Christianity And Porn
Good news – you can be healed from addiction to porn. Ashley Fantz reports for CNN:
Not long ago, it was unheard of for a pastor to talk about sex from the pulpit.
Today, clergy are talking about porn.
Many evangelical pastors say they don’t have a choice. The Internet has made porn unavoidable; it’s everywhere. And porn, they say, leads to a lack of intimacy in marriage, threatening the biblical mandate to get and stay married.
In the past few years, Christian leaders have established online ministries to tackle the problem, hosting anti-porn podcast sermons and Web chats. The popular evangelical blog Crosswalk.com recently ran an article headlined “How many porn addicts are in your church?”
Christian publishers, meanwhile, have produced a wave of recent books on the subject, including popular titles like “Porn-Again Christian,” “Secret Sexual Sins: Understanding a Christian’s Desire for Pornography” and “Eyes of Integrity: The Porn Pandemic and How It…
Why Is No One Watching Porn On TV Anymore?
![[PORN]](http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/PORN-210x300.jpg "[PORN]")
The TV networks are hurting because their most profitable customers – viewers of pornography – just aren’t watching enough. Sam Schechner and Jessica E. Vascellaro report for the Wall Street Journal:
Cable and satellite television companies have a pornography problem: Their customers aren’t watching enough of it.
Companies’ revenue from highly profitable adult video-on-demand and pay-per-view services has been slipping, as the genre’s consumers spend more time browsing porn on the Web.
The trend is prompting TV executives to pull back the curtain on how porn contributes to their businesses, a topic they have been loath to discuss publicly.
On Thursday, satellite provider DirecTV cited “lower adult buys” as a cause for weaker pay-per-view revenue in its second quarter earnings. That followed Time Warner Cable Inc.’s admission last week that shrinkage in the adult category was responsible for more than a third of a $14 million drop in video-on-demand revenue. While only a sliver…
ACLU Pushes For Porn In Prisons
Photo: Olivier T (CC)
Is the restriction of pornography to inmates because of the lack of literary diversity offered in prisons or because of a possible porn/violence connection? ABC reports:
The American Civil Liberties Union is pushing for porn at a detention center in Moncks Corner, South Carolina.
The move came after reports surfaced that the facility only allowed inmates to read the Bible. But prison officials said that isn’t true and inmates have a wide variety of reading material at their disposal.
The ACLU said it wants prisoners to be able to read and view pornography. Lawyers for the jail said that just won’t happen.
“If they don’t like the wording in some of our policies, we’ll be happy to try and create better wording for them. But, there are certain issues that we’re just not going to be able to bend on,” said Sandra J. Senn, an attorney for the Hill-Finklea Detention Center in…
US Government Accidentally Shuts Down 84,000 Websites
Photo: Zapyon (CC)
What happens when the government is given an internet kill switch? They accidentally shut down 84,000 websites whose identity they’ve mistaken during a child porn raid. Daily Tech reports:
In evidence of the dangers of the U.S. government’s increasing “kill switch” powers regarding web servers inside the U.S., the Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE last week essentially shut down 84,000 sites in a case of mistaken identity.
The shutdowns targeted mooo.com, the most popular shared domain at free web service provider FreeDNS. FreeDNS is a free domain service that is immensely popular among file sharers, blogs, small businesses, and other independent operators. Its homepage is afraid.org.
With the mooo.com shutdown last Friday, the ICE accidentally shut down 84,000 subdomain pages. The pages were all redirected to a banner that stated “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years…
Is Your Brain Addicted To Porn?
A big question from Big Think:
Not long ago, scientists thought of the brain as being “hard-wired.” Neural networks are formed at a young age and remain inflexible throughout the rest of one’s lifetime, they believed. But one of the great discoveries of recent decades is that the brain remains highly adaptable, or plastic, even in old age. On its own, the brain seems to compensate for certain diseases and brain damage like Alzheimer’s by rewiring around damaged areas. But there is a dark side to this phenomenon of “neuroplasticity”: unhealthy behaviors are just as likely to alter the brain as are healthy ones. Addictions are a prime example. “All addiction involves long-term, sometimes lifelong, neuroplastic change in the brain,” says Norman Doidge, psychiatrist and author of The Brain That Changes Itself.
In his book Doidge catalogs some amazing stories of personal triumph, but he also discusses how neuroplasticity can be hijacked by one of society’s most pervasive addictions—porn addiction. “The addictiveness of Internet pornography is not a metaphor,” he says. “Not all addictions are to drugs or alcohol…
The Man Who Would Be the Dot-XXX King
Interesting profile of the man who’s application for the .xxx domain extension has got the porn industry seeing red, in Business Week:
The Internet has made Stuart Lawley a wealthy man. In 1999 he got rich by taking a British Internet service provider public. The London Sunday Times has named him one of the 1,000 richest people in Britain.
Now he’s poised to make his next fortune selling Internet addresses to pornographers. Late last month the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), an international body that manages Web addresses around the world, gave preliminary approval for Lawley’s application to be the sole registry of Internet domains that end in dot-xxx.
If Lawley’s bid is approved—ICANN’s next board meeting is in December—he says his company, ICM Registry, stands to bring in $200 million a year selling Web addresses at $60 a pop. That’s six times the going rate for dot-com and dot-net addresses,…
Porn Is Apocalyptic
On porn and the end of the world:
The spread of porn is somewhat akin to Global Warming – both evidence that we are mistreating the Earth, but also has the potential to totally transform our behavior for the better. Porn is evidence that we’re being totally careless with our sexuality, but taboo-breaking could be useful if we don’t devolve completely. I’m not entirely optimistic about our chances.
The trouble with porn is that it is currently forbidden. Even though people decry the mainstreaming of porn – Jenna Jameson on Oprah – the mainstreaming is as senseless as any other cultural artifact. Jenna Jameson shows you can make a lot of money in porn and there’s even some glamor in it, but the real porn story is how this trickles down to everyone else. Just as people debase themselves eating cockroaches on “Fear Factor” to get 15 minutes of fame, porn is bringing…
Chatroulette Developing Genital Recognition Algorithm
Chatroulette is struggling with users’ constantly exposing themselves, which drives non-creeps away from the site. Thus they are mounting a campaign to develop technology that can identify and block human genitals — it’s this era’s Space Race. Techcrunch reports:
Russian website Chatroulette, founded by Andrey Ternovskiy, is perhaps most well known as a place to watch men expose their genitals.
Can Chatroulette become something more? Look for feature changes soon that will try to send all those penises to the background. The service may add software that can quickly scan video to determine if a penis is being shown. And users that are consistently quickly skipped over (presumably because they are exposing themselves or otherwise being disgusting) can be flagged as well. With those and other changes Chatroulette may be able to put people who actually want to talk to each other in touch much more often.
And that’s where real growth might happen.…
Florida State Senator Watches Dog Video, Topless Women Online During Abortion Debate
The local news in Florida captured an amusing video of Republican Mike Bennett’s activities on the floor of the state Senate: using his government laptop to surf for soft-core porn and cute animal videos. This was during the debate of a controversial abortion bill. Bennett explained that there had been “confusion” when attempting to view an “email about an item being debated on the Senate floor.” From the Sunshine State News:
Dirty Girls Who Are Addicted To Porn
Not quite your average New York Times story:
LENEXA, Kan. — It was the final session for the women at Westside Family Church’s Victory Over Porn Addiction group, and the youngest member, a 17-year-old named Kelsie, had not had a good week.
“I slipped two nights this week,” she said, to nods of support from the other women in the group.
“I decided that every time I’m tempted I’ll just let everything out to God,” she said, “then pray specifically for someone else, do selfless acts, to get away from being selfish.”
The group’s leader, Crystal Renaud, offered gentle counsel. “Pray for yourself, too,” she said.
To the wide array of programs offered by evangelical megachurches like Westside, the group adds what Ms. Renaud says is something long overdue. While churches have addressed pornography use among the men in their congregations and among the clergy, a group for women who say they are addicted to pornography is…
Bettie Page, FBI Consultant
via the smoking gun:
Though J. Edgar Hoover’s minions often probed the interstate transportation of obscene material featuring Bettie Page, the notorious pin-up model was nonetheless willing to help agents when it came to FBI inquiries about the production of certain “flagellation and bondage pictures,” according to bureau records.
When a 1957 police drug raid on a Harlem apartment turned up a cache of obscene magazines and photos, paddles, a riding crop, a whip, and lengths of chain, rawhide, and rope, FBI agents contacted Page for some expert guidance. Specifically, they wanted to know if the apartment was a photo studio where obscene material was produced. According to the below memo sent to Hoover, Page told investigators that she “had never heard of that type of photography being made in Harlem.” An agent reported that Page also advised that the “flagellation and bondage pictures that she had posed for” were shot “in photographic studios or photographers apartments.”
The seized porn, which included “two books and four pictures depicting Betty Page in various poses,” was shipped to Washington for “examination” by the FBI Laboratory, according to a second memo. At some point, agents planned to quiz the apartment’s inhabitants about “what the source of these items was, and to what use they were putting them to.”
How Sex Built The Internet
NPR discusses the intimate link between sex and technology — how Internet porn kingpins shaped the web as we know it today and introduced some of the technologies we now take for granted:
Coopersmith says America Online’s popularity was driven by its private chat features. “One of the nicknames for AOL in the industry was ‘the house that sex chat built,’ ” he says.
Adult sites also paved the way for the mainstream to adopt several technologies. They were among the first to integrate e-commerce systems to process credit card transactions. “The first part of the Web to make money was pornography,” Coopersmith says.
“You have a lot of some of the tactics, concepts and business strategies pioneered by the cybersex world that then flowed into the regular online world…For instance, creating these Web sites where you join for a fee and you have different levels of membership.”
More obnoxious practices were also readily embraced…
Porn: Good For Us?
Peep Show Window. Photo: David Shankbone (GNU)
Milton Diamond for The Scientist:
Pornography. Most people have seen it, and have a strong opinion about it. Many of those opinions are negative — some people argue that ready access to pornography disrupts social order, encouraging people to commit rape, sexual assault, and other sex-related crimes. And even if pornography doesn’t trigger a crime, they say, it contributes to the degradation of women.
It harms the women who are depicted by pornography, and harms those who do not participate but are encouraged to perform the acts depicted in it by men who are acculturated by it. Many even adamantly believe that pornography should become illegal.
Alternatively, others argue that pornography is an expression of fantasies that can actually inhibit sexual activity, and act as a positive displacement for sexual aggression. Pornography offers a readily available means of satisfying sexual arousal (masturbation), they say, which serves as…
Trade Your Bible In For Free Porn
A great publicity stunt by a Texas atheist group is discussed by Tucker Carlson for MSNBC:
Screener At LAX Accused Of Possessing Child Porn Was Also Catholic School Teacher
Thanks to Martin for sending us this story from CBS:
They are in charge of checking you and your luggage at the airport; making sure the skies are safe and sometimes coming close to you or your kids in the process.
But now a TSA screener at LAX has been arrested for possessing kiddie porn — pictures of girls as young as six.
Billy Alfaro was caught with more than 1,500 video files seized on his home computer, according to documents obtained by CBS 2 News. Alfaro lived with his parents in South L.A.
On Alfaro’s computer, a task force comprised of secret service agents allegedly found video files, such as one named “toddler girl.” According to a federal complaint, the video showed a young girl under the age of seven performing a sex act.
It goes on to say Alfaro admitted downloading child porn, confessed to looking at pictures of children under the age…
Children Under 7 Scour The Web For Porn
From CNN:
Yikes. According to Symantec, the fourth most popular search term for children 7 and under is “porn” – just ahead of kids’ networking site Club Penguin.
Symantec recently released the anonymous results of 14.7 million searches run by users of its OnlineFamily.Norton service in 2009. The service allows parents to monitor web activities and supposedly blocks questionable sites, so let’s hope the toddlers searching for “porn” were unsuccessful.
It’s understandable that “sex” is one of the top searches for teens, but I was surprised to see that children as young as 7 were familiar with “porn.” While services like OnlineFamily.Norton may filter most inappropriate content, they are not perfect – and are no substitute for parental supervision…
[continues at CNN]
All Men Watch Porn, Scientists Find
From The Telegraph:
Scientists at the University of Montreal launched a search for men who had never looked at pornography – but couldn’t find any.
Researchers were conducting a study comparing the views of men in their 20s who had never been exposed to pornography with regular users.
But their project stumbled at the first hurdle when they failed to find a single man who had not been seen it.
“We started our research seeking men in their 20s who had never consumed pornography,” said Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse. “We couldn’t find any.”
Although hampered in its original aim, the study did examined the habits of those young men who used pornography – which would appear to be all of them.
Prof Lajeunesse interviewed 20 heterosexual male university students who consumed pornography, and found on average, they first watched pornography when they were 10 years old.
Around 90 per cent of consumption was on the internet, while…
