So today I read one of the most disturbing articles in our university magazine. The article was about pornography, but it wasn't just the subject matter that made it distrubing. It was the fact that the author left out so many things in the story, and that the students interviewed were absolutely either unaware or uncaring about the seriousness of their situation. They commented on the amount of memory that the porn took up on the computer, saying that their computers were running slowly and they were constantly running virus scans, but it didn't even seem to phase them. One student was quoted as saying that his parents deleted a whole bunch of his porn over christmas break, but that he still had about 2 gigabytes left on his computer. Um, did it ever cross your mind that you have 2 gigabytes of flat, albiet smiling, nonresponsive women on your computer? Like its no big deal. Then, we find out that the students who contributed (who's names were also changed to "protect anonymity." hmmm- there's no shame in looking at pictures of boobs, but don't put my name in the article, because that might harm my reputation?) had experienced a decline in their social life. One guy said that he spent so much time looking at porn in higschool that his GPA went down, and now he's not in an "Ivy League" school. They sacrified other things in order to get on the internet and take full advantage of their liberty, but they didn't mind it at all. Hello! Your life is going down the drain because you spend too much time looking at pictures!! Another one said that he doesn't have a girlfriend, so he doesn't have to worry about any of that. (Don't ask me what that means.) Ok, so you don't have a girlfriend, but as long as you can look at a flat screen and imagine, maybe, that the perfect bodies of the women you see there love you, if in fact you can look past the body at all and give them a human status by affirming their mind and spirit along with their body, you'll be fine. That's sick.
And it gets more disturbing: these guys just didn't care. The ability to see naked women and enjoy their image (not the real thing, just the image, mind you) was worth the price of the hours a day they waste looking at them. How sad. I could go on about how pornography encourages the objectification of women, but I think I'll leave that one for another day. Regardless, I'm still struck by the pitiable state of those two students, and the many people like them. I want to hug them and say "It's an addiction! You need help!" But I can't, so I resort to ranting about their predicament online. *Sigh*
I'm just so saddened by this article, and the fact that it addresses none of the really meaningful things that pornography destroys, besides memory chips. I have always been impressed with the knowledge that porn is wrong and sick, and to hear it being treated in such a light way may be the most disturbing thing about my reading of this.