Russell Brand attacks pornography

Russell Brand attacks pornography March 5, 2015

British comedian Russell Brand is a wild man, a former heroin addict and a blame-England-first political radical with an irreverent comic schtick.  So it is striking that he is now crusading against pornography.  See his video on the subject, as well as a news story, after the jump.

 

From Courtney Crandell, WORLD | Actor Russell Brand makes anti-porn appeal but Google isn’t buying it | Courtney Crandell | March 2, 2015:

In a video published on his YouTube channel, Brand argued the soft-core porn presented in Fifty Shades, and even common product advertisements, mars attitudes toward relationships and sex by extracting sex from the context of love and healthy relationships

“Our attitudes towards sex have become warped and perverted and have deviated from its true function as an expression of love and a means for procreation,” Brand said. “Because our acculturation—the way we’ve designed it and expressed it—has become really, really, confused.” Brand, known for raunchy comedy and films like Get Him to the Greek, didn’t address sexual morality in marriage.

Brand said porn consumed him as an adolescent. Porn accessibility then was limited largely to the dirty magazine shelf at gas stations and grocery stores. Today, the internet has made porn ubiquitous.

“Now there’s just icebergs of filth floating through every house on Wi-Fi,” he said. “It’s inconceivable what it must be like to be an adolescent boy now with this kind of access to porn. It must be dizzying and exciting, yet corrupting in a way we can’t even imagine.” . . .

“Our generation is the first one where people can unexpectedly (and casually) see an almost-naked woman just by simply turning on the TV or scrolling on their phones,” the organization wrote. “It’s becoming more and more apparent that these oversexualized ads and magazine covers are the beginning, the gateway so to speak, to the harmful ideals about sex and porn in our society.” . . .

And whether it’s hard-core or culturally acceptable soft porn, pornography causes men to objectify women—viewing them as objects rated by their sexual attractiveness rather than relational human beings, Brand said. Pornography also reduces trust between couples, hyper-sexualizes society, and can cause some people to abandon hope for sexual monogamy and accept promiscuity as natural, all affects Brand admitted experiencing.

“It’s making it impossible for us to relate to our own sexuality, our own psychology, and our own spirituality,” Brand said. “Porn is not something I like, it’s not something I’ve been able to make a long-term commitment to not looking at, and it’s affecting my ability to relate to women, to relate to myself, to my own sexuality, to my own spirituality.”

 

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