According to Harper's Magazine, there's a website, based out of the United States, which features over seventeen hundred erotic stories about the fictional character Harry Potter and his friends. This website receivess almost two hundred thousand hits a day; for perspective, this blog gets about 20-30 hits a day, that's embarrassing.
It is tough to imagine a society constructed in such a way as to prevent any of its citizens from viewing conventionally-obscene materials. The greatest two tangible forces of influence on pornography prevalence are: 1) a society's ease of access and 2) the influence of the community's standards on a person's self image. The rise of the internet, indeed the rise of technology in general, has made great developments towards both connecting the world and isolating it at same time: shielded from the public's eye, all sorts of traditionally defined obscenity can be accessed by the average person with only a few clicks. It's no surprise, therefore, that men and women are more inclined to look at pornography than ever before, it's a matter of access.
It's true that people are more inclined to view pornography now than ever before, but are they more predisposed? I tend to view foul rap lyrics, video game violence, and internet pornography--aspects of society which question community standards--not as the problems themselves, but as reflections of the problems. Perhaps it's not the pornography which is giving rise to psychological illness, but the psychological illness which is giving rise to pornography. In fact, an argument can be made that pornography itself is a safe way to vent urges such as sexual anxiety (re: teenage boys) or much more odious sexual proclivities (re: pedophilic desires to read Harry Potter erotic stories), with much reduced physical harm, however I am not about to debate the virtues of this argument.
Instead, I'll say this: rather than lash out to censor internet pornography (or rap lyrics or video game violence for that matter), perhaps we should examine the psychological undercurrents of its enormous popularity. It's easy to explain the psychological cause of teenage sexual anxiety (coming of age, surges of testosterone, difficult social situations, just to name a few), but beyond that, it's much more difficult to explain the psychological causes of the more incendiary sexual inclinations which lend so much to the popularity of internet pornography. We can remove the raunch from the internet and we can censor it from our music stores, our television screens, and our radios, but we can't, no matter how hard we try, remove the mental impulses which facilitate its existence. We should examine them, not run from them.
There are two causes which I wish to examine: sin and jealousy.
Anthropologists have found that the concept of the obscene as had a place throughout all of human history; almost every society has shunned pornography and exhibitionism in some way. Now, as in the past, community standards are dictated by our religious or moral law. The suppression of sexual knowledge and action--a tenant of this moral law--is a stance I believe to be morbid and unnatural and responsible for great amounts of human misery. Curiosity in sex, like curiosity in dinosaurs and cowboys, is natural and should not be suppressed; ignorance, in my mind, is never justified, and certainly not for something as important as sexuality. Those who are told that drinking is wicked, cursing is wicked, and sex is wicked, despite their conscious rejection of these beliefs when they inevitably fail to adhere to them, are subconsciously tyrannize by this sense of sin and guilt throughout their lives. Perhaps Harry Potter erotic stories exist as a reflection of this sense of sin--by descending into infantile fantasy, by removing oneself from healthy sexual expression, one can reject and escape concepts of guilt and fear brought on by "the sinfulness of sex" so deeply entrenched in our psyche.
Jealousy, like sin, is a concept rooted in human nature, and one which I believe to be partially responsible for the existence of internet pornography. Throughout history, men have had a paternal desire for fatherhood, and in turn, a desire to dominate over their female spouses in order to secure their connection to their children. This urge, in many ways, has triumphed: the rights of women have almost never corresponded to the rights of men within relationships; women, for thousands of years, were property expected to be subservient and proper. It is the desire of women for political and social equality, along with liberating inventions such as birth control and liberating movements such as the working mother, which have significantly decreased the viability of complete female subjugation by men. Even in my high school, I see this phenomenon. The smart, tall, independent, and attractive girls, the ones with certain self-assurance, are not the ones consistently with boyfriends; it's the simple, dependent girls willing to sell sexual charm who get all the guys. Sure, men don't physically take ownership over women, but those psychologically impulses still pervade.
The rise of pornography, paralleling the rise of female independence and equality, is a reflection of this male desire to dominate and objectify women in a world where such practices are less and less smiled upon. Many men (at the very least many boys in high school) are attracted to a certain definition of femininity, a certain type of "lady." As women assert their social, economic, and political power, those types of girls will be less and less prevalent. Porn fills that void. As for ol' Harry Potter, what better way to remove oneself from the consequence of human equality; what better way to objectify, violate, dominate, and subjugate someone, then to strike up a relationship with a person who never even existed in the first place?
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