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Self-Medicating with Fantasy

Possibly the most serious accusation against
pornography is that it incites sexual aggression.

But not only do rape statistics suggest otherwise,
some experts believe the consumption of pornography
may actually reduce the desire to rape by offering
a safe, private outlet for ‘deviant’ sexual desire.

Porn Is Today’s Sex Education

Porn Portal

Porn consumption doesn’t make consumers more
aggressive, promote sexism or harm relationships.

Instead, exposure to porn might make some
people less likely to commit sex crimes.

The most common concern about pornography is that it
indirectly hurts women by encouraging sexism, raising
sexual expectations and thereby harming relationships.

Some people worry it might even incite violence against
women. But the data doesn’t support these claims.

There’s absolutely no evidence that
pornography does anything negative.
It’s a moral issue, not a factual issue.

Porn As Therapy

Read into this whatever cultural generalizations you like: recent numbers show that citizens of Germany, Spain, the UK, and the US have higher appetites for porn than anybody on the planet.

The Guardian recently got an exclusive peek at metrics from SimilarWeb, a web measurement company based in Tel Aviv that tracks clicks online (rather than total traffic volume).

The numbers show that in the UK, for one, traffic to legal porn sites outpaces even that for social media sites, such as Facebook. In fact, porn makes up 8.5% of all UK traffic.

Steamy sites also get more UK traffic than those for shopping, news, email, finance, gaming, travel, and business/industry.

The UK isn’t the top porn-loving place, though. That honor goes to Germany, where a whopping 12.5% of traffic heads to the X-rated.

Better Porn

The philosopher is taking on sex in a new digital venture that will attempt to position pornography as a therapeutic tool rather than a grubby thrill.

He describes the virtues of porn if executed in the right fashion: “No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation. It could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.”

He’s in the midst of building a website called ‘Better Porn,’ which aims to spotlight the higher art of web sex.

“The real problem with current pornography is that it’s so far removed from all the other concerns which a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have.

“As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it.”

The site will therefore offer users “a version of pornography which wouldn’t force us to make such a stark choice between sex and virtue. A pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values.

He considers that “pornography, like alcohol and drugs, weakens our ability to endure the kinds of suffering that are necessary for us to direct our lives properly.

“In particular, it reduces our capacity to tolerate those two ambiguous goods, anxiety and boredom. The entire web is in a sense pornographic.

“It’s a deliverer of constant excitement which we have no innate capacity to resist, a system which leads us down paths many of which have nothing to do with our real needs.”

“It’s at moments when we feel an irresistible desire to escape from ourselves that we can be sure that there is something important we need to bring to consciousness.

“Yet it is precisely at such pregnant moments that internet pornography has a habit of exerting its maddening pull, ensuring we destroy our future.”