The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson

Pornography and Prostitution

Introduction

If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then pornography is the world's oldest occupation.

But before I delve into a discussion about prostitution and pornography let me unequivocally state that I am totally opposed to child pornography. Those that promote child pornography, and those that consume child pornography, should be prosecuted for these acts, and if convicted should be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The children involved in pornography should be rescued and rehabilitated to reduce as much as possible the deleterious effects of their involvement in child pornography. And so it should be, and so we should make it be.

Let me also state that I do not believe that it is possible to stop prostitution or pornography. Many people want it and are willing to pay for it, and some people are willing to provide it for the right price. This is a fact of life, and to deny this is to deny life. To deal with life, other than for what it is, is foolhardy and wasteful. And I for one am not interested in pursuing a fool’s errand, nor wasting effort, time, or money in a fool’s errand. Anybody who believes that we can eliminate or significantly retard prostitution or pornography is foolish, and you should not pay attention to fools.

With the ubiquity of the Internet, pornography has, is, and will be available for anyone who surfs the web. Indeed, the needs of the pornographic industry to provide web content was a major driver in the development of the imaging, audio, and video capabilities of the web. And pornography continues to play a role in today’s technology developments. And the Internet is also changing the nature of prostitution. No longer do prostitutes need to walk the streets or hang out in public places to obtain customers for their wares. They post, blog, and advertise their services on the Internet, and arrange times and places to meet their customers to consummate their dealings. And I expect that the Internet will become a larger and larger source of business for prostitution.

Male and Female Sexuality

Men are actuated by sex, and sex makes the world go around. It always has been and always will be. It is hard-wired into the male brain by millions of years of evolution. It has the great evolutionary result of the propagation of the species, as well motivating men to succeed and achieve in life in the hopes of attracting and copulating with women (the more the merrier from the perspective of the male psyche). Advertisers and businessmen, entertainers and filmmakers, musicians, writers, and artists, and well as others all understand this and utilize sex to sell their product or service. This is why there is so much sexuality in popular culture. Sex sells, and sex sells very well. And this is why prostitution and pornography succeed and succeeds well.

Good modern scientific studies have determined that a woman has a sexual thought 10 to 20 times a day, while a man has a sexual thought of 10 to 20 times an hour. Men are primarily visual creatures when it comes to sex. Men are stimulated by the physicality of women, as this makes a woman more suitable for mating (on a basic level they are interested in the reproductive capabilities of a woman). Woman are generally less visual, but they too are stimulated by visual images. However, women are more stimulated by the physicality, success, and achievement of men, as they view this as the primary motivation to engage in sexual activity with men, as this makes them more suitable for mating (on a basic level they are interested in a man who can protect and provide for them and their children).

This is due to what evolution has wrought to ensure the survivability and propagation of our species. To deny this is to deny millions of years of evolution. We may believe (or hope) that modern men and women have gone beyond this basic instinct, but our brains are still hard-wired in this manner, and we cannot deny the hard-wiring of our brains. We may utilize our intellect, morals, and ethics to channel our basic instincts to a more cultivated approach to mate selection, but the basic sexual instinct is still within all of us. Modern society should encourage this cultivated approach to mate selection, but it cannot deny the basic instinct plays a part in mate selection. It’s how we balance these sexual factors that define our sexual society, and how we deal with sexuality in our society.

I you don’t believe in the basic instinct of human sexuality you should ask yourself the following questions: If you are a man and you see an attractive woman that has an air of sexuality, isn’t your initial reaction that you would like to have sex with her? And if you are a woman and you see a handsome and physical man who and has an air of competency and achievement isn’t your initial reaction that you would like to have sex with him, and possibly make him your own. Of course, it is! That first fleeting reaction is the basic instinct that I have been discussing. It is how we deal with that initial reaction that defines our sexual character.

So, what does this have to do with prostitution and pornography? Very simply, we must be cognizant of our basic sexual nature, in order to effectively determine how we should deal with prostitution and pornography in society. Men are driven by visual sexual stimulation that they see all around them, and they want to have sex with a woman because of this stimulation. As such if a man’s sexual needs are not being met with a real women man will often seek out images and videos of a scantily clad, nearly naked, and naked woman, as well as men and women engaged in acts of copulation, to satisfy their sexual needs. If their physical sexual needs are not being met by a real woman they may resort to prostitution to satisfy their physical sexual needs.

If a man is having difficulty in attracting and copulating with women, to the satisfaction of their psyche, they will often resort to prostitution and pornography to satisfy their psyche. We as a society need to accept this as human nature and set the bounds for what is acceptable in regard to prostitution and pornography in our society. Whether you engage in pornography or prostitution as a consumer or distributor is a personal choice. But it should be a personal choice based on informed consent, and not by any other factors. No one should be coerced into pornography or prostitution by peer pressure, intimidation, blackmail, extortion, threats of violence, or addictions. It is not informed consent if these techniques were utilized to coerce you into pornography or prostitution. If someone has so coerced another into pornography or prostitution by these means they should be prosecuted, and if convicted face the full penalty of the law.

The following is what I believe our society should set as boundaries in regard to prostitution and pornography.

Pornography

The main difficulty of pornography is that the woman or man who is distributing pornographic images or videos of themselves (porn stars) often has not made this choice on facts, intelligence, and reasoning. It is often an emotional or monetary decision based on external circumstances. Little thought is given to the immediate and future consequences of this decision.

The impacts on your life, if you decide to become a porn star, are considerable. I have no knowledge or expertise on this subject so I thought I would present the opinions of someone who is an expert – Jenna Jameson – one of the most successful porn stars of recent times.

Jenna Jameson's Twenty-Five Good Reasons Why No One Would Ever Want to Become a Porn Star:

1. Being a pornography performer can be bad for your emotional, mental, and physical health, and you will likely get sick at times as a result of your work.
2. In order to really succeed, you will likely have to get painful breast implants.
3. You will likely have to have sex with other people you find repellent.
4. Being a pornography performer can often be physically painful.
5. The porn industry will objectify you and influence you to see yourself as an object.
6. The porn industry and the people in it do not treat women with decency, fairness and respect.
7. The industry is full of strange and scary people, who are happy to take advantage of you – like “suitcase pimps”.
8. The industry will sometimes lie about you and not respect your wishes.
9. The other women that you will have to interact with in the sex industry usually won’t be very nice to you.
10. You sometimes have to lie on the job (or be quiet) in order to “maintain the fantasy” for men or your image.
11. You will likely be around a lot of people drinking and taking drugs, with a lot of temptation to succumb yourself.
12. Celebrities and the press will often treat you badly, like an object, and/or assume you want to have sex with them.
13. Your fans are often creepy and/or drunk, and none of them really care about your acting, talent or showmanship, they just want to see skin and sex.
14. Working in porn will negatively affect your viewpoint of men and sex.
15. It’s extremely difficult to have a healthy personal, romantic or sexual relationship with someone. Your career will likely negatively affect your relationship and your relationship will likely negatively affect your career.
16. The porn industry and success within in it can change you and others for the worse.
17. You may become tempted to become a “porn pimp” yourself, and bring someone into a world that you yourself find to be unhealthy.
18. Strangers may recognize you and try to attack you or rape you. Your safety will likely be threatened.
19. You will likely find it hard to do other types of work or feel that you can do so.
20. You may find yourself constantly seeking approval from others.
21. If you want to increase your income, you will likely have to have anal sex and sex with multiple partners.
22. You will likely end up touring strip clubs and doing stripping as part of promoting your career, and even though you may have already “made it” or become “a star”, you may have to work in less than desirable places, under less than desirable conditions.
23. You will likely be in the industry only for money or other reasons that aren’t the healthiest. (And therefore not be fulfilled in any way other than materially.)
24. Even if you leave the industry, your porn career will haunt you forever.
25. Since money alone does not lead to true meaningful fulfillment, you likely still won’t be happy, even when you reach the top.

Source - AntiPornography.org

Despite these reasons, many young men and women do become porn stars. In my observation of the “Cult of Youth” I point out the scientific reasons why young people often make bad decisions. The main reason is that your brain development is not complete until around age 25. Those brain function that is the last to develop includes mediating conflicting thoughts, making choices between right and wrong, and predicting the probable outcomes of actions or events. These are the brain functions that you need to make a wise decision on whether to become a porn star. Given this, I would seriously suggest that we raise the age of adult consent closer to 25, rather than the current 16 to 18 years that it currently is.

The impact of pornography on the consumer also has to be taken into account. Again, I have no knowledge or expertise on this subject, so I thought I would present the opinions of some experts in An Open Letter On Porn:

Pornography Poses A Serious Threat To Couple Intimacy And Relationship Harmony

By: Drs. John & Julie Gottman -  April 5, 2016

Pornography in relationships has been an issue for a long time. Even today, professional recommendations on how to manage the use of pornography still vary widely. We attended one workshop in a couples therapy conference that recommended to merely accept porn use, especially by men, as natural and harmless. While this may be an extreme view, many clinicians have suggested that if a couple uses pornography as a stimulus for intimacy, or if they both agree to read or view pornographic materials together, then porn use is fine. In fact, many professionals have thought it might increase relationship connection and intimacy. In the Bringing Baby Home new parents workshop, we initially took this view since our research had demonstrated that, after a baby arrives, relationship intimacy decreases and measures were needed to strengthen the intimate sexual connection.

Recently, however, research on the effects of pornography use, especially one person frequently viewing pornographic images online, shows that pornography can hurt a couple’s relationship. The effect may be true, in part, because pornography can be a “supernormal stimulus” (see Supernormal Stimuli by Deirdre Barrett). Nikko Tinbergen, a Nobel Prize-winning ethologist, described a supernormal stimulus as a stimulus that evokes a much larger response than one that has evolutionary significance. One effect of a supernormal stimulus is that interest wanes in normal stimuli. Tinbergen studied male stickleback fish who would naturally attack a rival male that entered their territory during mating season. He created an oval object with a very red belly, more intensely red than the natural fish. The fish fiercely attacked the mock-up and subsequently lost interest in attacking its real male rival. Now the supernormal stimulus evoked a reaction, but not the normal stimulus.

Pornography may be just such a supernormal stimulus. With pornography use, much more of a normal stimulus may eventually be needed to achieve the response a supernormal stimulus evokes. In contrast, ordinary levels of the stimulus are no longer interesting. This may be how normal sex becomes much less interesting for porn users. The data supports this conclusion. In fact, the use of pornography by one partner leads the couple to have far less sex and ultimately reduces relationship satisfaction.

There are many other factors about porn use that can threaten a relationship’s intimacy. First, intimacy between couples is a source of connection and communication between two people.  But when one person becomes accustomed to masturbating to porn, they are actually turning away from intimate interaction. Second, when watching pornography the user is in total control of the sexual experience, in contrast to normal sex in which people are sharing control with the partner. Thus a porn user may form the unrealistic expectation that sex will be under only one person’s control. Third, the porn user may expect that their partner will always be immediately ready for intercourse (see Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski). This is unrealistic as well. Research has revealed that genital engorgement leads to a desire for sex only 10% of the time in women and 59% of the time in men. Fourth, some porn users rationalize that pornography is ok if it does not involve partnered sexual acts and instead relies only on masturbation. While this may accomplish orgasm the relationship goal of intimate connection is still confounded and ultimately lost.

Worse still, many porn sites include violence toward women, the antithesis of intimate connection. Porn use can become an actual addiction with the same brain mechanism activated in other behavioral addictions, like gambling (see Your Brain on Porn by Gary Wilson). Pornography can also lead to a decrease in relationship trust and a higher likelihood of affairs outside the relationship. Many porn sites now offer an escalation of sexual activity beyond simply viewing porn that includes actually having sex with other individuals. Finally, the support of porn use is reinforcing an industry that abuses the actors employed to create the pornography (see The Empire of Illusion by Chris Hedges).  

We applaud major media outlets like Time Magazine that have joined the anti-pornography movement. Their April cover story titled Porn and the Threat to Virility dives into how modern men who grew up watching porn as children and teenagers have started a movement against it, hoping to shed light on the sexual material’s power to harm Americans.

In summary, we are led to unconditionally conclude that for many reasons, pornography poses a serious threat to couple intimacy and relationship harmony. This moment calls for public discussion, and we want our readers around the world to understand what is at stake.

John Gottman, Ph.D. and Julie Gottman, Ph.D. 

World-renowned researchers and clinical psychologists, Drs. John and Julie Gottman have conducted 40 years of breakthrough research with thousands of couples. They have published over 200 academic journal articles and written 46 books that have sold over a million copies in more than a dozen languages.

Source - The Gottman Institute

Given all these negatives of being a porn star, and the negatives of viewing pornography, why is the pornographic industry growing by leaps and bounds? I would suggest that the main reason is Modern Day Feminism and the Devaluation of the Male in today’s society.

Modern day feminism has little interest in men or the needs of men. They seem to be only concerned with the emotional and physical needs of women. Men play little part in their worldview, and the small part they play is considered unimportant. Men and male needs have also been devalued in today’s society, and in many cases, they are belittled or mocked. This has led to the male psyche reacting by ignoring or rejecting the norms of behavior in their relationships with women. If they are to be treated as unimportant, and their needs are too ignored or rejected, then they can treat their women as unimportant, and they will only consider what they need and want. And if they can’t get what they need or want from the real women in their lives they will get it from prostitution and pornography.

Of course, both the man and the woman need to set the boundaries of what is acceptable sexual behavior for them as a couple, but in today’s society, it is generally the women who set and enforces the boundaries. The frequency and regularity of sex, when to have sex, where to have sex, what positions to engage in, and the duration of the sexual contact is often decided by the woman. And that decision is usually based on the needs and desires of the woman, with little consideration of the man’s needs and desires. Feminist excuses abound as to why the woman’s decision is the correct decision for both of them, but it usually isn't the best decision for the man’s needs and wants. And when the man’s needs and wants are not being met by his woman they will often resort to pornography to meet their needs and wants. Some men, driven by desperation, will also resort to prostitution to have their needs and wants satisfied. And this is not good for both the man and the woman and the relationship between men and women.

But the unspoken truth is that men want and need a satisfying sexual relationship from a real woman. They want and need a woman who loves, honors, and respects them. They want and need a woman who is concerned about their sexual needs, and who is willing to work and apply themselves to meet their needs. And when they find that woman (which is becoming rarer and rarer) they will love, honor, and respect that woman, and will work hard to make that woman happy and contented, and meet that woman’s emotional and physical wants and needs.  And then both the man and the woman will have a happy, fulfilling, and complete relationship.

So, what should society set as acceptable boundaries for pornography, given that men are going to view pornography when their needs and desires are not being met? When pornography is viewed in the privacy of the viewers home it is that persons private business (except child pornography), and society has no business intervening in this activity. I would hope that the person viewing the pornography would keep it private, and not share their proclivities with the outside world. I would also hope that a man and woman can work out their differences so that a man doesn’t feel the need to resort to pornography. I would hope, but I do not have much expectation that this will happen, given feminist attitudes and society’s devaluation of the male.

Strippers and Stripping is the live form of pornography and should be treated as such. However, sometimes stripping goes beyond visual into physical contact. When this occurs, it is no longer stripping but prostitution and should be treated as such.

And truth be told practically all men have viewed and enjoyed pornography at some time, or many times in their life. Those men that won’t admit to this are either ashamed to admit it or are simply lying. And yes, I have enjoyed pornography, and I have occasionally been to a strip joint. I have seen strippers in all stages of undress, and have viewed images and videos of women in all stages of dress and undress, as well as images and videos of men and woman copulating. I can at least say that I have never viewed child pornography, and I have never been interested in pornography that was of a kinky nature. Good old fashion images and videos of naked women, and of a man and woman enjoying each other’s sexuality, are sufficient to satisfy my pornographic desires.

Prostitution

Should prostitution be legalized? One of the consequences of legal prostitution would be that woman would be treated as mere receptacles for a man’s sexual gratification. After all, if a man has a sexual urge and can satisfy the urge by renting out a woman for a short period of time to meet his needs then he has little motivation to pursue a woman for a committed relationship. Therefore, you would see a precipitous decline in marriage or committed relationships as well as fewer children being born. This is also degrading for the female population and reduces their status in men’s eyes to mere objects for sexual gratification.

It also does not help the woman involved in prostitution as they would still be prey to pimps and whorehouses who need a supply of woman to meet their customer's needs. And these pimps and whorehouses would still utilize the techniques of sexual trafficking, addiction, and physical intimidation to maintain a supply of prostitutes and to keep the prostitutes working for their profit, and not for the benefit of the prostitute.

Therefore, legalized prostitution is a very bad idea for society.

So what boundaries should society establish in regard to prostitution? Again, let me reiterate that no one should be coerced into prostitution by peer pressure, intimidation, blackmail, extortion, threats of violence, or addictions. I would also support more legal intervention to stop the practice of pimping and whorehouse, as this is the exploitation of the prostitute by the pimp or whorehouse and that should never be allowed.

We as a society need to be assured that prostitution is a consensual non-violent act by both parties. That both parties understand what is to be supplied and expected of the prostitute. No verbal or physical abuse of the prostitute is acceptable, and neither party suffers a physical injury as a result of the encounter. This includes medical disease or medical trauma. If a medical disease or medical trauma occurs the person who spreads the disease or inflicts the trauma need to be prosecuted, and if found guilty is sentenced to the fullest extent of the law. Regardless if the person who does this was the prostitute or the customer.

We should also decriminalize the utilization of the internet to initiate the encounter. I would also increase the prosecution for the elimination of street walking or in public places for prostitutes to hawk their wares. This will make our streets and public places safer and more respectable for all people to enjoy.

Free medical clinics should be available for a prostitute to be tested and treated for communicable diseases, and legal advice should be available for the prostitute as to their responsibilities if they have a communicable disease. The prostitutes who utilize these free medical clinics would not be reported to the authorities for prosecution. Psychological counseling should also be available at the medical clinic to assist the prostitute with any mental problems they may have. I would also provide social workers at the medical clinics to try to assist the prostitute in leaving the profession.

As such I would reduce the severity of the act of prostitution by the prostitute but increase the severity of the act of prostitution by the prostitute's customer. I would also severely criminalize those acts that I previously mentioned regarding prostitution. I believe that this would encourage the prostitute to report the criminal acts that occur during the encounter, without fear that the reporting prostitute would be in severe legal jeopardy.

As prostitution is the world's oldest profession you are never going to eliminate it. Instead, you should attempt to reduce it by trying to satisfy men’s sexual desires and needs through a normal healthy relationship with a woman. You should also try to make it as safe for the individuals involved, and for society as a whole.

Most men will never admit to utilizing the services of a prostitute. This is because they view it as a failure to attract women based on their own attractiveness, which is deeply disturbing to their psyche. Those men who boast of using prostitutes are reprobates, and should be ashamed of themselves for their braggadocio, and shunned by those around them. And no – I have never utilized the services of a prostitute in my life.

As I stated at the end of my observation of “Addiction” I realize that I will face a tidal wave of criticism for taking this stance. Many will attempt to demonize, disparage, or denigrate me so that my message will not be heard. To them, I say stop the nonsense, and start facing the truths of Prostitution and Pornography. So, I will endure this tidal wave of criticism, for as President Abraham Lincoln said in his Second inaugural address

"with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right"

And I am firm in what I see as the right. For those who think I may recant some or all of this I would remind them of what Martin Luther said in defending his "Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences", which came to be known as The Ninety-Five Theses:

"I cannot and will not recant anything,
for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.
Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God. Amen."