Playboy bunnies aren't cute
"Even though I was careful with my clothes and figure, I found that my husband was increasingly critical of the way I looked. Even when friends told me I was an attractive woman, I wasn't attractive enough to compete with the eternally young, surgically altered models (in porn magazines)."
- Laurie Hall in An Affair of the Mind.
Feelings of inferiority among women whose husbands and boyfriends use pornography is just one of the many dark sides of pornography. Pornography is not the innocent thing that many naive University of Arizona students, who celebrate the coming of Playboy Magazine, think it is. Pornography has a devastating effect on both men and women, and families.
Perhaps the most deleterious effect of porn is that it dehumanizes and objectifies women in the minds of the men who use porn. The glossy paper women of porn magazines and the Internet, and the celluloid women of porn film are just objects for men's pleasure. They are playthings (playmates) to masturbate with - they don't have feeling, they don't talk back, they don't even have to have a name. They are there just to please the men who use them. It doesn't take a lot of exposure to pornography before a guy may start to treat the real women in his life as objects for his pleasure.
How many women on this campus haven't given themselves to a guy sexually only to wake up the next morning and find out he's "gone?"
Laurie Hall writes "In the fantasy world of pornography, man is lord and master of the woman, able to use her in any way he desires. She is completely subject to his will."
This is not about relationship anymore, it is about control and selfishness.
Pornography doesn't help men either. Pornography is extremely addictive. Because of the chemicals released in the brain while looking at and masturbating to pornography, a man is soon controlled by what Dr. Victor Cline in, The Current Status of Research on Pornography's Effect on Human Behavior, calls "masturbation conditioning. A guy will begin to associate orgasm and the strong feeling of euphoria with the glossy photos and will, like an addict, want more and more."
I have met many men at the UA that are struggling with an addiction to pornography and I am convinced that pornography can be as addictive as any drug.
Pornography promotes promiscuity. It stands to reason, that if you can have sex with Ms January through December, then you should be able to have sex with anyone else who is willing.
It is a sad fact in our make-up as men, that we can be far more "recreational" about sex then women. It should be self-evident from the fact that the prostitution "industry" and porn industry are primarily directed at men.
If pornography promotes promiscuity, it also promotes more sexual dissatisfaction. Why? Because the best sex takes place in the confines of the marriage relationship. A major sex study commissioned by Redbook Magazine found that "strictly monogamous women experienced orgasm during sex more than twice as often as women who are promiscuous." Redbook , Sept. 1975.
Masturbation to pornography often leads to "learned" premature ejaculation. The "paper lady" doesn't take nearly as long to warm up as the real thing.
Pornography leads to a loss of intimacy and sexual isolation. Let's be honest guys, it's hard to focus on the women in front of you when your mind is filled with pornographic images.
Women have a fantastic ability to tell when their man is "not all there." And when we are "not all there" it hurts intimacy.
Pornography stimulates interest in perversions. A perversion is using a body part for something it was not intended for. If your boyfriend or husband is asking you for abnormal sex you can bet he has very likely been indulging in pornography.
Pornography destroys dignity. A major theme in pornography is control and bondage. How many UA women are turned on by power, coercion or humiliation? Frequent users of pornography may likely associate these things with sexual arousal.
Finally, pornography destroys marriages, for all the above reasons and many more. I personally know of three marriages in Tucson that have been destroyed in large part due to pornography. This is only the tip of a very sinister "iceberg."
Maybe Playboy should not be welcome at the UA.
If your curiosity is aroused I refer you to Pornography a Human Tragedy, edited by Tom Minnery, The Proceedings of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, and An Affair of the Mind by Hall.
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