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So in case you haven't heard, this past weekend at the Family Research Council's Values Voters Summit,
Michael Schwartz, the chief of staff for Sen. Tom Coburn, said
porn can turn young boys gay.
But because young boys hate fags more than any other group, this fact could be used to get them to not to look at porn.
SCHWARTZ: But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct. After all, homosexuality, we know, studies have been done by the National Institute of Health to try to prove that its genetic and all those studies have proved its not genetic. Homosexuality is inflicted on people.
Schwartz then went on to quote a formerly gay friend who said:
'all pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.' Now think about that.
Think Progress » Coburn’s Chief Of Staff On Keeping Kids Away From Porn: ‘All Pornography Is Homosexual Pornography’.
Pornography, as we all know, is a difficult thing for Americans to wrap their heads (although not their hands) around. On the one hand, we watch more and more of it. On the other, we are increasingly puritanical about sex outside of marriage.
In part, we watch more porn because it's soooooooo easy.
The VCR brought the consumption of pornography into the the home. Before VCRs, and later the Internet, pornography was almost exclusively consumed by men (straight and gay in darkened but still very public theaters or through magazines aimed almost exclusively at men). With the widespread use of video pornography and followed by pornography on the Web, large numbers of women began to consume pornography as well. Today, according to the Nielsen/Net Ratings, women make up about one third of the audience for the $10 billion porn industry. The average time spent on an adult site in May, 2008 was five minutes and twenty-two seconds, indicating that Internet consumption of pornography is both everyday and definitely not accidental. In June, 2008 Insight Express conducted an online survey of more than 200 consumers about their perceived usage of online porn. The majority of the respondents, 67 percent, acknowledged visiting adult websites. Not surprisingly, more men (85 percent) than women (50 percent) admitted to watching pornography.
In addition to the porn we consume, we are also all—women, men and children—increasingly subjected to everyday porn. Everyday porn— the highly sexualized and commercialized images of mostly female bodies that are meant to incite consumption more than desire- saturates American culture. Porn stars appear on tee shirts and in music videos. Children's toys, like Bratz, look like porn stars. And celebrities increasingly looking like Playmates even as Playmates are celebrities. Many commentators have called the ubiquitous presence of commercialized erotic images the “pornification” of popular culture
All of this porn has created a variety of "sex wars" over the dangers of porn. Some porn scholars and political activists have claimed that porn is in and of itself a form of sex discrimination since it doesn't just represent men committing acts of violent sex against women, it encourages them to do so. Legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon once went so far as to suggest porn doesn't just cause individual rape, but the systemic sort of rape committed by nation states like that committed by the Serbs in the former Yugoslavia. Other porn scholars have pooh poohed the idea that porn has real world effects or at least no more than any other form of representation, like advertising.
After years of watching, teaching, and writing about porn I am convinced of only one thing: porn can turn you straight. The truth is that the vast majority of porn is straight. This porn is generally told as one of excess desire to fuck by the possessor of the penis and to be fucked by a receptive partner. This partner may possess a vagina, a penis, some combination there of, and most certainly an anus. One can only imagine oneself, within the limits of easily available and therefore mainstream porn, as either the insertive or receptive partner, but never both or neither.
In other words, heteronormative desire is the cultural script that commercial porn gives us over and over again. And eventually it sinks in: this is what sex looks like, this is how desire works. It's like advertising that way: this is what is fashionable and beautiful, this is what is ugly. The more you consume, the straighter you get. And that's how porn turned me straight. I watched too much, fantasized myself into it once too often and poof, all desires outside of the heterosexual matrix disappeared.
So parents beware: letting your kids watch porn might just turn them straight.