Pornography

Pornography, as described by Wikipedia the un-scholarly paper, "is the explicit depiction of sexual subject matter with the sole intention of sexually exciting the viewer."

I feel that pornography is a very sensitive topic, and since it is able to cause both positive and negative impacts on the public, I find it very difficult to decide whether pornography is "entirely right" or "entirely wrong". Thus, I can only say that pornography is like a coin: it has both the rights and the wrongs, depending on the target that it is affecting.

Most people view pornography as a very delicate question of human psychology, in which it carefully skipped or lightly touched. However, a great percentage of the human population would view pornography as something bad, as firstly they feel that pornography is demeaning towards the female gender. This is due to the fact that a great portion of pornography "features" females, in different suggestive positions and strange sexual behaviours (e.g. bondage). Many people who objected pornography feel that by featuring females on porn magazines and other forms of visual entertainment, it gives the feeling that the female is being dominated and humiliated by the male, and consider it both as a sexist type of behaviour and (sometimes) also violence towards the females.

Also, most parents that opposed pornography give the reason that pornography distorted the true meaning of sex and love and when other people, especially teenager who are still developing both mentally and physically, will be greatly affected by pornography. This may result in cases such as the recent one, in which a 13-years old girl was pregnant after having sex with a boy of the same age. Pornography is especially disastrous to teenagers nowadays, who are literally unstable concoctions ready to explode at any time. This, when combined with pornography as the catalyst, would often result in teenagers practising premarital sex and other behaviours due to the fact that they are "curious". Thus, I feel that pornography is as dangerous a material as drug itself when the target audience is the teenagers, as they do not know the true dangers of pornography.

However, on the other hand, when the target audience of pornography became the more mature adults, it appears that pornography helps reduce rape cases, as it can be seen in Japan, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world.

Hence, I feel that pornography affects different people of different age differently, thus its level of harmful-ness also varies. Thus, I feel that the best way is simply teach teenagers about the bad effects of pornography, as they are the age group which is the most easily affected.