dear Chatali,

i used to always feel in a relationship if one of the partners use pornography ,then it effects the other partner..the insecurity and not being good enough feeling starts to crop up..

is there any statistics which shows that there are certain people trying to look beyond the sexual act itself and try to look at the person itself and what would have put them in such a position..
does the humanitarian aspect effect the people viewing porn ...

Hi Preethi

Don't know if I got your question right but here's an attempt to answer it. Firstly viewing porn is a very 'discomfitting' act. Not only because you are 'judged' by all and feel its 'immoral' somehow but also because accessing it , watching it etc all involves preferred anonymity. In such a mental 'state' I imagine the first instinct is to get the 'excitement/voyeurism' you seek. I don't think its got any contemplative value/time to allow the person to even go beyond what they see and wonder about the people who are in it, how they must feel or whether they are being exploited. I suppose they leave that to people like us who are looking at the larger picture, paying heed to the many stories of abuse and exploitation that the porn making industry involves etc.

Hope this was the answer to your question :-)

Preethi

Forgot to add that your first point is very valuable. Precisely what the critical point about using porn is. I guess many partners would feel inadequate/insecure since the person accessing the porn is basically saying I need this to get excited by the lovemaking-you are not good enough. I remember a client who had a horrendous problem with a husband who not only liked watching porn all the time but forced her to 'enact' the many sequences. She said that what disturbed her most was that he obviously fantasized about the 'women'in the show while he made love to her so she was just a body for him not a person who he wanted to love.

This power of porn or imaging is the key reason why and how it reflects a distorted sexuality. For sex is then just a mind thing, it has little to do with the love/relationship your are in. How can the sexual then be an act of intimacy between two people. It becomes a mere act.

Dear Chaitali

"72% said they used porn to masturbate/for physical release.
-69% - to sexually arouse themselves and/or others."

These statistics really stood out for me because I feel there is an irony at play here. Research recurrently shows that man's preoccupation with sex is at an all time high. Yet to have sex people are not able to conjure up desire without looking at pornography. I find that both amusing and distressing.

Amusing because it's so contradictory and distressing because we are actually so sexually dysfunctional that we can't even stimulate within us that which we desire the most. It has to come from an external source and one which is more often than not unhealthy.

Dear Preethi,

To answer your question on "does the humanitarian aspect....." . I asked myself what is being humanitarian. I got the answer being compassionate, showing love and affection in any relationship, not humiliating or distressing others, not being violent. When I thought about porn all that came into my mind was the very opposite of what I stated above.

Dear Chaitali

Have been reading your thorough & alarming pieces wondering what to say. The numers are just mind boggling & obviously there's something we need to be alarmed for. I've watched porn with friend s at college for a laugh. The aftertaste was bad, left no taste for more & of course since we were all girls we wondered 'what was so exciting? I don't know if there's any tasteful porn but what we saw was more animal like than human.

Point is one just ignores stuff, thinks sick, frustrated people watch it, men will be men type of thing and pay no attention. But these numbers & the discussion between Harvinder & Jasjit has been very disturbing. I still don't know what to say except ban the Crap but I know that's a foolish unreality.

BTW I notice no men engaging in this at all on the blog. Why, I think because its making them uncomfortable perhaps. Speaking of which where are the regular blog friends????

I will come back to this post Chaitali with a clear question I hope. For now I just feel uncomfortable at the thought that something so menacing is around, growing & we want to either be mum or indifferent or of course confused like me.

Kudos on your hard work.

Here is something I found today. I'm not mentioning the site nor the author. If you are really curious, your search engine should bring it up. Here goes:

----
"To be a parent is a difficult job, so unless you are ready to take that difficult job, don't become a parent. People simply go on becoming fathers and mothers not knowing what they are doing. You are bringing a life into existence; all the care in the world will be needed.

Now when the child starts playing his sexual rehearsals, that is the time when parents interfere the most, because they have been interfered with. All that they know is what has been done to them, so they simply go on doing that to their children.

Societies don't allow sexual rehearsal, at least have not allowed it up to this century, only within the last two, three decades, and that too only in very advanced countries. Now children are having co-education. But in a country like India, even now co-education starts only at the university level.

The seven-year-old boy and the seven-year-old girl cannot be in the same boarding school. And this is the time for them - without any risk, without the girl getting pregnant, without any problems arising for their families. This is the time when they should be allowed all playfulness.

Yes, it will have a sexual color to it, but it is rehearsal; it is not the real drama. And if you don't allow them even the rehearsal and then suddenly one day the curtain opens, and the real drama starts. And those people don't know what is going on - even a prompter is not there to tell them what to do. You have messed up their life completely.

Those seven years, the second circle in life, is significant as a rehearsal. They will meet, mix, play, become acquainted. And that will help humanity to drop almost ninety percent of perversions.

If the children from seven to fourteen are allowed to be together; to swim together, to be naked before each other, ninety percent of perversions and ninety percent of pornography will simply disappear. Who will bother about it?

When a boy has known so many girls naked, what interest can a magazine like Playboy have for him? When a girl has seen so many boys naked, I don't see that there is any possibility of curiosity about the other; it will simply disappear. They will grow together naturally, not as two different species of animals.

Right now that's how they grow: two different species of animals, They don't belong to one mankind; they are kept separate. A thousand and one barriers are created between them so they cannot have any rehearsal of the sexual life which is going to come. But the way children are brought up is almost butchering their whole life. Those seven years of sexual rehearsal are absolutely essential. Girls and boys should be together in schools, in hostels, in swimming pools and beds. They should rehearse for the life which is going to come; they have to get ready for it. And there is no danger, there is no problem if a child is given total freedom about his growing sexual energy and is not condemned, repressed - which is being done now.

A very strange world it is in which you are living. You are born of sex, you will live for sex, your children will be born out of sex - and sex is the most condemned thing, the greatest sin. And all the religions go on putting this crap in your mind.

These people all around the world are full of everything rotten that you can conceive, for the simple reason that they have not been allowed to grow in the natural way. They have not been allowed to accept themselves. They have all become ghosts. They are not authentically real people, they are only shadows of someone they could have been; they are only shadows".
----

I have not formed a strong opinion about what is mentioned. What I am struggling with is whether this can be implemented without any external infleunces on the 7 year olds mentioned. If the 'discovery' and interaction is left to the children, all on their own, it may work. But once you have prying adult eyes and voyeurs - which is reality today, the practicality of this concept is greatly threatened.

Hi Harvinder

The words sound like Osho's and if I'm not mistaken they should be from his 'The New Child'. In that case we are looking at a Master's vision whose total response to humanity is to pull it to its higher purpose/potential. Though Osho was unique in as much as he actually devised hundreds of meditations as tools to access the modern psyche where it stood, rather than just purport a Higher Truth in the abstract. His commune started off as an immense experiment to create social/pyschological alternatives for the 'New Man/Woman'. Children were allowed to roam freely, being parented by a host of people rather than the biological two. However that was all disbanded a long time ago. largely because, as you argue, it is impossible to creates oases/islands of 'difference' in a world which is so connected now. Naturally it cannot work because the 'innocence' of being cannot be reclaimed within the melee of madness that the world is. If it all, it can be accessed and reclaimed within, at an individual level.

I guess All who rise to become spiritual teachers have a dream of building such an oasis, perhaps in the hope that humanity can be en masse shaken out of the stupidity of habit and the hegemony of stifling social/moral pens.

In their non-applicability in our 'real world' his insights just sound like a wonderful dream.

Hi all,

nice discussion going on.

Preethi in any relationship I feel there is a difference in sexual appetites. One might be more dominant and vigorous whereas the other mild. On the other hand both of them might enjoy the libido at the same level.

Sexual preferences and ideas vary. If then one partner enjoys porn I feel it might not necessarily mean that he/she is not interested in the other partner always.

I think any relationship needs an "elastic quotient" to be fulfilling.

Down the line everyone involved in a relationship knows that even if there are incidents of a partner enjoying porn or another partner eyeing other women/men the basic level of love and affection between the two remains.

I think cultivation of this "elastic quotient" is very critical in a happy relationship in these times.

Hello everyone! It's been sometime since I've been on the blog. Seems like lots have been happenin on it.

Here is what I have to say on porn. I think it's made exclusively for men. Statistics might say that women too watch porn but the stats on men outdo it by hundreds.

Radhika even I once watched porn with my female friends. We thought let see what is so great that men love to watch it and people like to make a business out of it. God! we couldn't even watch 5 min of it. It was disgusting. Visually there was no 'violence' on it but there was something in it that gave all us girls a sick feelin. I don't want to be rude with words here and xcuse me if it is adult language but using all the orifices of women to penetrate into it was just disgusting. Neither were the lesbian porn stimulating any of us. Even the so called soft porn left us with a strange unemotional and dead feelin.

Many of us were watching it for the first time and had thought that there will be something erotic in it. But it was nothing even near erotic... Mills and Boons gave us more orgasm than the porn movies.

Good Morning everyone!

Annie, how true that for women its all about the emotions and the sexual activities being the expressions of those emotions. No wonder Mills n Boons romance appeals more to us than porn!

Hi Harvinder,

Thanks for sharing that piece. I agree, ideally, it would be great to provide boys and girls the freedom to mingle and grow together, but I guess its not possible in a society where the people bringing up these children, nurture unhealthy sexualities.

Hi Guys!

I was going through the newspaper this morning and look what I found!

A German housewife caled police because her husband would not stop watching porn movies. The woman dialled the police and said that she had an emergency. When the police arrived they found the lady pacing the apartment while her husband sat watching a blue film. She told the police " Nothing will move him, not even if I offer him the real thing, and he has the TV on so lud I'm sure the neighbours can hear it." The woman was told however that there was nothing the police could do in such a case, but refer her to a counsellor for help.

What a frightening story...

Porn has been an ongoing problem in my relationship with my long-term boyfriend. i feel a great discomfort with his viewing of internet porn. occasionally clicking on the links from his search history, i have found myself appalled and and in a panic like state of emptiness. none of the images looked like they would be even remotely pleasurable for the woman, and for me as a woman viewer caused an instant and inexplicable emotional pain. i too feel that porn in its current form would not exist if sex was not kept in the closet, and if the objectives of sex expanded beyond instant male gratification with no regards for the woman. i am not at all against sex, but am against pornographic images that display surgically altered women, women made to look like little girls, and the absence of realistic sexual situations in today's popular industry. and i find it very bizarre that the debate over porn is split into a for and against binary, largely ignoring the subtler misogynist implications of porn in its current state.

Dear Andy

Your comments on porn are insightful and true. However much of the problem stems from the fact that we look at sex and intimacy (and in this case specifically porn) as something we have a view and opinion on. However that it exists in our own space (in this case with your long-standing boyfriend)is where we need to search for answers. Porn proliferates in the west where sexual freedom has indeed swung the other way for so long and there is hardly any moral or social censure which can contain it so perhaps the seed is not really a lack of sexual freedom.

Somwhere our inability to address sexuality, concepts of healthy and unhealthy practices, autonomy and the notion of pleasure are perhaps at the root. It is a maze where few are skilled to address and heal others. And porn is merely a symptom of an unwholesome sexual self. Child pornography, sado-masochistic and snuff pron are only degrees of how unwholesome pornography really is. Perhaps somewhere society having climbed into its mind so completely, has lost the reverance and passion that sexuality symbolized. From an act of joy, mutuality and sensuality it has turned into a mind trip which is riddled with violence, shame, suppression and violation. I do believe the answer always lies within us and not out there. Perhaps sexual healing is something that most people need to experience.

What do you think?

Love

your this blog has attracted maximum comments from readers which somehow proves that porn in some form or another influences all minds in some way. some admit openly while majority enjoys it but condemns it before others to show that their garment is white. I find hypocrisy gripping the minds of all. It is a hard fact that everybody in some form or other entertains the subject.