Quote:
Originally Posted by jay santos
I don't think you can blame the church for creating a male-female dynamic that creates an environment for porn problems. This is a nationwide/worldwide epidemic. I just saw something on TV last night that had a few on a panel, including a divorce lawyer in Dallas, that talked about it from a non-religious, national perspective and said that divorces naming porn as a contributing cause were exploding.
I have an opinion on church leaders constant barrage of "avoid pornography" but at the same time giving no hope or no help to those caught in the trap. It's unfortunate that church leaders do this, but I don't blame them. I think by hammering the topic they scare a certain % of members away from it, which is a good result from a bad tactic. It's a big and scary problem and I don't think they know what to do about it, other than scare people into avoiding it. If this scare tactic helps keep my sons from porn, then yappari I will probably be grateful for the help as a parent. If one of my sons becomes addicted to porn, then I will probably be angry at the church's tactic because at that point I think their methods do more harm than good.
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In a sense I'm not blaming the Church. These tendencies are present in the larger culture (which has Victorian influences too). But Mormon's susceptiblilty to pornography has a particular place in the larger nationwide/worldwide epidemic. The smutty world rhetoric doesn't get us anywhere. Our particular problem has more than a little to do with Mormon's post-polygamy Victorian Uncle Tom-ism. It was the Victorians who, after the civil war, came after us for polygamy and eventually kicked our ass. Like bootlickers we've been reinscribing ourselves with their flawed sexual dynamic ever since and were paying the price for that. The cult of true womanhood rhetoric, the angel-whore dichotomy, the priesthood leader as the great Western ideal of 19th century masculinity, the repression of discussion about the sexual deviance of polygamy, it goes on and on. Have you ever noticed that sex differences are reified by many North American Mormons for their own sake and with little reflection? It's nothing short of astrological. People go to this stuff and then try to forge their identities from it. It's just like someone discovering she's a Gemini and then trying to refashion her personality to fit the description in the book.
Take a moment and consider what I've written. There's more than a little truth to it.