no surprise to me - when my political & religious views were so bound up tight i had a much bigger struggle with porn. through my recovery i have learned that having opinions that are so stringent made me so legalistic - the steam has to go somewhere - and with their horrible view on women this isn't a shocker.
New Scientist - Porn in the USA - Conservatives are the biggest consumers
via queer messages
5 comments:
The funniest rebuttal I have heard on this was a evangelical pastor; he stated that the survey was, of course, flawed and cited another one that showed liberals admitted to watching more porn than conservatives did.....talk about missing the point.
A friend used to say the strangest reaction he ever got from his parishoners was when he would see them at the local video shop. They would be panicked that somehow their choice in videos would point out some sinful tendency in their lives. And, I suppose, in a number of cases, it did.
The interesting word in Anj's comment was the word admitted - it doesn't mean that porn was watched any less by conservatives, just that fewer "liberals" gave a rat's patootie whether anyone else knew about their tendencies.
There's an old joke about Baptists recognizing everyone they knew in the coffee shop and no one they knew in a liquor store...but that would be a cheap shot.
Someday, the Institutional Church will recognize the phrase "There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one."
Not to mention some guy who said, "Let them without sin cast the first stone..."
It's all in that Book that they love to read parts of, but no one wants to read the entire thing....
(Forgive me if I steal this link, and repost these comments at my house too.)
Yup, it seems to me that fundamentalist thinking contributes to the tendency to have a personality schism. Perfect and harsh on the outside, but hiding obsessive needs and addictions when no one's looking.
bobbie, i am an intern working for a ministry called harvest usa. we work with people with sexual addiction, same sex attraction, wives of husbands who are addicted to porn.. and i have to respond to this.
the folks that walk through our door are, for the most part, christians. they are leaders,elders, some may be pastors. porn cuts across age, gender, nationality, spirituality. The ultra conservatives may have their heads in the sand because they have no clue how to deal with what is in front of them. I'm not sure that has anything to do with what they think about women. I think they refuse to look at what lurks in their own hearts. And they seem to think that only 'the world' has that 'kind of sin'. It's sad... harvest has been turned away by supposedly christian churches because 'that sort of thing isn't found here'. HAH!
it's not a matter of liberals vs. conservatives. it's everywhere, sad to say. Maybe some day they will wake up and see what they have been hiding from, and the damage that has been wrecked because of their deliberate ignorance.
unfortunately, i hear a lot of people say their exposure to porn was as a small child. Dad left something lying around the house... and then it just gets passed down to the next generation.
I found when I was depressed that I hated movies I'd loved. I remember watching Shirley Valentine, about a British housewife who goes off to Greece and I loved it, but as a depressed woman I couldn't watch it, I though, how vacant her life was, I didn't see the humor at all.
So I understand the comment you make about having a bigger problem with porn when your religious views were tighter. It's almost as if we need to be healthy to breathe right.
Thanks for posting this.
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