The Indelible Bonobo Experience

“It’s about the double standard associated with Japanese culture,” says Simon Baker, curator of photography at the Tate. “It’s an incredibly polite, formal society on the surface, [but it] has this hidden underside of sexuality. Araki very effectively works on this relationship.” Is it art or is it porn? To Araki it makes little difference. In the end, his subject is the everyday – or his everyday – the poignant and the touching, the messy and the disturbing. (via Is Nobuyoshi Araki’s photography art or porn? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk)

“There was rape before porn, and if you could somehow magically remove porn, there would still be rape,” said Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. “It’s kind of silly to assume that mass media and porn is responsible for violence, but it’s not ridiculous to assume that these mediums reinforce values that lead to violence.” (via Is pornography changing how teens view sex? | Toronto Star)

• In a 2010 analysis of 50 randomly selected adult films, researchers found high levels of verbal and physical aggression. Of the 304 scenes analyzed, 88 per cent contained physical aggression, including spanking, gagging and slapping, while nearly 50 per cent contained verbal abuse, particularly name-calling. In most cases, the men were dominant and the women almost always responded neutrally or with pleasure. Only 10 per cent of scenes contained positive sexual behaviour.
• A U.S.-based 2011 study of 10- to 15-year-olds over three years yielded similar results. The 1,200 kids were asked if they had seen X-rated material, included sexually violent material, and if they were involved in sexually aggressive behaviour within the same year.
• A teenager’s brain is an ideal haven for pornography. Between the ages of 10 and 15, the teenage brain is in a heightened state of sexual development and maturity. This is also when many kids are first being exposed to pornography. Scientists have discovered the teenage brain is not exactly like the adult one — and that may influence how their brain responds to sex on demand.
• In recent years, scientists have done brain scans of children from early childhood through to age 20 to track brain development. For years the assumption had been that that gray matter — the thinking part of the brain — peaked at early childhood and gradually decreased. Instead, scans indicate that the volume of gray matter is highest during early adolescence, giving the brain enhanced elasticity, yet delaying its progress into adulthood. That’s because gray matter matures in a back-to-front pattern with the frontal lobe the last to develop. This is perhaps most relevant, as this part of the brain is responsible for executive functions, such as planning, controlling impulses, judgement and reasoning.
• MRI scans of teen brains also show that it is actively involved in a process of building neural connections, and thus the grey matter forges and prunes neural pathways. Scientists believe the “use-it-or-lose-it” process is actively at work here — and that how a teenager spends his days and nights will likely determine how his brain will ultimately be wired.
• Brain scans have also found the teenage brain is dominated by areas associated with pleasure and reward, and emotional response, perhaps explaining the emotional roller-coaster years associated with puberty.
• “In the teenage brain there is an imbalance of power between the thrill-seeking part of the brain, the reward circuit and the frontal cortex part of the brain, the higher brain that controls impulses and consequences,” said Gary Wilson, a physiologist and founder of the website www.yourbrainonporn.com. “This leads to the urge to seek thrills, especially sexual thrills, like Internet porn, and there is no inhibition of that.”
• However, some critics debunk such theories on pornography addiction as “pseudo-science.” They say there is no concrete scientific evidence that pornography is as addictive as drugs, or that it has the same detrimental outcomes as substance abuse. Studies on teenagers are even more difficult to administer, due to the sensitive subject matter. “It is difficult research to do because you can’t ethically expose underage people to pornography,” said Ybarra, who adds that in most cases research to youth is limited to self-administered surveys. “But the work is made even more difficult because people have a hard time untangling the scientific and the moral arguments around pornography.”
• Another complicating factor is that, while pornography consumption may be up, the “official” numbers of documented rapes are down. “Rape remains at its lowest level in 40 years cross-nationally, for both juvenile and adults … even at a time when porn is everywhere,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, an associate professor of psychology and criminal justice at Texas A&M International University. Ferguson has done a meta-analysis of all studies looking at the correlation between porn and aggression and found the linkages were hardly convincing. “We are just not seeing that relationship.”
• for both men and women, their understanding of what constitutes rape is also alarming. Almost 75 per cent of women whose experience meets the legal definition of rape don’t recognize themselves as victims. In the same survey, one in 12 men admitted to acting in ways that met the legal definition of rape or attempted rape, but 84 per cent of them said what they did was “definitely not rape.”