We can’t just rule out any attempts to find value in pornography based on a moral resistance to it. Porn is with us for a reason and can serve a purpose. The need for sexual images, outlets, and stimulation are an important part of forming identity and experiencing pleasure. However, we can and should make distinctions about the types of pornography that causes real harm, projecting degrading images of women and most disturbingly exploiting children and adolescents. There are the unrealistic and ridiculous portrayals of human sexuality and how the porn industry uses its workers that must be challenged as well.

It also appears that the porn industry is becoming increasingly irrelevant as amateur videos dominate various websites distributing free pornographic content. Sex acts are now transmitted to us from the privacy of homes and bedrooms across the globe. Our exhibitionist and voyeuristic tendencies are on full display. The desire for someone else and how it expresses itself in our sexuality creates some of our deepest, most beautiful and disturbing experiences. An unrelenting need for connection and release end up driving us to the most intimate, vulnerable, and revealing aspects of who we are and what we want from one another. So we have to ask ourselves what is this need to view porn all about? On this note, Ryan Sager has a post titled “Is Porn Good For Us?” Here is an excerpt:

Is porn good for us, as a society? Is it at least not bad — as in, neutral? I’m guessing most people who read this blog are pretty open-minded types without any major hangups about sex. But porn panic is also pretty common in our political culture (of course, find me the politician railing against porn and I’ll show you the leather fetishist with a dungeon in his basement).

While the question of free speech is philosophical, the question of whether porn does any social harm is an empirical one. And the data is pretty clear: Pornography either reduces sex crime by giving males a non-violent outlet for excess sexual impulses, or it has no effect.

(Find the photograph above here.)