by Rachel Mascord, Dentist, Sydney, Australia

Today I became re-acquainted with music videos. I also got newly acquainted with the ‘pornification’ of our society.

As a teenager I loved my Saturday morning television fix of greatest hits, or ‘Rage’, ABC TV’s Sunday morning music staple. Many years have passed since I have watched a music video. This morning’s viewing at the gym proved to be educational… and deeply disturbing.

All the clips portrayed women being sexual to a degree that was blatantly pornographic. One video stood out in particular, and not for the loveliness of its music or the artistic quality of its content. No… it grabbed my attention with the fact that it was focussed on the bare behinds of its three featured dancers.

And I mean focussed. Continue reading “Pornography: Time to Say ENOUGH!” →

I have been inspired by the recent blog ‘Pornography, Internet & Sex – An Insight into a Distorted World’ and my thanks go to the author for having the courage to start up the conversation on this topic. Nearly all men that I know have been affected by pornography at some point in their life, but it is a topic that bears too much shame to talk about properly – shame that we have been part of it and shame that we have contributed to the abuse of women in this way. Yet the fact is that the author of the above blog is right when he says that porn is something that controls us. It is a drug, a form of addiction, and one that is more common than we care to admit. Like any person in denial, I never thought I had an issue with porn. I was not a serial or frequent user, more an occasional if not rare recreational user, as many people like to explain themselves when defending their use of addictive substances. Yet, when I started to really question my attraction to it, I realised that my occasional foray into porn was having a huge effect on my life… Continue reading “PORN – An Addiction Worth Talking About” →

by Anonymous

Thirty plus years ago I was seven years old when I found a huge pile of pornographic magazines at our family home in the UK. They were stacked in a fireplace behind an old welsh dresser. I was assisting my mother in cleaning out the old dresser that was no longer wanted in our house. When we found them there was no discussion, no normalizing of the situation, but ignorance and a quiet ‘they’re your father’s magazines’. Submissive really, and yet something in me was fascinated. I was hooked and wanted to see and read more. The challenge was getting back to the magazines in secret! How is it possible that at the age of seven I knew that I could get something from them? It wasn’t that it was sexual at that stage: a fascination it could be dubbed. However, there is something much more sinister here looking back… there was already an inbuilt program wanting to be refuelled for this lifetime. And it started so early. Continue reading “Pornography, Internet & Sex – An Insight into a Distorted World” →