Dear National Post and Other Publications – Please Stop Publishing Garbage Articles About Porn

STF AdminAwareness, Culture, News

By Josh Gilman:

Dear National Post.

I appreciate your desire to print a diversity of opinions. But as a father of four, a husband, and….. actually no, caveats don’t matter, I don’t need additional qualifications. As a human. Who respects others humans. I am perplexed as to why you have for the third time, printed a mind-numbingly ignorant article on the subject of pornography, in particular as it relates to the recently released study on the harms of pornography.

Now before you accuse me of calling the authors of the article ignorant themselves, judging by their qualifications I would suggest that any ignorance on their part may be willful and not any particular comment on their intelligence. Still, if one is to look at the actual facts and arguments, they have produced an “article” which absolutely does not fall on the right side of the ignorance scale.

Which is why I’m perplexed as to why it was printed. It contributed nothing besides putting “violence and degrading” in quotations. Which has never been part of the discussion anyways. The arguments for relationships that mimic 50 shades of grey has been that people enjoy violent and degrading acts, not whether whips and chains were violence or degrading to begin with.

The article was so easily debunk-able that my colleague Jonathon Van Maren simply had to spend 10 minutes tweeting out evidence and research to reveal the entire article for the ignorant piece it is.

Feel free to peruse his collection of responses. If you can make your way through these articles, interviews and presentations and still think this article was worth the digital ink used to print it, I will be perplexed. In particular, listen to Van Maren’s radio debate with a pro-porn academic who readily agreed that the majority of pornography is horrible and degrading and contains messages worth combatting.

Let’s just remember this as well. If what we watch has no effect on our behaviour, than the entire ad industry is wasting trillions of dollars. I would think they aren’t, but you can decide for yourself, just please consider ALL the evidence.