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Moriah JovanUtah’s #1! In porn consumption…
Posted by chanson on March 15, 2009
This was last week’s big story on the Bloggernacle (before it got edged out by HBO’s temple antics). I meant to post something about it here at The Visitors’ Center (since Mormons-n-porn is one of our favorite subjects!) but what is there to say? So Mormons look at a lot of porn on the Internet. Surprise, surprise! Unless you’ve been sleeping through General Conference for the past few years, you already know it.
Aside: I don’t listen to General Conference myself — I prefer the Bloggernacle-digest version. You get all the juicy bits — plus entertaining commentary — without sitting through the snoozer talks. And if one thing is certain, the Bloggernacle-digest version has the porn subject covered, but good!
So, as I like to do when I have nothing of my own to add to a subject, I’ll just give you an index of what everybody else is saying about this:
Naturally, the reaction of the culture warriors on the liberal side was somewhere between gloating and “I told you so!” — viewing it as a morality tale about hypocrisy and authoritarianism. Pharyngula sums it up, and similar discussions appeared on Silence of the Clams, Gene Expression, and Main Street Plaza. And Good Reason added to the theme by tying in a few related (unintentionally) humorous t-shirts like the “EX-Masturbator” ones and some homoerotic Mormon ones.
Naturally, the faithful blogs favored re-analyzing the statistics. After all, the study didn’t cover anywhere near all the types of porn available, and Utah isn’t all Mormon. Mormon Matters discusses these flaws, and points out the low rate of porn consumption in (heavily Mormon) Idaho. Chris Smith (faithful, but not Mormon) takes the Idaho example a step further and suggests that Mormonism works better as a subculture than as a dominant culture. Eugene Woodbury covers these flaws as well, and adds
However, the popular perception that Edelman is onto something might explain why Mormon church leaders are so obsessed with the subject. Though this obsession has also made online porn the current “sin of choice” among Mormons, the confession of which being used (as a moral “theory of everything”) to absolve all others.
Then there were some blogs that decided that — despite the flaws in this particular study — maybe it’s a good time to open up the discussion again and try to understand what’s going on. The LDS Stake Medium Council asks what are the implications for the church if these trends continue. And BCC posted 50 conversations about one thing. Actually, I’m not really sure where these conversations came from or where BCC was going with them, but maybe someone here can explain it to me…
Joe Two said
Like all conversations/arguments about pornography, nobody really knows what you mean when you say the word. The statement “I know it when I see it” is complete nonsense. What I consider porn is more extreme, but probably well within the range of definition of most people, than what my sister-in-law considers porn, which is a far outlier. However, even within any commonly accepted definition of porn there are serious gradations and this is the problem with this study; we have no idea what they are actually talking about.
First, we need to determine if the percentages of married couples doing this with the full knowledge of the other spouse, spouses doing this without the knowledge of their companion and singles.
Second, we need to break down what the prevalence is with regards to sex of the subscriber.
Third, what porn is each demographic looking at?
My own guess is that the vast majority of this [paid] porn is couples viewing mostly straight sex videos that is only one step removed from your standard Cinemax soft-core erotica (some of which is pretty good for the purposes of getting things heated up.) I’m not exactly being a braniac here; I’m just looking at where the bulk of material is being produced.
A second reason for my prediction is that single men know how to get the stuff THEY want for free and don’t really have the money to pay for it anyway and married men and women who are hiding their consumption from their companion are also getting it free because they don’t want to get caught.
One last prediction, among couples, men are the primary drivers of using porn in an attempt to find intimacy that is missing in their marriage. The church repeatedly blunders in emphasizing the matriarchal aspects of relationships and demonizing the patriarchal. This greatly affects many men who find the rejection and demonization of their sexual desires to be emotionally painful. It also affects a lot of women who also want more, but are made to believe that such desires are wicked. A big point is that once they see quality porn, many women realize they enjoy it and that at the very least, isn’t an awful thing so why not if it makes their man happy?
(Sidebar: repeated studies have found that women respond physiologically to porn to the same extent as men, even the hard core stuff. They’ve also found that women respond strongly to depictions of intimacy, regardless of the sexual match up, while men don’t respond outside their own sexual preference.)
PS. For those who scream about “addiction”; give me a break. Even if I accept the use of the word addiction (which I most certainly do not, even for most drugs), you can turn just about anything into an addiction. I know people “addicted” to church. Growing up, there was a man so “addicted” to being Bishop, his wife almost divorced him (though I’ve long suspected he was really just avoiding her, who I suspect was nice to be around, but hell to live with.)
In most other cultures, the threat of having a mistress would