Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community - Downloads of Net Porn hit Record high

In other news, pornography demonized by moralizing British press...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/liv...n_page_id=1770

Quote:

Downloads of Net porn hit record high
09:25am 29th May 2006

Record numbers of people are downloading pornography from the Internet, a survey revealed yesterday.

And campaigners fear that as computer porn becomes more widespread it will give more men unrealistic expectations of their love lives and threaten couples' relationships.

There are also concerns that the growing number of people hooked on adult sites will fuel demand for illegal material such as child abuse.

More than nine million men - almost 40 per cent of the adult male population - logged on to sex websites last year, more than four times as many as the estimated two million in 2000.

The number of women downloading Internet porn soared 30 per cent to 1.4million.

Forty per cent of couples having problems with their relationships say Internet pornography is at least partly to blame.

Relationship experts said women have to compete with 'perfect' models online, which could lead to an explosion of young people unable to hold down normal relationships.

Christine Lacey, a senior counsellor with the relationship advice service Relate, said: 'On the Internet there are no bounds.

'You can look at the most perfect bodies doing the most unusual sex practices and having sex whenever you want to watch.

'What normal woman can compete with that? If people are watching this sort of thing all the time without contact with other people, it can normalise it.' Clinical psychologist and author Oliver James said: 'If a man looks at a lot of pornography - in which women are essentially slaves - it interferes with their ability to sustain a real relationship.'

The findings were made in what is thought to be the first definitive study of Internet pornography, for the Independent on Sunday by analysts Nielsen NetRatings.

The research found men and women who visited such sites spent 40 minutes on average each month looking at images.

One in four men aged 25 to 49 - around 2.5million - had viewed online hard-core images in the past month alone.

And the explosion of Internet pornography has also resulted in more than half of all children viewing adult images 'while looking for something else'. Liberal Democrat health spokesman Sandra Gidley said she was 'alarmed' by the material available and particularly how easy it is for children to be exposed to it.

The MP added: 'I'm concerned that the boundaries are being pushed on what is acceptable. Some of the hard-core stuff is quite shocking.'

Men tend to prefer picture-based websites while women prefer erotic chatrooms - although they are more likely to view using porn as an act of betrayal. The UK porn industry is now worth around £1billion. The business is valued at £20billion globally.

Unlimited free access with broadband technology is largely behind the growth in pornography on the Internet.

While it appears to be killing off Britain's soft-core porn magazine market, which has halved to 500,000 sales each month since 2000, many critics believe it has opened the way to the adult movie market.

A total of 28 R18 movies were passed by British censors last week, compared with 25 for the whole of 2000.

There are now 6,500 titles available in Britain.

Yesterday, the Internet Watch Foundation, the online child abuse watchdog, warned the popularity of Web porn is leading more people into child pornography.

Thaddeus Birchard, a psychotherapist, said: 'It is infinite. It's like falling into a vortex. 'There is a tendency for users to go for hit after hit and eventually get totally caught up in it.'

The scale of the problem has been highlighted by Operation Ore, a United States-led investigation into an online service offering thousands of images of abused children.

More than 7,250 British subscribers were identified from their credit card details, leading to 2,000 prosecutions.

Okay, so let's see. Pornography:
- Interferes with men's ability to have normal relationships
- Makes normal women have to compete with perfection
- Makes women into slaves (!)
- Is killing the soft-core porn magazine market
- Leads people into child porn

Sounds like bad stuff. And oh my god, more and more people are seeing it! Next step: censor it and shut down its evil producers, right?

Effing ridiculous. Blaming porn as the cause of people being unable to have relationships work is totally absurd. A porn fixation might be a symptom of a relationship that's not working. Relationships are mostly a function of whether communication is working, not whether somebody is looking at porn or not. And I'm not convinced that children seeing pornographic images is damaging to them--I've got to think it's not as simple as that.

I know I'm largely preaching to the choir here... But what are your thoughts?