Dr. Robert LeFevre: Pornography is good for us, we would be a far more repressed society without it. Dr Clarissa Smith: There is no one porn industry and some of them look much more like your sole trader than they do a big budget studio. We are not talking about an industry that like some juggernaut comes rolling into town and squashes everything in front of it. The largest grossing film of all time, Avatar grossed 2.7 billion on its own. Hollywood alone, okay? Its global profit exceeds 100 million per year.
Hooray for porn! What would we be without it? Bored, repressed, frustrated. Porn allows the timid to indulge fantasies they’d never live out in real life and the adventurous to experiment with new forms of pleasure. Now that it has stepped down from the top shelf and waltzed across the internet we can all enjoy it. All we need to do is stop pretending it’s something dirty and come straight out and salute it. Or maybe not. Porn after all is selling a lie: that women are always eager to engage in extreme practices, that bodies are always tanned and buffed, orgasms explosive. Isn’t this a recipe for frustration and disappointment? And to attract the restless voyeur, porn is always having to up the ante – cyber-sex is getting ever more degrading and extreme. Men are finding it harder to be satisfied with their real world partners, women are feeling inadequate and pressured to live up to the cyber-competition – this is the reality of pornland. So which is it – the great liberator of the libido or a blight on...
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