AndrewD wrote:
The answer, as history has proved - when you get too old.
Haha! Spot on. I've reached that point, but I have enough perspective to realise that's what it is.
Norman86 wrote:
Ah... But should should there be porn in the first place?
Surely these things are morally subjective?!
Morality is partially subjective, and we have different mechanisms for organising it. But there are a couple of things people tend to agree on before getting into specifics. One is the "golden rule" most famously known from a medieval rabbi who said, "Do to others what you would have them do to you." But obviously you have to go deeper than a mere action since you may get pleasure from harming yourself. It's the pleasure that counts, not the action of harming.
So, if lots of people really enjoy porn. And the actors are fully aware of what they're doing, and are not coerced, and are adults (and almost certainly making shed-loads of cash), and no one is forced to watch it, it's difficult to argue from principle that there's anything wrong with it. You can argue from "revealed" morality, but every revealed morality contradicts every other one so you can't use that as the basis for running a mixed society.
Since Christians would be angered if they weren't allowed to eat pork, and Hindus would be angered by the slaughter of animals, and Muslims would be angered by not being allowed to execute apostates, you therefore settle on a secular, principle-based morality as a compromise - which is what almost all pluralistic societies have done. And from that perspective there's not much you can say about porn.
You could say that it objectifies women, but it also objectifies men, and it's difficult not to see a compelling association between the legality of porn and the increasing liberation of women. In societies that restrict porn heavily, women tend to be taken less seriously. I'm not arguing that porn liberates women, only that it doesn't have any strong effect in retarding women's liberation.
