Pornhub vows to plant a tree for every 100 videos watched, but only for those in the “Big Dick” category.
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“The more videos you watch, the more trees we plant!”
It’s interesting – the idea of linking porn use to environmental sustainability. But things interesting aren’t immune to being incredibly lame.
Pornhub’s latest campaign slogan is “Pornhub Gives America Wood” and it’s been running since April 25, Arbor Day. On The Huffington Post’s “Green” section, Nick Visser writes of the campaign:
“Helping the planet really couldn’t get any easier this year….”
In an article for Mashable, Laura Vitto writes that:
“Users will have until midnight on May 2 to power through as many videos in the specified category as possible. After that, Pornhub will finalize an agreement with a tree-planting organization and begin planting.”
The Mashable article ends on this quote from Mike Williams, Pornhub’s communications representative:
“Whatever the species, our trees will grow up to be long and hard and, with any luck, they will go on to spread seed of their own.”
A quick glimpse into Pornhub shows that the site portrays minorities, sexuality, women and violence in all the stereotypically destructive ways. Petite Asians want to be crushed, women just want to be f’d by a “Big Dick,” etc. The language, of course, leans toward power and domination. And yet we’re all supposed to sit back and believe that the more we watch the more we are “helping the planet?”
Bullshit.
As the “You are what you eat” idea has become part of food culture, so too must “You are what you watch” become part of our culture in general. Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh has for years spoken about the importance of bringing awareness to what our minds ingest. This doesn’t mean shielding ourselves from the suffering and cruelness of the world; it means continuously striving to see reality for what it is: beautiful, heartbreaking, weird…diverse, interesting, changing. It means realizing that our minds, just like our physical bodies, will adapt to what we feed it. Malnutrition can afflict the mind as well.
Science continues to prove that the modern and unrealistic images of porn, coupled with the ease of access, have negative effects on the mind. This isn’t anything new to scientists. Such studies have been replicated and expanded for 20+ years.
Like many men, I’ve viewed porn. At times I even felt the pull to use it regularly, to be reliant on it. But I’ve also stepped back to analyze how my viewing habits changed me for the worse, and because there’s nothing special about me I believe it’s changing other men in similar ways.
An excerpt from How porn is rewiring our brains says succinctly what I’m getting at:
“In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, the psychiatrist Norman Doidge writes about a phenomenon he began to notice among his male patients in the mid 1990s. They watched porn – ‘everybody does,’ they told Doidge – and were experiencing ‘increasing difficulty in being turned on by their actual sexual partners, though they still considered them attractive.’ They found themselves having to fantasize about porn scenes to get turned on.
“That’s because, along with a great number of porn users, they had rewired the arousal pathways in their brains. ‘Pornography, ‘writes Doidge, ‘satisfies every one of the prerequisites for neuroplastic change,’ – that is, the brain’s ability to form new neural circuitry. The most important condition is the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that gives us a feeling of exciting pleasure, which porn triggers. The more often you watch porn and get the dopamine hit it delivers, the more the activity and the sensation become entwined in your brain.
“Doidge puts it like this: ‘since neurons that fire together wire together, these men got massive amounts of practice wiring these images into the pleasure centres of the brain.’ And, ‘because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images increased at the expense of what had previously attracted them.’
“A related problem is what addiction experts call ‘tolerance,’ in other words the need for more of a given stimulant (harder and weirder porn) for the same amount of dopamine.”
As if this isn’t enough, what’s the direct impact this can have in relationships? GQ sex columnist Siobhan Rosen put it this way in her article Dinner, Movie, and a Dirty Sanchez:
“And what has a formative decade of self-pleasure before the soft glow of computer screens wrought? Well, I’m not the only one inadvertently attracting Seymore Butts acolytes; almost every female friend of mine has had an experience with pornified sex super-early in a relationship….”
In an article for The Telegraph titled “Is porn ruining your relationships?” a commenter writes the truth:
“Pornography is here to stay, it’s how we deal with it that matters.”
No, pornography shouldn’t be banned. I don’t even object to porn sites trying to hook users by making them feel like their “product” is somehow bringing heaps of goodness to the world. Businesses in every sector do the same thing.
But I will not sit back, kiss the powerful porn industry’s ass and believe in the fantasy that it’s somehow “helping the planet” while it pollutes the minds of the planet’s inhabitants.
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Why is porn (and its users) always singled out for this “polluting the mind” nonsense? Why not erotica, or romance fiction?
Umm, maybe because they’re not using other actual, splayed out, butchered, amputated, living human beings, to get themselves off on…
Butchered? Amputated?
Have you actually seen any porn?
Please Cameron, spare us the self-righteousness. It really doesn’t become you. First, you yourself are (or have been) a user of the product. There is no one more tiresome than the ranting, reformed alcoholic. And second, no one – and certainly not Pornhub – is asking you to kiss their ass. They’re doing a marketing promotion, just like all businesses (including GMP) do in our market driven society. If you bothered paying attention to the news today, you’d know that porn is hardly the biggest problem that we’re facing right now…not even close. If you want to vent some angsty… Read more »