Interesting interview with Dr. Chyung Sun, co-creator of The Price of Pleasure

[redqueen]

http://cltampa.com/dailyloaf/archives/2011/01/24/the-price-of-pleasure-talking-with-a-vocal-critic-of-the-porn-industry#.TsvdsT2cJgE

I thought these exchanges in particular were quite good.

SA: When the U.S. government banned alcohol in 1920, a huge black-market erupted to fill American’s thirst for it. If porn was banned, the same thing would likely happen. Do you think porn fills a basic human need, or has it become a drug that we rely on?

Dr. Chyng Sun: We live in a society that deals poorly with sexuality and relationships. Look at the rates of sexual assault, sexual abuse, and divorces. I point to Dr. Richard Wolff’s insight that in a capitalist society, when certain needs and wants—such as sexual ones—are unfulfilled, then private entities come in to meet those needs. In the process, they also shape these needs and wants… often in perverted ways, I should add. So in the bigger scheme, pornography works the same way as sugary breakfast cereals. Do we need a hundred kinds of sugary cereals in a local supermarket?

(snip)

SA: The recent bestselling book on evolutionary psychology, Sex at Dawn, suggests that primitive humans lived in small hunter gatherer groups that were non-monogamous. Do you think our culture’s emphasis on lifelong monogamy as the normative relationship has created a need for unsatisfied partners to seek sexual satisfaction through porn?

Dr. Chyng Sun: In a society where half of marriages fail, I don’t think most people really take “lifelong monogamy” that seriously. I also don’t think most people find “sexual satisfaction” through pornography. Pornography is very much like McDonald’s: it’s everywhere, it’s cheap, the taste is predictable, and it does the job quickly but also temporarily. For some people, there is no risk involved in watching porn and masturbating, because they think they don’t know how to get better sex, or they can’t afford it (insecurity, lack of opportunity, lack of social and communicative skills, etc.). Or it has become a routine, a habit, or even a compulsion—particularly if the watchers started doing it when they were young.

We need more discussion about and understanding of sexuality, intimacy, and relationships. And I don’t think that merely watching images of people having sex, regardless of whether the images are violent or degrading, can help advance too much of that discussion. When I discuss with female friends their love/sex lives, the complaints are mostly about the difficulty of finding someone to connect with intellectually and emotionally, but not about the lack of good porn to masturbate to. Is sex really so hard if the involved people are open, secure, communicative, creative, playful, and kind? Is it so hard that we have to look at on-screen menus in order to know what to do, or even how to get aroused? So the issues are more fundamental. How do we become open, secure, communicative, creative, playful, and kind individuals? What could impair our ability to do so?