Is porn to blame?

After learning that dressing like a porn star = getting rated a 10 on Hot or Not, I started to read the chapter on the rise in pornography in Eric Schlosser's "Reefer Madness" the other day, and suddenly the light bulb went on. Maybe Internet personal ads aren't the only factor in the frustration that so many singles are having with dating today -- there's also the impact of Internet porn.

I've always considered pornography fairly harmless -- a fantasy world that exists outside the bounds of our "real" flesh and skin interactions. Though even from my high school days, my friends and I never felt we could live up to the airbrushed women in Playboy and Penthouse, who they themselves couldn't live up to their fantasy images. (I became friends with a woman who posed in Playboy once -- not only was she really smart, but, she was now bespectacled, overweight and really frumpy! You would have never imagined her as a centerfold.)

But I started to think of the ways that the fantasy of unlimited access to thousands of women has changed the way men relate to us. I just feel a lot more objectified out in the personal ad world, with men reacting and responding purely to my legs, my breasts and my face, and all but ignoring anything else I have to offer from the neck up (like a college education or an inquiring mind.)

There are of course, smart men who appreciate a woman for more than the physical -- though it seems that more and more, men have sexual fantasies and tastes that stretch outside the boundaries and deeper into the realm of what they're seeing on Internet porn sites.

A new Harris poll confirms my hunch.

"When men look at pornography, what effect does that have on the women who love them? Fully 47 percent of women and 33 percent of men believe porn harms relationships between men and women," stated an article today on Netscape.

"Even so, we are a nation divided. An online Harris Poll of 2,555 U.S. adults finds that when it comes to pornography, we're not sure what should be done about it. Women are generally much more critical of pornography than men. As a result, a small majority of women, but not of men, favors government regulation of pornography on the Internet if that were possible.

"About half of all adults believe that pornography raises men's expectation of how women should look and that it changes men's expectations of how women should behave. About the same amount say pornography is demeaning towards women, although this view is more widely held by women than by men.

"What is the effect of pornography on kids? If children see a lot of it, 30 percent of adults say it distorts boys' expectations and understanding of women and sex, while 25 percent say it makes kids more likely to have sex earlier. Just 7 percent think it distorts girls' body images and their ideas about sex. Only 2 percent say looking at pornography helps children better understand sexuality."