Thursday, September 24, 2009

Straight porn makes you gay   posted by Razib @ 9/24/2009 10:54:00 PM
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This is making the rounds of the internet:
Schwartz told the crowd about Jim Johnson, a friend of his who turned an old hotel into a hospice for gay men dying of AIDS. "One of the things he said to me," said Schwartz, "that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark...he said 'All pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards."

There were murmurs and gasps from the crowd. "Now, think about that," said Schwartz. "And if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he's going to want to get a copy of Playboy? I'm pretty sure he'll lose interest. That's the last thing he wants! You know, that's a good comment, it's a good point, and it's a good thing to teach young people."


This conversation is a window into the widely divergent worldviews of many conservative Christians in the United States from the rest of society. How many 11-year old boys are going to look for Playboy if they want porn today? Playboy isn't even considered porn by many today, I recall in the mid-1990s when the military removed pornographic magazines from stores on their bases they left Playboy. Next he'll be talking about the dangers of rock & roll! More seriously, I suspect many people would react to this sort of assertion as ludicrous on the face of it, but it seems possible that to this audience this is an insightful and plausible thesis (or, they feel that they have to pretend that it's insightful and plausible, as they may have personal experiential knowledge which falsifies it which they can not divulge because they aren't supposed to be having those experiences). Secondarily, I remember the serious reception of Naomi Wolf's thesis from several years ago that porn was turning men off from having sex with real women in some quarters. Since the 1970s the Religious Right and Feminist Left have oddly paralleled each other, asserting strange ideas about the nature of heterosexual males and their susceptibility to sexual visual stimulus, without bothering much to consult a wide range of men who engage in the behavior in consideration.

I won't deny that there might be some effect of porn on the margin. But really. Perhaps men turned gay by straight porn will show up in the comment threads and tell their story, or those who only have sex with their girlfriends when their internet connection is down (the latter may occur, but probably has more to do with World of Warcraft than porn, so porn related behavior changes only).

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