Marnia Robinson’s piece on porn and its effect on boys has already attracted its fair share of discussion.
Christopher Shulgan, author of Superdad, weighed in as well, with some valid counter-arguments:
As the headline suggests, today’s Naughty America is not your father’s Playboy. But then again, your father’s Playboy wasn’t his father’s tittilating postcard. When Playboy came along, the ‘60s equivalent of Ms. Robinson were all up in arms about how terrible it was that young men could get erotic magazines at newsstands. And hey, those men turned out all right. And you know what? Our kids today will turn out OK, too.
Shulgan believes that Robinson misses the mark with her alarm over the increasing availability of Internet porn. Instead, Shulgan argues, “it’s kind of awesome,” and “removes the loneliness and stigma of strangeness.” Now, with “easily available imagery” teens won’t feel ashamed for having deviant sexual fantasies, and can instead “discover a community of like-minded people.”
If Shulgan is talking about harmless fetishes, then he has a point. But Robinson’s primary concern is with the increasing availability of extreme, violent porn, not videos of people with balloon fetishes. Plus, every teenager already knows he can see all the chocolate fantasies he wants on HBO’s Real Sex.
—Photo (sizemore)/via Flickr
Since the above posted, more debate has happened at the following link:
http://www.shulgan.com/blog/2010/12/not-your-fathers-playboy-a-response.html#comments
As Marnia acknowledges, this was originally posted in the comments section of my blog. I will follow her lead and cut-and-paste here as well. Hi Marnia and Gary — thanks for taking the time to comment on my response. I still question your reasoning. Marnia, in your “Not Your Father’s Playboy” article, you counsel parents to suggest that their adolescent boys limit themselves to masturbating once or twice a week “or even less.” You criticize sex toys because “once we move to new thresholds of stimulation, we risk making our brains temporarily less sensitive to subtler, ordinary stimuli.” And in… Read more »
Thanks for pointing this out. Here’s what I attempted to post on Christopher’s blog: It’s surprising that someone with a history of addiction would be so unaware of the power of supranormal stimulation to create unwanted symptoms and alter brain chemistry. Contrary to your insinuations, there’s a lot of solid science behind what I’ve said in my article (which, by the way, was shortened by “The Good Men Project” editors). Unfortunately for a generation of avid Internet users, the research that would confirm the phenomenon I’ve written about (brain changes leading to unwanted escalation and morphing of sexual tastes in… Read more »
The incident you are most likely referring to was with Lineage, a different game, but it easily could have been WoW. It is actually very instructive for your argument, though. Approximately 10 million people worldwide play WoW, almost none of whom have experienced anything like what you referred to. Some people have had issues putting their game lives before their real lives, and I’d imagine many users have had the experience of game and real life objectives conflicting, and being tempted to choose the former over the latter. There’s real issues here, involving incentive structures that are far more attractive… Read more »
Is it awesome that boys are bullying girls to engage in sexual acts that are painful to them? Would be awesome if girls were doing this to boys? The problem here is that men simply do not care that women do not like this… There’s a problem here and it’s reflected in the fact that men like Shulgan simply do not even factor in, or care, that women are even in the picture… Sex is not something men do to women. Its something we do together. Men like Shulgan don’t even care.