitment they have to the women they’re with.

I can’t prove to you that porn and the hedonistic attitudes associated with it are doing damage to individuals and to society, but I suspect you can see if for yourself if you look closely. I’m not even touching on moral aspects, simply because if you already believe it’s immoral, you don’t need me to explain that. I’m concentrating on the pragmatic effects.

I believe porn is damaging our society as a whole. I believe it’s damaging to the performers. And if you’re watching porn, I believe it’s doing long-term damage to you and your ability to have healthy relationships.

I don’t want to use government force to prevent people from engaging in porn or from consuming it. But I suggest it’s in your own self-interest to see the damage porn does to your ability to experience healthy emotional intimacy in relationships.

Don’t accept it as healthy — for yourself or for those in your life who claim to care about you.

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For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to For “throwback Thursday, let me introduce you to Sam. In 2009, I took in a young feral cat who I named for the early American revolutionary Samuel Adams. He was one of the most confident — downright arrogant, in fact — cats I’ve ever been around. He had an amazing personality and I immediately loved him. He was no more than 8 or 9 months old when he suddenly died for reasons that my vet couldn’t explain. Even though I had him only a short time, he was one of my all-time favorites. #tbt #cats #tabby #feral #birmingham #alabama
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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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