#43229: pough — 10/09  at  12:32 PM
Every Sunday is Porn Sunday! In fact, it doesn't even need to land on a Sunday!

#43231: — 10/09  at  12:33 PM
Geez, zebrafish males are all minutemen.

#43233: — 10/09  at  01:23 PM
Yes, we're fascinated by sex all right. Just a couple weeks ago, my husband and I were lucky enough to spot a couple of orb weaver spiders in the midst of courtship. We couldn't help but watch. It was a very tenative affair. The male both really wanted the sex, and really didn't want to get eaten. It was fascinating, and I knew what it was thanks to your Spider Kama Sutra page.

Now I can also thank you for the fish porn.

#43234: — 10/09  at  01:26 PM
"people like sex"

I didn't like sex until I found Pharyngula, but now I'm Porn Again! Lemme at that cephalopod porn!

#43235: Bob Davis — 10/09  at  01:32 PM
Nice video and photos. I think I'll download them and save them for later. Is that healthy?

#43236: — 10/09  at  01:33 PM
Heh heh....

This brings to mind a rather amusing visit with some *very* religious in-laws a year or two ago. These in-laws are *extremely* fundamentalistic -- the entire house was filled with religious posters, knick-knacks, etc., with pictures of Jesus and Biblical verses adorning the walls almost everywhere you looked. The kids were at the time attending a private church-school, the father was a youth minister/teacher at the church, etc. etc.. All the family's social activities revolved around the church. Kids were not allowed to watch TV, and DVD's/videos were *always* pre-screened by the parents before the kids were allowed to watch them.


We spent the night at their house; we slept in the den/entertainment room where they kept their PC. The PC -- hooked up to a cable-modem and left on 24/7 -- was Dad's toy (kids were allowed to use it only under strict supervision).

Well, I woke up very early the morning after we arrived, and not having anything better to do, decided to check some of my favorite subversive web-sites while every one else was still sleeping. The first web-site I visited was juancole.com. But as soon as I typed the letters "ju", the browser's history/auto-complete function offered up "juicyboobs.com"! Whoa! I quickly found out that no matter what I typed into the URL window, the browser's history feature would offer me a rich assortment of dirty website URL's (some with which appeared to have embedded user id's). There were dozens and dozens of XXX web-sites in the browser's history cache. At that point, I decided that the PC was just too radioactive and found myself a day-old newspaper to read instead. (Amusing note: right next to this PC with god-knows-how-many dirty pictures in the browser cache was a bookshelf packed with religious books, including some well-known anti-evolution titles and most of the "Left Behind" series).

Now both kids were 7-8 years old at the time, so I know that it wasn't a matter of a hormone-soaked teenager poking around the naughty corners of the web. It looked like the very strict, fundamentalist youth-minister father had quite a little "midnight-fixation" with porn... This wasn't just a matter of a quick peak now and then at playboy.com -- this was *serious* porn-surfing action.

#43240: — 10/09  at  02:25 PM
Did they get those stats from the porn industry itself? Because pornographers exaggerate the size of everything.

#43241: MJS — 10/09  at  02:28 PM
As long as the male has the female home by midnight, what's the harm? Unless her dad does an egg count--how embarrassing! She better hide that "Dry T-shirt" trophy too...

+++

#43244: removed — 10/09  at  03:15 PM
"I'm Porn Again!" I love that.

I think caerbannog points out the true engine behind the porn industry (no pun intended). The more forbidden something is for an individual the greater the appeal and temptation, and it’s no secret that pornography is just as “rampant” among the Religious Right as it is with everyone else - perhaps more. If the U.S. suddenly abandoned its Puritan sensibilities and hang-ups over sex, the porn industry would be in big trouble.

#43245: Raven — 10/09  at  03:25 PM
Fish are an excellent choice for subverting Porn Sunday, PZ--compared to them, tetrapods are so vanilla.

#43246: — 10/09  at  03:26 PM
Seems to me that the existence of a powerful sex drive helps to prove evolution rather than divine creation.

Would an omniscient God, intent on designing a successful human species, really have created mankind with a procreation mechanism that is so corrosively contrary to God's plan and morals?

The fact that sex is so addictive is a proof point for evolution as opposed to creation.

#43247: John M. Price — 10/09  at  03:48 PM
Well, from the paper of the town I was born in:

((BLacklisted item found?? A LINK to a newspaper article?))

it notes that there, too, a couple of churches are doing it.

In this article, Shadowy Obsession Now a Sermon Topic they state (formatting pretty much their's):

A 1989 study by Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, "Pornography: Research Advances and Policy Consideration," examined the impact of non-violent pornography on traditional values about marriage and family.

They exposed participants to pornography during hourly sessions over a six-week period.

Survey on family values
After one week, participants were asked to complete a family values survey.

Results found that endorsement of marriage as an important institution fell from 60 percent in the control group to 39 percent in the treatment group. The treatment group also wanted fewer children.

You know, there is so much left out of this summary of the research, one can't even think it of any value.

#43250: Geoffrey Brent — 10/09  at  04:43 PM
If women are far more likely than men to have multiple partners, casual sex, and extramarital affairs, who are they having all this sex *with*? I can only think of two likely explanations:

- There's even more Hawt Girl-On-Girl Luvvin' going on than even the porn industry would have us believe.

- Somebody has invented an activity that only counts as 'sex' for the female partner, not the male. (Or, more seriously, reporting bias to that effect.)

Trackback: Sunday miscellany Tracked on: Majikthise (66.151.149.25) at 2005 10 09 16:54:14
An excellent essay by Nicolai Ouroussoff about New Orleans and the life and death of great American cities. [NYT permalink] Jar O'Lanterns [Via Cynical-C] PZ Myers celebrates National Porn Sunday by doin' it ichthyo-style How to turn your hamster into

#43254: — 10/09  at  05:32 PM
The chief complaint I have about pornography on the web is that it's not erotic. It tends to be quite clinical -- a real turn-off for most kids, I'd think -- and unromantic completely.

So why bother with it?

#43259: — 10/09  at  06:06 PM
It's very short—only about 2 seconds long—but that's because I've cut out all the foreplay.

Now, if only would could use science as an excuse for that with women...

#43260: — 10/09  at  06:08 PM
Zebrafish? No black-&-white striping, no brushy manes, no hooves? Are you sure you're working with the right species? (Besides, how could fish evolve from zebras? There ain't no transitional fossils!)

Meanwhile, you should prepare yourself (and yr lawyer) for a federal visit:

U.S. Attorney's Porn Fight Gets Bad Reviews

[by] Julie Kay, Daily Business Review, 08-30-2005

When FBI supervisors in Miami met with new interim U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta last month, they wondered what the top enforcement priority for Acosta and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would be.

Would it be terrorism? Organized crime? Narcotics trafficking? Immigration? Or maybe public corruption?

The agents were stunned to learn that a top prosecutorial priority of Acosta and the Department of Justice was none of the above. Instead, Acosta told them, it's obscenity. Not pornography involving children, but pornographic material featuring consenting adults.

Acosta's stated goal of prosecuting distributors of adult porn has angered federal and local law enforcement officials, as well as prosecutors in his own office. They say there are far more important issues in a high-crime area like South Florida, which is an international hub at risk for terrorism, money laundering and other dangerous activities.

His own prosecutors have warned Acosta that prioritizing adult porn would reduce resources for prosecuting other crimes, including porn involving children. According to high-level sources who did not want to be identified, Acosta has assigned prosecutors porn cases over their objections.

Acosta, who told the Daily Business Review last month that prosecuting obscenity was a priority for Gonzales, did not return calls for comment.

... The Mississippi-based American Family Association and other Christian conservative groups have pressured the Justice Department to take action against pornography. ...

Sources say Acosta was told by the FBI officials during last month's meeting that obscenity prosecution would have to be handled by the crimes against children unit. But that unit is already overworked and would have to take agents off cases of child endangerment to work on adult porn cases. Acosta replied that this was Attorney General Gonzales' mandate. ...

So I guess it doesn't matter if you can prove those fish are over 21...

#43262: GrrlScientist — 10/09  at  06:33 PM
Interestingly, there is a blog with plenty of photos of nude women that links to Tangled Bank. Have any other hosts noticed this? It's almost a playboy among blogs.

#43267: the amazing kim — 10/09  at  09:05 PM
"we also have curious monkey-minds that are attracted to the forbidden"

with 4.2 million porn sites I don't know how you would classify it as forbidden...

Trackback: Rub one out in the name of Jesus Tracked on: Pandagon (66.33.218.138) at 2005 10 09 21:27:52
Nearly forgot, but here's a last minute reminder--today is Porn Sunday! *balloons and noisemakers* Granted, the original idea behind Porn Sunday was that one is not to look at porn but instead do something lame like read Bible verses or...

#43270: — 10/09  at  09:58 PM
I regularly waste money chatting with nude ladies at peekshows and flirt4free. My girlfriend's and my schedules don't coordinate very often, so i use porn chat to occupy my time until i can have the real thing. I really should own stock in the Kleenex company.

#43278: — 10/10  at  02:50 AM
One of the unfortunate legacies of our history is this nasty streak of Puritanism that keeps rearing its ridiculous head. It's not merely quaint, it's a form of pathological misanthropy.

-jcr

#43286: Arun — 10/10  at  05:55 AM
For one thing, more open-mindedness about sex and reproduction might make pathological stories of parental abuse of their teenagers rarer.

Theodore Dalrymple would disagree. One needs to read several of his essays to get the point.

http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_4_oh_to_be.html

A single case can be illuminating, especially when it is statistically banal—in other words, not at all exceptional. Yesterday, for example, a 21-year-old woman consulted me, claiming to be depressed. She had swallowed an overdose of her antidepressants and then called an ambulance.
....
My patient already had had three children by three different men, by no means unusual among my patients, or indeed in the country as a whole. The father of her first child had been violent, and she had left him; the second died in an accident while driving a stolen car; the third, with whom she had been living, had demanded that she should leave his apartment because, a week after their child was born, he decided that he no longer wished to live with her. (The discovery of incompatibility a week after the birth of a child is now so common as to be statistically normal.) She had nowhere to go, no one to fall back on, and the hospital was a temporary sanctuary from her woes. She hoped that we would fix her up with some accommodation.

She could not return to her mother, because of conflict with her "stepfather," or her mother's latest boyfriend, who, in fact, was only nine years older than she and seven years younger than her mother. This compression of the generations is also now a common pattern and is seldom a recipe for happiness. (It goes without saying that her own father had disappeared at her birth, and she had never seen him since.) The latest boyfriend in this kind of ménage either wants the daughter around to abuse her sexually or else wants her out of the house as being a nuisance and an unnecessary expense. This boyfriend wanted her out of the house, and set about creating an atmosphere certain to make her leave as soon as possible.

The father of her first child had, of course, recognized her vulnerability. A girl of 16 living on her own is easy prey. He beat her from the first, being drunken, possessive, and jealous, as well as flagrantly unfaithful. She thought that a child would make him more responsible—sober him up and calm him down. It had the reverse effect. She left him.

The father of her second child was a career criminal, already imprisoned several times. A drug addict who took whatever drugs he could get, he died under the influence. She had known all about his past before she had his child.

The father of her third child was much older than she. It was he who suggested that they have a child—in fact he demanded it as a condition of staying with her. He had five children already by three different women, none of whom he supported in any way whatever.

The conditions for the perpetuation of evil were now complete. She was a young woman who would not want to remain alone, without a man, for very long; but with three children already, she would attract precisely the kind of man, like the father of her first child—of whom there are now many—looking for vulnerable, exploitable women. More than likely, at least one of them (for there would undoubtedly be a succession of them) would abuse her children sexually, physically, or both.

She was, of course, a victim of her mother's behavior at a time when she had little control over her destiny. Her mother had thought that her own sexual liaison was more important than the welfare of her child, a common way of thinking in today's welfare Britain. That same day, for example, I was consulted by a young woman whose mother's consort had raped her many times between the ages of eight and 15, with her mother's full knowledge. Her mother had allowed this solely so that her relationship with her consort might continue. It could happen that my patient will one day do the same thing.

My patient was not just a victim of her mother, however: she had knowingly borne children of men of whom no good could be expected. She knew perfectly well the consequences and the meaning of what she was doing, as her reaction to something that I said to her—and say to hundreds of women patients in a similar situation—proved: next time you are thinking of going out with a man, bring him to me for my inspection, and I'll tell you if you can go out with him.

This never fails to make the most wretched, the most "depressed" of women smile broadly or laugh heartily. They know exactly what I mean, and I need not spell it out further. They know that I mean that most of the men they have chosen have their evil written all over them, sometimes quite literally in the form of tattoos, saying "FUCK OFF" or "MAD DOG." And they understand that if I can spot the evil instantly, because they know what I would look for, so can they—and therefore they are in large part responsible for their own downfall at the hands of evil men.

Moreover, they are aware that I believe that it is both foolish and wicked to have children by men without having considered even for a second or a fraction of a second whether the men have any qualities that might make them good fathers. Mistakes are possible, of course: a man may turn out not to be as expected. But not even to consider the question is to act as irresponsibly as it is possible for a human being to act. It is knowingly to increase the sum of evil in the world, and sooner or later the summation of small evils leads to the triumph of evil itself.

My patient did not start out with the intention of abetting, much less of committing, evil. And yet her refusal to take seriously and act upon the signs that she saw and the knowledge that she had was not the consequence of blindness and ignorance. It was utterly willful. She knew from her own experience, and that of many people around her, that her choices, based on the pleasure or the desire of the moment, would lead to the misery and suffering not only of herself, but—especially—of her own children.

This truly is not so much the banality as the frivolity of evil: the elevation of passing pleasure for oneself over the long-term misery of others to whom one owes a duty. What better phrase than the frivolity of evil describes the conduct of a mother who turns her own 14-year-old child out of doors because her latest boyfriend does not want him or her in the house? And what better phrase describes the attitude of those intellectuals who see in this conduct nothing but an extension of human freedom and choice, another thread in life's rich tapestry?

Lack of sexual freedom is not the problem above. Elsewhere we find that 40% of children are born out of wedlock in England.


Also see:
http://www.city-journal.org/html/10_3_urbanities-all_sex.html

Is this going to be a question of ideology - i.e., some Christians are concerned, and they must be wrong? - or are we going to look at the actual evidence of what happens?

#43287: PZ Myers — 10/10  at  06:03 AM
Those are terrible stories, but they don't suggest to me that open-mindedness about sex and reproduction is the problem. Drug addiction, crime, and a lack of responsibility are the issues. Being sex-positive does not mean we encourage children to run out and get pregnant by a drug addict.

#43288: Raven — 10/10  at  07:09 AM

are we going to look at the actual evidence of what happens?

Let's look at the actual evidence. You've drawn a correlation between desperate, compulsive sex and child abuse, but I am not sure that the causality lies exactly there, nor that it is unidirectional even if it does. Perhaps another factor causes both--how do you establish causality in this case? For example, do other mothers who don't act out sexually otherwise abuse their children? And are there mothers that act self-destructively sexually, but make sure to protect their children from it? The presence of either of those would dilute your correlation.

And even if you do establish the particular causality you imply, what does any of that have to do with sex-positivity? I do not see anyone here advocating acting destructively and self-destructively out of sexual compulsion, but rather constructively out of freedom and openness and respect for others; your model is of something entirely different, if not even opposite. Do you really not see the distinction between the two?