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In reply to the discussion: Art of Manliness: the problem with porn [View all]Major Nikon
(36,917 posts)My personal prospective on porn is that I simply have no use for it. At this stage in my life my sexual activity is equal to my desire for sex. So I have no use for masturbation or masturbation aids. However I have a libertarian stance on the subject. Even if you can make the case that porn somehow produces erotoxins that destroys or appropriates 'healthy' brain cells and ruin people's lives, so what? Maybe these people have just decided that life in general sucks and at least such things provide an outlet, albeit short-lived from life's general sufferring. Even if you can make the case that porn is an addiction, or compulsion or whatever, the reality is that it isn't as hard to break such things as some people make it out to be. Even hard physical addictions only require short periods of intervention to break. The reason people return to them is because a certain segment of the population is prone to chronic addiction. If they weren't compelled to porn they could just as easily be alcoholics or drug addicts. That doesn't mean everyone who does these things are going to ruin their life with them, and it doesn't mean that someone who ruins their life with porn wouldn't have ruined it with something else.
The problem I have with anti-pornographers of any stripe is that if I don't speak up for other people's vices, I can't really complain much when nobody stands up for mine. I like to drink whiskey and I like to smoke my pipe and I don't really care much for controlling assholes who try to curb those activities regardless of how good their intentions are. If I can't do what I want with my own bag of meat, regardless of personal consequences, what real freedoms do I really have? If more people were as concerned with making society more pleasurable rather than what someone else is doing with their body, maybe there wouldn't be as much demand for simple pleasures.
The very best you can say is that he makes the same flaw as any other anti-vice argument which is that people are incapable of moderation. The reality is that people can and do. The worst you can say is that he needs to give more thought into minding his own fucking business.
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