May 2012
“Many adults are put off when youngsters pose scientific questions. Children ask why the sun is yellow, or what a dream is, or how deep you can dig a hole, or when is the world’s birthday, or why we have toes. Too many teachers and parents answer with irritation or ridicule, or quickly move on to something else. Why adults should pretend to omniscience before a five-year-old, I can’t for the life of me understand. What’s wrong with admitting that you don’t know? Children soon recognize that somehow this kind of question annoys many adults. A few more experiences like this, and another child has been lost to science. There are many better responses. If we have an idea of the answer, we could try to explain. If we don’t, we could go to the encyclopedia or the library. Or we might say to the child: “I don’t know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you’ll be the first to find out.”
—Carl Sagan (via itscandidlycara)
“I wonder if Beethoven held his breath the first time his fingers touched the keys the same a way soldier holds his breath the first time his finger clicks the trigger, we all have different reasons for forgetting to breathe.”
—Andrea Gibson (via peculiarities)
“I have a healthy range of fetishes, one of which is so unusual that I’ve never met anyone in ‘real life’ who shares it. Growing up with that sort of ‘dirty secret’ can be a lonely experience; but finding a whole sub-community of dedicated porn-makers who not only shared my kink, but actively celebrated it and acted out the same fantasies, helped me to realize I wasn’t some twisted freak. At least not for that reason. If porn can help kids realize that their urges are natural and healthy, that’s not a bad thing in my book.
The diversity of adult entertainment is so great that just talking about ‘porn’ as if it’s one big pink throbbing homogeneous mass is profoundly ignorant, whether its the subject of a campaign or a research question. For example, a paper by Michael Flood suggests “exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships,” but would we see the same impact from Maggie Mayhem’s feminist porn that we would from Playboy?
Lumping the two together is like trying to ask, “do video games make people violent,” without bothering to differentiate between the Grand Theft Auto series and Pacman. It undermines research, but more seriously it can lead people to tackle the wrong problem. It could well be true, for example, that the majority of porn reinforces misogynistic attitudes, and that this could damage young children as a result; but if that’s the case then the problem is misogyny, not pornography, and it needs to be tackled wherever it appears, not just in the adult entertainment industry.” —Porn panic! | Martin Robbins | The Lay Scientist | Science | guardian.co.uk (via sexisnottheenemy)
The diversity of adult entertainment is so great that just talking about ‘porn’ as if it’s one big pink throbbing homogeneous mass is profoundly ignorant, whether its the subject of a campaign or a research question. For example, a paper by Michael Flood suggests “exposure to pornography helps to sustain young people’s adherence to sexist and unhealthy notions of sex and relationships,” but would we see the same impact from Maggie Mayhem’s feminist porn that we would from Playboy?
Lumping the two together is like trying to ask, “do video games make people violent,” without bothering to differentiate between the Grand Theft Auto series and Pacman. It undermines research, but more seriously it can lead people to tackle the wrong problem. It could well be true, for example, that the majority of porn reinforces misogynistic attitudes, and that this could damage young children as a result; but if that’s the case then the problem is misogyny, not pornography, and it needs to be tackled wherever it appears, not just in the adult entertainment industry.” —Porn panic! | Martin Robbins | The Lay Scientist | Science | guardian.co.uk (via sexisnottheenemy)
