Malechallengemedia's Blog

Sadly the sexualizing of Society is accelerating with little concern for present and future generations. Paedophile rings are increasing and make headlines on a regular basis. Porn has become a huge industry with massive “collateral damage.” All males embracing healthy forms of musculinity need to be informed about porn and the harm it does to women, children and even the men who engage in it.

Rather than buying into the underlying themes such as a ”real man” must be a stud, I propose the idea that real, “real men” make a stand against porn, since it is yet another form of “invironmental” pollution for humanity to deal with.

The following is extracted from an excellent article, Men and Porn, in the UK Guardian, written by Edward Marriott . The link to the full article is below; I recommend it.

• 89% of porn is created in the U.S.

• $2.84 billion in revenue was generated from U.S. porn sites in 2006

• $89/second is spent on porn

• 72% of porn viewers are men

• 260 new porn sites go online daily

In the US, with the pornography industry bringing in up to $15bn (£8.9bn) annually, people spend more on porn every year than they do on movie tickets and all the performing arts combined. Each year, in Los Angeles alone, more than 10,000 hardcore pornographic films are made, against an annual Hollywood average of just 400 movies.

Just like drugs, pornography provides a quick fix, a masturbatory universe people can get stuck in. This can result in their not being able to involve anyone else.

Research has shown that boy babies are treated more harshly than their female counterparts and, as they grow up, boys are taught that success is achieved through competition. In order to deal with this harsh masculine world, boys can learn not to trust their own feelings and not to express their emotions. They become suspicious of other men, with whom they’re in competition, after all, and as a result they often feel lonely and isolated.

Yet men, as much as women, hunger for intimacy. For many males, locked into a life in which self-esteem has grown intrinsically entwined with performance, sex assumes an almost unsustainable freight of demands and needs. Not only does the act itself become almost the only means through which many men can feel intimate and close, but it is also the way in which they find validation.

And sex itself, of course, cannot possibly satisfy such demands. It is into this troubled scenario that porn finds such easy access. For in pornography, unlike in real life, there is no criticism, real or imagined, of male performance. Women are always, in the words of the average internet site, “hot and ready”, eager to please. In real life, by contrast, men find women are anything but: they have higher job status, they demand that they be sexually satisfied, and they are increasingly opting to combine career and motherhood.

Unlike real life, the pornographic world is a place in which men find their authority uncallenged and in which women are their willing, even grateful servants.

As our technology exploded so did a whole host of relationship problems…………

Marriot Concludes with a final ironic summary

The average man, of course, whatever his consumption of pornography, is no Bundy. Yet for those who have become addicted, the road to a pornography-free life can be long and arduous. Si Jones advises accountability: “Make your computer accountable, let other people check what you’ve been looking at.”

And the alternative to pornography, says Morgan, is not always easy. “Relationships are difficult. Intimacy, having a good relationship, loving your children, involves work. Pornography is fantasy in the place of reality. But it is just that: fantasy. Pornography is not real, and the only thing human beings get nourishment from is reality: real relationships. And, anyway, what do you want to say when you get to the end of your life? That you wish you’d spent more time wanking on the internet? I hardly think so.”

Extracts from an article “Men and Porn” by Edward Marriott, The Guardian, Saturday November 8, 2003

Full article at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7