| A little porn is good for you | 2004-08-24 23:23 15 comments |
 by Flemming FunchIn Australia like many other places, prudish politicians have decided that they know what's best for people and are trying in various ways to outlaw pornography, or to install restrictive mechanisms to 'protect the children'. The trouble is of course that there's no particular factual or empirical basis for such policies. Its just what they somehow think is Right. Or, we could well say that the people who are proposing them have in one way or another developed their own perverted attitudes to sexuality and to children, which they're trying to make right by enforcing them on everybody else. It's an old story. You know, the awful sneaking suspicion that somebody somewhere is having a good time, and it's got to be stopped. Anyway, much to their displeasure, apparently some Austrialian researchers have studied a lot of habitual porn users and found that they typically are more relaxed, less judgmental and have better marriages and families. And what about children? Asked whether such results meant pornography was good for children, Dr McKee said: "I think you come there to an issue we can't answer - should children who are 16-years-old be allowed to be sexual?"And who says 16-year olds are children? Nature certainly seems to have something else in mind. But a lot of governments try to stop it. In the U.S. you're in various important ways considered a child until you're 21. Big mistake to keep treating people as irresponsible idiots in those years where the most urgent and natural thing they need to learn is the opposite. Big mistake to think one can pretend sexuality out of existence with oppressive laws. Anyway, most kids I know are the result of people having had sex, and having had a very good time in the course of it. Trying to then enforce that sexuality or images of sexuality should be kept out of families at all costs sounds a bit off-the-wall. Sort of anti-family or something. |