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The RNC Wants to Take Away Your Porn. Maybe That's Not a Bad Idea?

A "faith-based" "non-profit" says Romney intends to make a war against porn a part of his presidency, if elected. You can have my porn when you pry it from my warm, sticky hands, thought a good percentage of dudes on the internet when they heard the...

Of all the alarming aspects of the Republican Party platform—and there are many, particularly if you're the owner of a vagina, or a brown vagina, or a poor vagina—there's one particular revelation contained therein that has got the internet's denizens paying attention. According to a press release earlier this week from Morality in Media, a "faith-based" "non-profit" Mitt Romney intends to make a war against porn a part of his presidency, if elected.

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Patrick Trueman, president of Morality in Media, and a former anti-porn prosecutor, says that the means through which we consume pornography are “a violation of current federal law.”

“Yet, most children in America have free access to obscene pornography as soon as they learn how to use a computer. The average age of first exposure to obscene Internet pornography is now eleven.”

New, stronger anti-porn language would suggest that “Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, was instrumental in jamming this language into the lusty and willing platform.

You can have my porn when you pry it from my warm, sticky hands, thought a good percentage of dudes on the internet when they heard the news. In truth, it's potentially bad news for both the anti-censorship, “freedom of information” crowd on the internet left, and the small government fantasists on the right who keep coming back to the Republican party like a whipped dog hoping for different results every time. It's also an issue that places Romney in opposition to small businesses, and hotels in particular, who rely on the sale of pay per view pornography for revenue, mostly because they've all got such horrible wi-fi service lonely travelers with ten minutes of down time have no other options but to get pantsless in front of the TV.

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But wait a minute. I never thought I'd say this, but maybe the right has a point here. Surprisingly, Trueman's argument against pornography isn't based on some nomadic desert people's ancient sky man fear book, it's rooted in the real, contemporary world. It's a technique known as "using reason" and "data" to argue for a political position, something we're not accustomed to seeing from the right. In fact his approach has caught me so off guard I find myself almost agreeing with him.

As Trueman says, the ubiquity of porn is a major problem among men in their 20s and 30s, and has led to an epidemic of "porn-induced sexual dysfunction."

"It's the Viagra problem for guys in their 20s," he said in an interview. After spending so many years masturbating to porn, they become "dysfunctional sexually because their brain maps are changed. They enjoy what they've been doing for ten to 12 years. Normal sex is not something that gets them excited."

There's ample evidence to back up his argument as well, although definitely nothing anecdotal to add from a freelance writer who sits at home in front of the computer all day who you definitely don't know.

A study this year from the University of Sydney found that "excessive users had severe social and relationship problems, and had often lost their jobs or been in trouble with the law as a result of their [porn] addiction. Some users escalated their viewing to more extreme and often illegal material."

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Look, I know a lot of guys who view pornography regularly, I do too myself, but how bad do things have to get where one minute you're opening up 4tube.com on your browser, and the next the police are involved? This is some serious business. What happens on the computer screen stays on the computer screen (literally and figuratively if you've seen most dudes' crusty laptops). That's how it's supposed to work in the world of fantasy, right? Not the case anymore.

As Dr. Gomathi Sitharthan, one of the researchers behind the study points out, in what is known as the “not like it was back in my day” scientific approach, the ease with which we can access pornography online now has completely changed our relationship with it, and as a result, our real life sexual relationships as well. Twenty percent of responders to his study said that they actually had come to prefer their sex life solo compared to their IRL experiences. Maybe it's because most of the responders aren't dating four different naughty babysitter cheerleaders at once?

Or five. Or six. That's the way it works with pornography. Much like anything else we become addicted to, a user must gradually escalate their dose in order to achieve that same original high. The "central consequence of overexposure to Internet pornography," writes Scientific American, "is hedonic adaptation, which means that what was once arousing no longer does the trick, and thereby addicts escalate to increasingly extreme ('harder') images."

And it's not just those of us of legal pornography-viewing age who this is affecting. A University of New Hampshire study this year said that pornography addiction is a problem starting at earlier and earlier ages. And it's a problem that's leaking over, not only in our ability to function as sexual beings, but also the specific ways in which we expect sex to play out. We are less interested in having sex with our actual partners, and when we do, we expect them to perform like the professionals we see on screen. That means completely hairless bodies, willingness to experiment with anal sex, multiple partners. As one article in Details a couple years back put it, “Considering the standard climax to even the most vanilla hard-core scene today, that means there is an entire generation of young people who think sex ends with a money shot to the face.”

That would be like playing basketball with your buddies and expecting them to be able to dunk just because you saw Lebron James do it. It's illogical, and most of us know it's illogical, and yet here we are.

With pornography revenues in the billions of dollars, and the availability only broadening, it seems unlikely that this is a consumer culture that can be stamped out so easily, and certainly not by crusading moralizers from the right. But it's worth considering whether or not it should be, even for those of us who'd otherwise never stand for such an intrusion into our media consumption habits, or those of us who balk at the idea of government interfering with what goes on in our own bedrooms, which, increasingly, seems to resemble so much else about modern life online: a nation of lonely, computer-addicted souls reaching out to people that don't really exist for fulfillment that's never going to come. No pun intended.

@lukeoneil47