I was doing some site maintenance on the server and decided to check the stats for MSP while I was at it. I noticed something interesting and thought it might be worth mentioning here. Since May, this post I wrote last year has been either the top or second highest viewed post on MSP: “What’s with Mormons and Porn?” I haven’t been out promoting it, but it is the second link on Google when you search for “Mormons + Porn“. Here’s a screenshot from June:
I’m not sure why the sudden interest as it wasn’t in the top 25 in April. Has something changed in Mormondom? Are Mormons now allowed to look at porn? Or are more Mormons venturing on to the interwebs to search for porn and wondering what is available for them? I sense a money maker here: a porn website just for Mormons. I’m not exactly sure what it would look like, but I think this person was on to something: mormonporn.org. They’ve been taking pictures of movie stars dressed in bikinis or otherwise revealing clothing, overlaying a color on top and then popping out bubbles in perfectly suited locations so it looks like the stars are naked, but are not. This is the perfect Mormon alibi: “I wasn’t looking at naked women; they just appear to be naked. If you look at the original picture they’re wearing clothes. And if they have clothes on, it’s not porn.”
Not that I’m planning on starting a porn site for Mormons, but I have to wonder: What would a porn site for Mormons look like?
There’s also the new White and Delightsome blog that Cognitive Dissenter and Donna Banta just started. Pretty funny
http://whiteanddelightsome.com/
Didn’t google change the way their rankings work? I believe that they are now personalized in some way, so that if you and I search the same terms, we see different results. That happened sometime early this year, I think…
I can see some non-Mormons doing this. From what I hear from Nevada, Mormons are pretty hot. That’s probably true in other areas, too.
I can also see people investigating political/business events like Marriott allowing porn and Mitt Romney not signing that one pledge that contained a million items (including porn, which some people stress)
The Mormon church diligently teaches against all types of porn. Anything that stirs sexual feelings outside of marriage is strongly prohibited. This includes soft porn, making out, etc.
I have seen articles on the bubble pictures as well as other sexual practices that appear to be produced by people striving to find loop holes in the teachings of the church and to justify wicked practices. According to Mormon doctrine, these people are in severe need of repentance.
I suppose that porn is rampant in the US and much of the world. And many church members have fallen prey to its addictive nature. Because of the prevelance of this addiction, even within the church, , the church aggressively councils to stay far from it. It is extremely damaging and continues to be a major cause of divorce.
Here is a page concerning pornography that is linked to the official churches home page:
http://combatingpornography.org/cp/eng/
I have found the same thing on my blog. The few posts that are tagged with “porn”, “Mormon”, “masturbation” or “sex” get significant hits as a result of people searching for those topics.
I also recently posted regarding a study that found the sort of things that Peter described don’t work. It does nothing to change behavior. The real harm is done by the extremeguilt engendered. Instead of focusing on the don’ts religions would do better to encourage responsible and rewarding sexual relations…something they really do nothing to address. Divorces are really caused by naive folks who are trying to maintain an adult relationship with an adolescent view of the world. I’d say the church’s approach causes the divorces, not the pornography.
http://www.atheismresource.com/2011/sex-and-secularism-a-fascinating-study-from-darrel-ray-and-amanda-brown
Goddess, I hate discussing pornography and masturbation with Mormons.
Mormon men all do it, all hate that they do it, all hide it from everyone else and will cruelly snipe you apart with the same guilt and self-loathing they feel. Meanwhile, Mormon women think male sexuality’s evil and dirty (unlike the feelings they have), and see males who admit to having sexual feelings as acceptable targets.
Obviously there are exceptions (asexual Mormons don’t do it, liberal Mormons don’t get worked up about it), but I have gotten into nasty arguments with nasty Mormons about this subject. And I almost freaking killed myself because I couldn’t abstain like I was supposed to. But of course, I’m the exception and it’s all because I took things the wrong way.
I have to be. Otherwise they’d have hurt innocents.
The idea that the real problem isn’t pornography but the church’s teachings about pornography is so foreign to their worldview that many Mormons seem literally unable to consider it.
(Main Street, have you seen this item that I found while on the web? Sandy)
MORMONISM OKAYS PORN
by Jared Young
Both Mormon and non-Mormon scholars are aware of a hard-core pornographic drawing in the “Book of Abraham” which is Mormon-approved scripture.
The same Book is part of the “Pearl of Great Price” which, along with the “Book of Mormon” and the “Doctrine and Covenants,” make up the LDS church’s “triple combination” in one volume.
The porn is found in Fig. 7 of Facsimile 2 in the “Book of Abraham” which shows two beings facing each other, which were described by Joseph Smith as representing the Holy Ghost and God the Father, the latter clearly showing an aroused male sex organ.
After Smith published this sketch in his newspaper in 1842, which offended Mormon sensibilities, the phallic portion was whited out for more than a century until the “restored” LDS church decided in 1981 to restore what had long been censored!
Equally shocking was the discovery that the “Book of Abraham” had nothing to do with Abraham or his God but was actually based on ancient Egyptian funeral documents depicting occultic obscene practices – and the original sketches showed an erotic phallus on both beings including the one Smith blasphemously claimed was the Holy Ghost!
For further information see “Book of Abraham” (Wikipedia). Also see Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s “Mormonism – Shadow or Reality?” which on 76 pages reproduces the original Egyptian X-rated drawings and shows how Smith altered them and created one of his many frauds. Highlights of the classic Tanner work can be seen by typing “Facts From Mormons” and “What LDS Leaders Say” on Yahoo.
Sandy — The Book of Abraham is an embarrassment to the CoJCoL-dS for so many reasons. And the fact that there’s a penis hieroglyph in facsimile #2 is probably the most hilarious one. (I wrote about it here.)
I didn’t hear that it had ever been controversial (censored and restored, etc.) though. It’s blurry enough that a layman without some knowledge of hieroglyphs probably would never notice or identify it. Do you have a reference for your research?