Pope Admits Priests, Nuns Watch Porn

That’s not a “porn problem” then; that’s a “society problem”. So then the discussion should shift to discussion the problems you see in society, and not revolve around porn. But you are calling porn “the problem”.

Why would we put gay porn aside (other than the fact that it does not conform to your argument against porn). Gay porn is still porn! If porn is the problem, then your arguments should apply across subgenres of it. The fact that they don’t serve as evidence to me that many of your arguments against porn as a whole.

But you didn’t mention that at all until I raised it (which is part of my point). Your framing of victimhood on this issue is one-sided. You’ve based much of your argumentation on the testimony of a small sample of female ex porn stars, which biases your outlook.

That doesn’t make something misogynist! As you’ve already pointed out, men consume more porn than women do, and heterosexuals outnumber homosexuals. Logically…of course the focus of more of it will be women. Misogynistic means promoting hatred, prejudice, or discrimination against women. Advertising a product consumed mostly by straight men by sexualizing women is not misogynistic. It’s a successful business model. If women consumed more porn then producers would do the opposite. If there were more gays consuming porn then most porn would focus on the male (and you wouldn’t have a problem with that). To say that it’s only a problem BECAUSE it’s women being advertised is a double standard.

A quarter to a third of your consumer base being women is still a sizable minority. I’ve already conceded that a majority will be men, but that explains why they market women the way they do.

Sure you SAID that, but you haven’t provided any evidence or cited any examples of it. While theoretically anyone can be a victim, I do not consider the industry itself victimizing anymore than any other industry.

Would I consider someone soliciting a homeless PERSON as a victim? Yes! And my answer would be consistent whether they were a man or a woman. Now, demonstrate to me that any of the pornographic performers on Pornhub or OF are in fact exploited and I’ll be the first to call for that video to be removed and for those producers to be arrested. Absent of that evidence, I don’t see how you have a case here. This is not happening in the majority of pornographic videos.

No, I’m not missing your point, I’m just disagreeing with it. Rape is not “unwanted sexual intimacy”. Rape is sexual penetration WITHOUT CONSENT! That’s the definition of rape and that’s why your attempt to equate performing in porn to rape is a false equivalency. In a rape, the person did not consent to sex and was forced to have sex anyway. This is largely where the trauma stems from. Deciding to have sex and then later regretting it is something that happens to almost everyone at some point in their life. But it doesn’t necessarily result in trauma. And even if the person experiences trauma from it, it’s not the same kind of trauma as a rape!

Yeah but again, you need evidence of that to back it up. You can’t just assert that and expect me to accept it as true.

That’s not how burden of proof works. You are the one claiming that they do. I don’t have to prove a negative. You need to prove that your assertion is true.

Anecdotal evidence is not empirical evidence. We have personal testimony of people who claim to have experienced trauma. But we don’t have any psychological evaluations of these people by qualified professionals, nor do we have any psychological studies on the effects of sexual exploitation in porn and how that compares to rape trauma. Everything you’re saying is speculation based on hardly any sample size at all.

Because that’s how burden of proof works. The correct question to ask is why should we condemn the industry based on anecdotes from a small minority of disgruntled past performers? Also, it’s not that those numbers are near impossible to obtain - it’s that nobody has commissioned a scientific study of the experiences and perceptions of most performers in the modern porn industry. That might yield some useful data.

Except that you haven’t actually demonstrated that the industry “relies” on that, you’ve only asserted it. This is an assumption based on the relatively few anecdotes that you have making your argument a begging the question fallacy! The notion that the industry relies on exploited victims is the thing that you’re trying to prove in the first place, and you haven’t done that yet.

You haven’t given me “good reasons” so to think what you think. I understand that you have “beliefs” about porn, but you haven’t convinced me that your beliefs are true.

I’m not sure if you realize this, but you’ve actually made one of my points for me. Remember when I said that exploitation exists in EVERY institution? We you just attempted to validate that. Unfortunately the examples you just gave are kind of false equivalencies. Let’s talk about sweat shops!

The reason people (in America) are upset about sweat shops is because it’s basically a modern form of slavery (often with underaged workers), who are employed by American companies like Nike operating outside of the jurisdiction of US Laws against such exploitation. We actually have laws against child labor that are being circumvented by companies hiring children in other countries with no such laws. We KNOW exactly who is being exploited and we can see the volume of exploitation that would be illegal here. That is not in any way equivalent to the porn industry!

As far as as the army goes…do you really want to go there? 🤨

I mean, I’m happy to have that discussion but the comment is borderline offensive and I’m just not sure that’s the best way for you to make your case.

Again, you have NOT demonstrated that this is the case. You’ve only asserted it! So I already reject your premise.

I’m not sure what you’re even talking about now. Please reword this.

That wasn’t my question; it’s actually a complete evasion! Abuse CAN and DOES happen in the Boy Scouts and in the church, which leads to trauma. And parents are aware that abuse can happen. So are they “dubious” for allowing their children to partake in something in which they can be abused?

Of course people CAN find anything traumatic. But that doesn’t necessarily speak to the nature of the industry. What you need to do is show that the average person (or that the majority of performers) are likely to be traumatized because of the industry. And that’s not something that we have data supporting. More to the point, one isn’t necessarily dubious for supporting an institution which has the possibility of leading to traumatized victims. And my analogies (which you avoided answering) were designed to demonstrate this.

There are people raised in the Church who were never sexually abused by a priest who are also traumatized by the nature of what they were indoctrinated into. So what? Does that make the institution inherently evil or the people who are not traumatized by it inherently dubious? That’s the question!

I actually agree with that. The problem is, you haven’t been making that case at all. The case you’ve been making is one against the porn industry. That’s what you’ve been attacking, not “economic problems” in the world.

Okay, you’re entitled to think that. I’m more interested in what you can demonstrate with evidence. What you think, feel, and believe doesn’t inform as to what is true. I don’t support or condemn institutions based on what other people think, feel, or believe about the institution. The thing you need for a compelling argument is DATA!

You’d have to ask the people you are calling dubious. But that’s an emotional argument, not a logical one. I don’t know that the prevalence of “4” is HIGH (I don’t even know what percentage you consider high) because you can’t show me that it is high. If you could show me that a majority of those involved in porn are abused, or my argument would be different. But you can’t show me that. You can’t even show me that the majority of those involved in porn “feel traumatized”. I can show a high prevalence of abuse in the Catholic Church by pulling up statistics and the Church’s own acknowledgment of widespread abuse.

Can you give an example?

I don’t know what you mean by that. Can you give an example?

What “injustice” are you referring to? Capitalism or porn? 🤷🏽‍♂️ If you’re talking about the injustice of capitalism, then you need a new argument. I wouldn’t knowingly support an injustice except out of necessity (Capitalism), and I wasn’t defending it or using this as an excuse to keep it going. If you’re talking about the “injustice of the porn industry”, then you’ve failed to make a case that the industry itself is the problem. It doesn’t need a defense or an excuse until you can prove that it necessarily leads to harm or injustice.

Nevertheless, your talking points are calling out the problems mostly associated with only a subset of pornography. Not the porn industry as a whole. Consequently, your argument is largely a fallacy of composition.

Lana Rhoades is ONE person with ONE story! I feel bad for her that she found her job traumatizing. But that doesn’t tell me that her job was inherently evil. It tells me that she should have chosen a job that was better for her.

Which is why I don’t care. The power is still in the hands of the performer. That’s NOT exploitation! And if it’s not exploitation then I don’t care.

All the more reason for the traumatized sex worker to become a janitor, no?

You keep saying that to me as if I ought to care. And yet, I don’t! The fact that the commodity is a body instead of a building literally makes no difference to me. People have the right to sell their bodies. There’s nothing immoral about that at all! It all depends on how comfortable the person is doing that. If they’re not comfortable with it, then they can be a janitor. This is not a moral issue for me.

I don’t need to make porn a scapegoat for tackling economic drivers that cause happy times for few and hard times for most. We can just go directly towards the economic systems which lead to poverty, under education, lack of healthcare, etc. The institution of pornography is irrelevant, and those who feel traumatized by having to do porn is only a symptom of a greater disease (not named porn).



1) I don’t accept that porn relies on misogyny (because you haven’t made that case yet, you’ve only asserted it).

2) Even if I did…the problem of misogyny exists in society outside the context of porn, and I don’t need to scapegoat porn in order to have a discussion about promoting women’s rights (which I do anyway). I consider your argument a non-sequitur.

I don’t know what a “borderline addict” is other than hyperbole! One either has an addiction OR they don’t. And if they don’t, then it’s not a problem. If they do, then THEY need to have psychological counseling IF their addiction causes them problems in life. The assertion that most porn consumers are addicts is a statement that needs to be backed up with evidence and yet again we do not have data to support that. Alcohol is readily available and normalized in society too and we definitely have people who are alcoholics in this country. But nobody asserts that most people who drink alcohol are “borderline alcoholics” because a- that sounds ridiculous, and b- that’s not a thing! Instead of inferring that alcohol is inherently “bad”, let the addicts and their therapists deal with the problems of their addiction. Society already has measures in place warning people of the dangers of alcohol addiction (based on actual science). With porn on the other hand, people rely on anecdotes and purity tests to demonize the industry. These are arguments of emotion, not logic.

I'm not using pedophilia as a smokescreen or straw man for anything. Rather, it is a straw man to say that watching porn *RELIEVES* the urges of potential pedophiles when it does not.

No one here has claimed that watching pornography does anything towards alleviating the drives of individuals who desire sexual contact with children. You keep harping on this particular point to evade answering my point, which is, once again: Would the pope agree that the viewing of pornography as an outlet for normal sexual feelings is better than keeping individuals in a state of unrelieved tensions that is known to be harmful to mental well-being for many?

Because you continue to go back to the pedophilia example rather than answer this plain question plainly, you are indeed constructing and employing a strawman argument in using it.

I imagine the Pope would be better saying clergy didn't have to be celibate anymore rather than saying they could use porn as an alternative. In fact, is there really any moral argument for celibacy? My understanding was it was more of a pragmatic thing so that whole families didn't have to be moved with the clergy member, but other churches seem to get by ok.

It's been a known fact for many years that priests have sex with nuns, nuns get pregnant, nuns give birth, they kill the babies because they can't POSSIBLY admit having sex or they won't be holier than thou anymore. So what's so surprising that they watch porn too?

 It is the Church's job to condemn all forms of sin. Therefore, nobody in the hierarchy would say "oh well. At least you are not committing rape..." or something along those lines.

Viewing pornography is not a 'sin'. Nor is the experiencing of basic sexual drives, or the expression of them in forms outside of the 'married, 2.5 kids' paradigm. It's the Church's insane insistence on this and only this as just barely acceptable ("better to marry than to burn"--which means, as Paul uttered it, to burn with 'lust'--an abiding obsession with him--not to burn in hell, as it's generally interpreted) that begets a goodly part of the madness to begin with.

Yes it is.

Porn, According To The Catechism Of The Catholic Church

Have you ever heard of Christopher West and/or The Theology of the Body, amyghost? You should look him up. Very interesting stuff, & he explains Theology of the Body in a very good way.