Word: porn
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...researchers and therapists routinely use porn films to prod troubled couples into overcoming their sexual inhibitions. Says Dr. Zev Wanderer of the Center for Behavior Therapy in Beverly Hills: "Watching explicit sex makes the patient willing to try in his own life what he has seen on film...
...opponents of porn, that is one of the problems. Will porn's power to lessen inhibitions, which has perhaps already won some acceptance for practices long regarded as aberrant, do the same for rape and sadomasochism, both now part of the usual repertoire of film and printed porn? Writer Irving Kristol complains porn is considered harmless "by the very same people who seem convinced that advertisements in magazines or displays of violence on television do indeed have the power to corrupt...
U.C.L.A. Psychiatrist Robert J. Stoller, author of Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred, argues that hostility is the essential dynamic of all pornography. In his eyes, even the mildest porn is tinged with aggressive voyeurism and the sadomasochistic search for a sexual victim. Says he: "Societies fear pornography as they fear sexuality, but perhaps there is a less sick reason...
...they respond intuitively to the hostile fantasies disguised but still active in pornography." In Stoller's view, porn is two-edged; it "disperses rage" that might tear society apart, but it also threatens society by serving as propaganda for the unleashing of sexual hostility...
...went on in ancient Greece, says Chairman Glen Bowersock of Harvard's classics department, "the U.S. hasn't seen anything." Classical pornography was largely created, he says, "by the most intelligent, erudite and cultured people in the society" and was a source of pleasure and lively delight. Unlike American porn, it was not "cheaply and badly done, solely to make a buck." And, argues Bowersock, contrary to popular legend, pornography did no harm whatever to the culture of ancient Greece. The most that can be said of ancient Rome, according to Jeffrey Henderson, Yale assistant professor of classics, is that...