Art

"In this study, we examined the unique contribution of pornography consumption to the longitudinal prediction of criminal recidivism in a sample of 341 child molesters. We specifically tested the hypothesis, based on predictions informed by the confluence model of sexual aggression that pornography will be a risk factor for recidivism only for those individuals classified as relatively high risk for re-offending. Pornography use (frequency and type) was assessed through self-report and recidivism was measured using data from a national database from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Indices of recidivism, which were assessed up to 15 years after release, included an overall criminal recidivism index, as well as subcategories focusing on violent (including sexual) recidivism and sexual recidivism alone. Results for both frequency and type of pornography use were generally consistent with our predictions. Most importantly, after controlling for general and specific risk factors for sexual aggression, pornography added significantly to the prediction of recidivism. Statistical interactions indicated that frequency of pornography use was primarily a risk factor for higher-risk offenders, when compared with lower-risk offenders, and that content of pornography (i.e., pornography containing deviant content) was a risk factor for all groups. The importance of conceptualizing particular risk factors (e.g., pornography), within the context of other individual characteristics is discussed."

"To this day, I can't watch my own sex scenes."

"Though watching porn may seem degrading to some women, the fact is that it's one of the few jobs for women where you can get to a certain level, look around, and feel so powerful, not just in the work environment but as a sexual being. So, fuck Gloria Steinem."

"The oppressive measures on pornography by the Korean government are totally insane... It is actually seen that it oppresses masculinity and that it distorts the essentials. It is all done by the Ministry of Gender Equality and women’s organizations led by Korean feminists."

"Pornography, it seems to me, is no different from war films or propaganda films in that it tries to make the visceral, horrific, or transgressive elements of life consumable. Propaganda is far more pornographic than a home video of two people fucking."

"Using an online sample of participants in committed relationships, support was found for a moderated mediation model in which depression mediated the relationship between pornography use and relationship satisfaction, and this indirect effect was moderated by level of moral disapproval. Results indicate that, among consumers of pornography, their level of moral disapproval exacerbates adverse intra- and interpersonal outcomes such as distress and decreased relationship satisfaction. These results extend the empirical literature that examines the conditional effects of moral disapproval of pornography use to relational outcomes."

"Despite the fact that, prior to COVID-19, 17 states introduced or passed legislation calling pornography use a public health crisis, public health professionals have argued that it really is not one, and I tend to agree. COVID-19, on the other hand, certainly is a public health crisis."

"In 2019, my colleagues and I published a review of over 130 scientific studies of pornography use and motivation. We found that the most common reason people report for why they view pornography is sexual arousal. Research is abundantly clear that the majority of time that pornography is used, it is used as a part of masturbation."

"In the United States, Internet pornography use is a common behavior that has risen in popularity in recent years. The present study sought to examine potential relationships between pornography use and well-being, with a particular focus on individual perceptions of pornography use and feelings of addiction. Using a large cross-sectional sample of adults (N = 713), perceived addiction to Internet pornography predicted psychological distress above and beyond pornography use itself and other relevant variables (e.g., socially desirable responding, neuroticism). This model was replicated using a large cross-sectional sample of undergraduates (N = 1,215). Furthermore, a 1-year, longitudinal follow-up with a subset of this sample (N = 106) revealed a relationship between perceived addiction to Internet pornography and psychological distress over time, even when controlling for baseline psychological distress and pornography use. Collectively, these findings suggest that perceived addiction to Internet pornography, but not pornography use itself, is uniquely related to the experience of psychological distress."

"In conjunction with prior literature, we conclude that there is little or no evidence of an association between mere pornography use and ED, consistent evidence of an association between self-reported problematic use and ED cross-sectionally, and no evidence of causal links between any pornography variables and ED."

"Peter Griffin: What's the difference between art and pornography... a government grant!"

"Monks, these two extremes ought not to be practiced by one who has gone forth from the household life. (What are the two?) There is addiction to indulgence of sense-pleasures, which is low, coarse, the way of ordinary people... and there is addiction to self-mortification, which is painful, unworthy, and unprofitable. Avoiding both these extremes, the Tathagata (the Perfect One) has realized the Middle Path; it gives vision, gives knowledge, and leads to calm, to insight, to enlightenment and to Nibbana."

"Everyone knows that child pornography is bad because it's been demonstrated over and over that people who look at that stuff end up acting it out—and really destroy people's lives. That's beyond the unconscionably cruel exploitation of the children involved. Other forms of pornography are harmful for a similarly oft-repeated reason: Pornography makes women into objects of desire rather than real people. We want to have relationships between person and person, not person-to-object."

"Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it."

"Pornography is the essential sexuality of male power: of hate, of ownership, of hierarchy; of sadism, of dominance.""

"Men characterize pornography as something mental because their minds, their thoughts, their dreams, their fantasies, are more real to them than women's bodies or lives; in fact, men have used their social power to characterize a $10-billion-a-year trade in women as fantasy."

"The pornographers actually use our bodies as their language. We are their speech. . . . Protecting what they 'say' means protecting what they do to us, how they do it. It means protecting their sadism on our bodies, because that is how they write: not like a writer at all; like a torturer."

"Pornography is used in rape - to plan it, to execute it, to choreograph it, to engender the excitement to commit the act."

"[I]n the male sexual lexicon, which is the vocabulary of power, erotica is simply high-class pornography: better produced, better conceived, better executed, better packaged, designed for a better class of consumer. As with the call girl and the streetwalker, one is turned out better but both are produced by the same system of sexual values and both perform the same sexual service."

"...pornography is the orchestrated destruction of women's bodies and souls; rape, battery, incest, and prostitution animate it; dehumanization and sadism characterize it; it is war on women, serial assaults on dignity, identity, and human worth; it is tyranny. Each woman who has survived knows from the experience of her own life that pornography is captivity–the woman trapped in the picture used on the woman trapped wherever he's got her."

"It was Raimondi who created the images for the first work of printed pornography, a book called "I Modi" (“The Positions” or “The Ways”), also known as "The Sixteen Pleasures" (or, if you’re into Latin, "De omnibus Veneris Schematibus"). As per the title, the book was built around engravings of 16 sexual positions, based on a lost series of paintings by Giulio Romano, Raphael’s pupil, which he had painted for Federico II Gonzaga, to decorate and provide inspiration at his Palazzo Te in Mantua (destroyed in 1630, during the War of Mantuan Succession)."

"Horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success: they 'prove themselves upon our pulses""

"Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials."

"...well meaning decent people will condemn [the] behavior of a Ted Bundy while they're walking past a magazine rack full of the very kinds of things that send young kids down the road to be Ted Bundys."

"Those of us who are, who have been so much influenced by violence in the media, in particular pornographic violence, are not some kinds of inherent monsters. We are your sons and we are your husbands. And we grew up in regular families. And pornography can reach out and snatch a kid out of any house today. It snatched me out of my home twenty, thirty years ago."

"Listen, I'm no social scientist and haven't done a survey. I don't pretend to know what John Q citizen thinks about this. But I've lived in prison for a long time now and I've met a lot of men who were motived to commit violence just like me. And without exception, every one of them was deeply involved in pornography. Without question, without exception. Deeply influenced and consumed by an addiction to pornography."

"Pornography has been so thickly glossed over with the patina of chic these days in the name of verbal freedom and sophisication… Part of the problem is that those who traditionally have been the most vigorous opponents of porn are often those same people who shudder at the explicit mention of any sexual subject… There can be no equality in porn, no female equivalent, no turning of the tables in the name of bawdy fun. Pornography, like rape, is a male invention, desgined to dehumanize women… Pornography is the undiluted essence of anti-female propaganda."

"Sexual drives are core aspects of human functioning, but the quantity and quality of sexual behaviors show high variability across individuals. Pornography use has become a normative behavior among adults, and individuals show differences in quantity/frequency measures of consumption. Considering the broad spectrum of “normal” sexual behaviors and the finding that the number of people with NPHFU is 3–6 times larger than the number with PHFU, pornography use may be linked to adverse health measures in a minority of adults."

"In this connection we may refer to fornicatory acts effected with artificial imitations of the human body, or of individual parts of that body. There exist true Vaucansons in this province of pornographic technology, clever mechanics who, from rubber and other plastic materials, prepare entire male or female bodies, which, as hommes or dames de voyage, subserve fornicatory purposes. More especially are the genital organs represented in a manner true to nature. Even the secretion of Bartholin's glans is imitated, by means of a "pneumatic tube" filled with oil. Similarly, by means of fluid and suitable apparatus, the ejaculation of the semen is imitated. Such artificial human beings are actually offered for sale in the catalogue of certain manufacturers of "Parisian rubber articles.""

"Pornographic sex is a kind of sex that can be described. Which told you something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith's time, sex divorced itself from feeling. Pornography was the industrialization of that rift."

"I once stole a pornographic book that was printed in Braille. I used to rub the dirty parts."

"In discussions on pornography, a lot depends on the very definition of what is considered to be “pornographic” material. Pornography may be defined as (a) a moral wrong, (b) a moral good or (c) a non-moral issue. Thus, “the right to pornography” (as a “liberty”, not as a “claim-right”) may either be argued “because” it is amoral or non-moral good, or “although” it is a moral wrong. But whether one relates the notion of pornography intrinsically to (the showing/describing of) sexual acts, considered to be morally reprehensible, or uses a morally neutral or positive definition, one cannot escape the task of arguing what exactly makes (some or all) pornography a moral wrong or good."

"It is as important a serious piece of work as Strindberg or Ibsen. You don’t shortchange the work because it is a comic book franchise for a studio. I think entertaining is a serious business and shouldn’t be taken half-heartedly."

"RINGGENBERG: Do you think there are any limits about what should be published in a comics format?"

"Chief Counsel Herbert Beaser asked: "Then you think a child cannot in any way, shape, or manner, be hurt by anything that the child reads or sees?""

"RINGGENBERG: Let's jump ahead a little bit, to the New Direction comics. In Impact #4 you had a story called "The Lonely One", which was about prejudice against Jews. The Jewish in the story had a very bland name. It was "Miller"."

"RINGGENBERG: Well, given that the Comics Code expressly forbid the use of the words Weird, Horror and Terror, did you feel that your company was being particularly targeted?"

"Nudity with meretricious purpose and salacious postures shall not be permitted in the advertising of any product; clothed figures shall never be presented in such a way as to be offensive or contrary to good taste or morals."

"Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden."

"Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested."

"Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Rape scenes, as well as sexual abnormalities, are unacceptable."

"Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities."

"Suggestive and salacious illustration or suggestive posture is unacceptable."

"Nudity in any form is prohibited, as is indecent or undue exposure."

"Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden."

"Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolfism are prohibited."

"Inclusion of stories dealing with evil shall be used or shall be published only where the intent is to illustrate a moral issue and in no case shall evil be presented alluringly, nor so as to injure the sensibilities of the reader."

"All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be eliminated."

"All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not be permitted."

"No comic magazine shall use the words "horror" or "terror" in its title."