Page 1 of the Home section of today’s Straits Times has an article titled “Anti-porn drive: 19 netted at Aussie airports”. (Click the picture for the full article.)
In the article, it writes that an 41-year-old SIA pilot Capt Ng (you can check his full name on the article) was arrested in a crackdown on porn at Australian airports. He was charged by Australian authorities and fined A$12,000. He was described by colleagues as a “nice chap” and “a regular family man”.
It was this paragraph that struck me most, because most porn addicts are not hardcore criminals. They are your nice chaps and regular family men.
Capt Ng was just unlucky to have been caught… or he may have wanted to be caught. Now this sounds strange, but I’ve heard a number of people share that their guilt in watching porn, or committing other indecent acts, has led them to secretly wishing that they get caught. Some have also shared that getting caught became a wake-up call for them because it helped them to realize how serious their condition was.
According to the ST article, it is not a crime to bring pornographic material into Australia. However, it becomes an offence when the materials are objectionable or abhorrent, which includes child pornography.
Unless you watch pornography yourself, you probably won’t know how many different kinds of objectionable or abhorrent materials are available online, many of them free to download. Speaking to some people who have no idea about pornography sub-genres, I’ve found that most people like them think that there are only two categories of pornography – softcore and hardcore.
I started to write a long list of sub-genres to show you, but it got too long, and frankly, I was kind of disgusted (with myself mostly) after writing it all out, so I decided to just direct you to the Wikipedia list, which is non-exhaustive:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pornographic_sub-genres
One of the reasons it’s non-exhaustive is because the pornography industry keeps coming up with new categories…. which basically says that for a porn addict trying to quit, it’s near impossible to get to the point where he says he’s seen everything and is bored by it. Just wait two weeks, and new material keeps coming up.
Frankly, I am happy to see that a general anti-porn movement taking shape in the world. Some people would protest against this, saying it’s their right to download and watch pornography, but similar things were heard with the Odex anime saga, and despite the protests, anime collectors stopped collecting after the threat of being arrested became real. I think the same can be done with pornography. As one anime fan said during the Odex saga, “It’s safer to download porn than to download anime.”
So, Singapore, something’s been done about anime, will something be done about porn soon?
Filed under: Culture of Death, Family, News, Pornography, Sex
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While porn may be illegal in certain quarters, there is a fundamental difference between porn & anime and that is copyright. So, for the longest time, no one actually apply to copyright porn (yet?). Sports Illustrated is not counted, as it is not porn but its images can be copyrighted.
“Odexing” all porn downloaders (in Singapore) would be rather embarassing. Why? Are we sure that our enforcers have not downloaded porn too? Except for one minister who said he has not watch porn before. Remember “the laws are there but we will not be proactive”
Currently, the thing people can do is to educate the young on the harmful effects of porn. At the end of the day, it is the individual who will decide what he/she wants to do with his/her life, with regards to porn.
If there is a fight on this, the arguments will flying all over the place as some will ask why the fresh trade is not tackled seriously too when both porn and prostiution are harmful, in relation to sex. Prostiution in Singapore has a (rather blatant) public display of activities (eg Geylang) while the porn consumers (termed as such?) are mostly doing things behind closed doors.
Well, this is what I can said. The social and legal implications are there and they are too complex as it is a world wide phenomenon. As someone said before, “the relationship is not so simple”.
The objections to downloading porn and downloading anime are pretty incommensurable, if you ask me. In the former, you object based on the good of the human individual; in the latter, on the basis that the protection of IP rights is needed for the good of society-at-large.
I do not believe criminal legislation is the best way to deal with porn addiction. For the porn addict, I think counselling and psychiatric treatment are better options than criminal sanctions. For the Internet, I do not think censorship is the way to go (assuming it is even feasible); it is a perilous slide down a slippery slope, once government starts censoring ‘pornographic’ material.
You may now that s. 30 of the Films Act already makes it an offence for any person to have in his or her possession a pornographic film (including on the computer). It’s just that there is no active enforcement of this law — sensible, IMO.
I don’t think porn does much for us as people, but I don’t think it’s as harmful as you say. You talk about objectification, which is a worthwhile concern, but that isn’t the nescessary sole result of looking at porn.
At it’s most basic, porn is pictures of naked people. People are social, sexual animals, and we naturally like to look at other people, and we like to look at them naked. Now, is it going to be beneficial to a person if their only experience of half of the human race is through pictures showing a highly dramatized, stylized version of the other half, focusing solely on one aspect of the human experience? Obviously not. Just like Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ would make for a skewed perception of the west if it was all, say, China had ever seen of us, if someone’s only contact with women was via porn, they would probably end up seeing women as sex objects.
But. And here’s the big ‘but’, the one you ignore – in the majority of cases pornographic images constitute such a small percentage of anyone’s, even a regular viewer of porn’s, experience of women, as to be more or less negligible. Sometimes people get so drawn into that one side of women, that one aspect of them, that it becomes all they can see when they see a woman. Obviously that isn’t good, but it also isn’t the nescessaty end-result, and it’s definetly not the majority of cases.
The majority of men look at porn once in a while, especially young, single men. Most people ‘engage in oral sex’. Most people masturbate. Most people fantasize about adultery, sodomy, threesomes, and lots of other immoral things. And for most of them it’s not a problem.
Blaming porn because everyone likes it and some people take in way too much of it is like blaming donuts for obesity. Sure, objectification is a problem, but does porn, nescessarily and inherently lead to it? In fact, at the root of objectification is lies more insidious, something that can come anywhere, any time – a failure of compassion.
Hi spelton,
Thanks for commenting on my blog, and apologies for the late reply.
We do need to question whether porn is something that is harmful or beneficial to the society. If it is harmful, then as a society, we can act to disapprove porn, just as we have done towards cigarette-smoking. Yes, it is still up to the individual whether he wants to smoke or not, but making it difficult for a smoker to find places to smoke, or increasing the costs of cigarettes, certainly give reasons to help people curb their bad habit.
Rather than imposing a fine or jailing a person who watches porn, a person who is caught with pornography in his possession can be made to undergo mandatory counselling. That would be more helpful than a mere fine or jail term, both of which can be unfair to the culprit.
Again the question goes back to whether or not we see pornography as something harmful to a person, and harmful to a society. If it is indeed harmful, then we must take action to reduce its occurrences, rather than to turn a blind eye to its presence.
God bless,
Catholic Writer
Hi la nausee,
I agree with you: counselling and psychiatric treatment are far better options than criminal sanctions. However, many people do not want to attend counselling sessions because they don’t think that their situation is serious enough. When will it be serious enough? When a person has turned to prostitutes to satisfy his lust? When he turns to massage parlours and social escorts? Every person that I’ve spoken to who visits prostitutes and uses the services of girlie bars and massage parlours, every single one of them started because they watch pornography.
Granted it is true that not every one who watches pornography will go further, but if we can nip the problem in the bud, then let’s do it. Let’s recommend counselling for anyone who watches pornography habitually, because having to watch pornography habitually is a sign that something is not right in the person. And if a person has to receive a court order to realise that he needs help, then that would be a good thing to have.
I wonder if it is possible for the government to block Internet websites that have pornographic content. Of course it requires that people constantly submit to the relevant authority any new pornographic material that appears on the Internet and is accessible from our shores, but I think that’s still quite feasible if enough people agree that pornography is harmful to our society. That’s one way of acting on s. 30 of the Films Act. After all, simply viewing pornographic material, even without actively downloading it, already leaves a trace of it on the computer.
But if we pay so much attention to the IP rights, why is it that we do not pay as much attention to the rights of a Singapore citizen to have a pornography-free society? What about those who feel that their rights to a decent society are being infringed upon? Are we to remain silent just as we do when an inconsiderate person talks loudly on his handphone in the cinema hall?
Things to ponder.
God bless,
Catholic Writer
Hi jjames3157,
One of the things that Pope John Paul II says about pornography is that it is not that pornography reveals too much about a person, but rather it reveals too little of a person. That might be a curious thing to say, but it’s quite true. I come back to this later.
It is true that pornographic images constitute only a small percentage of anyone’s experience of women, but it does constitute a large percentage of a person’s experience of sex. Consider the case where a person has never had sex before, and all he knows about how to have sex comes from watching pornography. What do you think his first experience of sex is going to be like? If anything, he’s going to be disappointed because it’s not as good as the pornography he’s watched makes it out to be. And I would say that it is true for the majority of teenagers – their first introduction to sex is from watching pornography found on the Internet.
Now coming to what Pope John Paul II said about pornography. The reason pornography reveals too little of a person is because pornography only reveals the physical aspect of a person. A person who watches pornography does not develop a relationship with a person; rather he develops a relationship with an image (or a video). Do we really think that the woman acting so coyly in front of the webcam is really looking into our eyes? Obviously we don’t think so, but when we are in the heat of the moment, we like to believe so. At the end of it, the person who is masturbating to the pornography he watches imagines that he is having sex with the woman, but when it is over, he is really just sitting there all by himself, and that’s a sad, sad way to live.
When he tries to take this experience of a fantasy into the real world, he finds that the world doesn’t behave quite according to what he watches in the pornographic film. Entering a relationship with a woman is a lot more than having someone to turn you on as and when he wants. There is so much more to a relationship, including discovering the other person.
I have encountered so many young men who today are single, unattached, and don’t have a clue why they can’t get a girlfriend. Often it has to do with their porn addiction and the way that they have looked at women all these years. They don’t see women as persons to know and grow to love, but they see women as objects of desire. They are not willing to put the effort in to develop a real long-lasting relationship with women. It’s not that they don’t want to, but their addiction to pornography – which probably started in their teenage years – has conditioned them to treat women as objects.
These are not bad young men, or even hedonistic young men. They are your classmates, your friends, your nephews, your sons, your brothers. They are people like you and me, but have been brought up in a pornographic culture. I can say with absolute certainty that they are people like you and me, because I’m one of them. I’m not some Christian sitting on his high horse condemning people who watch pornography. I’ve been deeply involved in pornography for more than half my life, and have only recently started to see the dangers of it, and am spreading the word.
What do you think is going to happen to young women if they grow up in a pornographic culture? The majority of young women are going to become what young men want them to be. They are going to become what they watch on television, see in the movies, and watch on the Internet. Pornography has already invaded our culture; it is no longer something that is only found on the Internet. It is on our television, our cable TV, in our video games, in our cinemas, in our anime, in our magazines, and on our streets.
These young women, so as to be accepted by young men, are going to give in to peer pressure and culture and become the objects that young men want them to be. Only the strongest-willed and the most well brought up young ladies will have the willpower to resist such temptation to become what others want them to be. And they will be shunned and treated as outcasts because they value vritues like virginity, chastity, and true love.
We’re looking at the next generation of young people who look to our generation for guidance. If our generation says it’s okay to watch pornography, these young people are going to be the next porn stars. Remember Tammy? Our young people are already porn stars in their own homemade videos. Tammy shocked our generation, but to people of their generation, Tammy was just like anyone else. No big deal. They are just emulating their favourite pop stars like Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Edison Chen. That is the kind of pornography that is most dangerous; not the x-rated kind that we find on the Internet, but the kind that we see all around us already.
I’m not blaming pornography for the problems that we have, for our decrease in sexual morality. Rather, the reason that pornography has been allowed to invade our society already is because we have not stood up to it. We have let it walk over us and we have not voiced out our concerns to the people who can do something about it.
If we think that most people who fantasize about adultery, sodomy, threesoms and other immoral things don’t have a problem, then perhaps our thinking is the problem, because it is not normal to fantasize about such things in the first place. The reason why we think we don’t have a problem is because our society’s sexual norms and morals have already been eroded to such an extent. Consider for a moment where most people even get the idea for their immoral fantasies. Does it not come from pornography?
But again, it is not pornography that is the problem, but we who are too weak-willed to stand up to such a problem. We have let popular opinion, fashion and pop culture run us down and steal our will to dight against the threat and dangers of pornography.
But it’s not too late. We still have a fighting chance, because we are not as far gone as some other countries. We can still reverse the trend, and our small size as a nation makes this easier than in other countries. We need to first be able to see the danger, and sound the alarm before our entire ship sinks. Yes, it is that dangerous. Take a look at other countries and you will see the risks. Look at the U.K. for example, and see the soaring rates of STDs, the young age at which people first start having sex, and the overall breaking down of the society’s norms. And even so, there are voices over there that are trying to turn things around.
We can still turn things around here in Singapore.
God bless,
Catholic Writer