Monthly Archives: June 2011

My Journey through Porn Addiction, Part III: ‘The Mechanics of Porn Addiction’

In the first two parts of this series I documented my descent into porn addiction and subsequent recovery. Despite the number of people affected by porn addiction, the whole issue is veiled by a fog of shame and confusion and none of the established therapies seem to be consistently successful. During the course of my recovery I learned that the more accurately I understood the psychological processes surrounding my addiction the more easily I was able to reprogram them in healthy ways. As a result I developed an intense desire to deconstruct porn addiction; to transform it from a mystifying complaint whose very existence is disputed into a clearly understood mechanical process, much like one of those exploded diagrams showing the inner workings of...

LA County Won’t Mandate Condoms In Porn

LOS ANGELES — An appeals court says the courts can’t compel public health officials to require and enforce condom use in porn. The June 16 ruling by the 2nd District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles upholds dismissal of a case brought against county health officials in 2009 by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation. In its suit, AHF contended the officials should be compelled by the court to issue a regulatory order requiring adult film performers to wear condoms in sex scenes and get hepatitis B vaccinations. The appeals court said the county health officer has discretion in his duty to prevent and control disease. The advocacy group’s lawyer Brian Chase says the case will be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

APMProject at Conference ‘Building the Good Society’

The Anti Porn Men Project will have a representative speaking at the Compass ‘Building the Good Society‘ conference in London this Saturday. The Project is taking part running a workshop entitled ‘Resisting Porn Culture’ alongside representatives from UK Feminista and OBJECT. Tickets for the entire conference are from £25 and there are a few left so you can still book here.

Is pop music getting more ‘pornified’?

Last week Mike Stock, -one-third of all-conquering pop production house Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW), which gave the world Bananarama, Rick Astley and Kylie Minogue and racked up more than 100 top 40 songs in the late eighties and early 1990s, including 13 number ones- spoke out against the music industry’s “slow but unmistakable descent into pornography”. He called on broadcasters to refuse to play videos or songs “they deem unfit”, saying it would force record companies to “to think again and clean up their act”. Music blogger Matilda Egere-Cooper said Stock has a point but that big-name backing is needed for his campaign to succeed. “The people who have power are the ones who can make this work – like a Kanye West or...

F-off Heff: on Playboy, sex, psychosocial stress and the jilted generation

Contributed by Adam Ramsay, co-editor of Bright Green I like sex. OK, that’s a pretty banal statement. Most people do. So, let me put it another way. I have no problem with people having sex as much as they want to, with as many other people as they want to. I’m happy for consenting adults to do together whatever they please. And, it’s not just that I like sex. It’s not just that I think people should be allowed to do whatever they please in the privacy of their own bedrooms. I also think we don’t talk in public about sex enough. Our sex education fails to equip people for the lives they are likely to lead. We turn it into a forbidden topic,...

(US) More Anti-porn groups protest against Playboy

Anti-porn groups are targeting advertisers of “The Playboy Club,” an NBC drama based the chain of nightclubs started by Hugh Hefner, in an effort to get the television network to cancel the show before its debut in the Autumn. The TV series is based on the real-life Playboy Club in Chicago, which was once one of the busiest nightclubs in the ’60s. The show is said to be about the ‘drama’ between the city’s powerful men who frequent the club and the Playboy “bunnies” that wait on them. Patrick Trueman, president of Morality in Media, an organisation that campaigns against porn in the media, said that the TV series will “contribute to the sexual objectification and exploitation of women and encourage greater acceptance of...

(London) HARDCORE: 10th Anniversary Screening

UK Feminista and OBJECT are to present a 10th anniversary screening of the groundbreaking documentary, Hardcore. Hardcore is a shocking, moving documentary which charts a young British woman’s attempt to break into the porn industry in Los Angeles – the city where ten thousand pornography movies are made every year. The result is a rare glimpse into the reality of working in the sex industry. “Hardcore is not a film that will leave any illusions about the nature of porn undisturbed.” The Independent The screening will be following by a discussion with Hardcore producer, Richard Sattin, and Dr Rebecca Whisnant from the University of Dayton (with more speakers to be confirmed). Here are articles and reviews of Hardcore from the Independent, the F Word,...

German Playboy features football internationals in lead up to the World Cup

The Daily Mail and Guardian recently reported on the inclusion of a few youth internationals in the July edition of the German Playboy. The move by the magazine is supposedly intended to “promote the women’s World cup” as the headline of the Mail read. However it should be argued that features like these actually accomplish the opposite. Features like these often aim at discrediting the stereotype that women who are good at sport are unattractive – or to put it in Kirstin Gessat’s words “the message is, look, we are normal – and lovely – girls.” However, instead of promoting the Football World Cup 2011 this feature promotes the objectification of women and I think could lead to the disqualification of the women’s skills on the pitch. This photoshoot also once again underlines that no...

Will the UK Government’s “Bailey Review” attack porn culture?

The Conservative-led government is keen to “take a lead from mumsnet” and address popular media concern about the sexualisation of children. Will this do something big enough to also reduce porn culture, by, for example, making people more aware of how adult choices are related to the sexualisation of children? I think not. The Bailey Review is not enough, might not even be much of a good start, and that optimism about it may reduce our efforts. Metaphorically, it might be like a stick of chewing gum as an answer to hunger. The Government has been happy to side with Mumsnet right from the start, and eagerly talked about the dangers of the sexualisation of children: In May , Prime Minister David Cameron vowed...

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