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Roll up, roll up to yet another round in the "Pornography: Harmless Enjoyment That Prevents Rape, or Degradation of Women And Should Be Banned" boxing match!
This time, news from Ireland. A study by the Economic and Social Research Institute, ‘Use of Pornography by Young Adults in Ireland’, was published today. It's generally on the negative side. I was surprised by this plum which I plucked out - men from advantaged, as opposed to disadvantaged, backgrounds use porn more.
Before anyone goes "Ah yeah, well this is what you'd expect the ESRI in Ireland to say", they're not religious, they're no more right-wing than any semi-government body, the Church has nothing to do with them, and remember we're up to our necks in Pride parades and trans non-binary gender rights (as Leo tried and failed to get with the recent referenda. Speaking of which, I'll be coming back to those elsewhere) with social liberalisation now, so it's not "little Catholic Ireland finger-wags at porn, the backwards repressed bunch".
This is the age cohort they studied, the ESRI says the study is about "pornography use among over 4,500 young adults at 20 years of age" which is when the last reporting was done:
Now! The juicy summation of findings, which is where the hair-pulling starts!
I'm leaving this here for discussion, I'm not going to express an opinion one way or the other.
It is plain to me that "pornography" - in the broadest sense of the term, any material that contains the explicit depiction of sexual activities or sexualized nudity, fictional or not, regardless of context or intended purpose - represents the most urgently necessary direction of development for art in general, the most fertile soil for aesthetic discoveries and innovations, and indeed the greatest possibility of an experience that might be called "spiritual".
Plainly there has never been an epoch of human history where sexuality was not of central importance. And consider the explicitly acknowledged centrality of sexuality in contemporary political discourse - not only the status of men and women in general, but also transsexuality and homosexuality, consent, the depiction of women's bodies. An art that does not fully develop its capacities in this domain is a dead art, an art that has abdicated its duty.
Some of the most important and advanced works of recent decades were not produced by the organs of the academy and traditional "literary circles", but are instead being circulated on obscure Japanese doujin sites and fanfiction platforms.
Anyone who flatly announces themselves as "anti-pornography", without first demonstrating that they have clearly perceived the aesthetic necessity for art to become more "pornographic", instantly arouses great mistrust in me. It is evidence that their senses have been dulled regarding certain vital matters.
If I have skimmed the study correctly, it's not talking about "pornography" in the same way you are. While it starts with a broad definition, it soon narrows down to just look at "watched pornography online". This is also why it reports such large differences between male and female consumption - it deletes the female consumption by ignoring euphemistically categorized written material (this doesn't explain all the gap but it is a sizable fraction of it).
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