nomadthethird
more issues than Time mag
I'm pretty sure it's difficult to die from heroin withdrawal (T is right about booze and benzos, though), because dehydration is relatively easy to treat...so it's not unheard of, but rare. Most of the people who do die in h withdrawal have HIV or something else. You wish you'd die though.
Craner:
You're right, it's not in and of itself a bad thing, in a lot of ways it was the best thing they could've done for me--I have a decent career edge in part thanks to being pushed pretty hard. I should've filled that out more, I suppose. The bad part was that from a very young age, my parents started trying to live vicariously through me in almost every way. Because I was labeled "gifted", my parents put me in all kinds of competitions, probably thinking this would challenge me and I'd learn from it.
I couldn't do anything without it being made into a competition--from piano and violin playing (which I loved, but eventually hated, because I was forced into playing competitively), to sports, to quiz bowl (my team was on TV once, PBS), to science fairs and OM and all of that. If I won, or beat everyone else, I was the best kid ever. If I lost, I was a huge disappointment and they let me know it. (They also constantly compared my brother to me and made him feel like he couldn't measure up, and to this day he's very insecure in some ways because of it.) Still to this day, anything positive I've achieved they want to take complete credit for, anything bad I've done--well, that's only my fault. There were several levels of dysfunction operating above and below this one, but it's the one that sticks with me the most.
Porn: I haaaate porn. I think it's the least sexy thing imaginable, and I think voyeurs are terrible in bed. Watching porn enough can turn even a decent person into another imagistically-oriented drone who can't get off without looking at strangers "performing" (usually rather unrealistically) sex. This makes sex about getting off on "kicks", so porn watchers often have to keep finding more over-the-top images because the tamest ones stop working over time. They end up being totally visual and not tactile (a woman's nightmare!)
I think the worst thing to do to a teenage male is expose him to all kinds of cheap sexual imagery and pornography, because it plays to all of his worst, most adolescent (read: narcissistic, masturbatory) impulses and fantasies. We have a society full of adolescent men who never grow up sexually because they don't have to--sex remains forever something dirty that they think they need to "trick" women into doing with them, feel embarassed by, and then run from. They lose out just as much as women do, in the long run, because they don't learn how to form lasting bonds and attachments, the stuff that makes intercourse actually satisfying.
That said, I don't think censoring porn is a good idea. First of all, that becomes one of those "slippery slopes" where definitions can't be agreed upon. Second, it's ridiculously difficult to enforce. But ultimately, perhaps the worst effect is that most efforts to stamp out pornography only tend to reinforce negative cultural tendencies like "slut-shaming" and devaluing women based on perceived sexual experience. The better thing to do would seem to be start kids early on respecting others and try to make them see sex as an expression of positive rather than negative attachments or feelings. I think many people (males especially) have no idea how to vent their rage, anger, or other negative emotions through anything but intercourse/sex, and their partners end up bearing the brunt of this. They use sex only to make themselves feel powerful and not to express positive feelings like care, trust, admiration, infatuation, etc.
Craner:
You're right, it's not in and of itself a bad thing, in a lot of ways it was the best thing they could've done for me--I have a decent career edge in part thanks to being pushed pretty hard. I should've filled that out more, I suppose. The bad part was that from a very young age, my parents started trying to live vicariously through me in almost every way. Because I was labeled "gifted", my parents put me in all kinds of competitions, probably thinking this would challenge me and I'd learn from it.
I couldn't do anything without it being made into a competition--from piano and violin playing (which I loved, but eventually hated, because I was forced into playing competitively), to sports, to quiz bowl (my team was on TV once, PBS), to science fairs and OM and all of that. If I won, or beat everyone else, I was the best kid ever. If I lost, I was a huge disappointment and they let me know it. (They also constantly compared my brother to me and made him feel like he couldn't measure up, and to this day he's very insecure in some ways because of it.) Still to this day, anything positive I've achieved they want to take complete credit for, anything bad I've done--well, that's only my fault. There were several levels of dysfunction operating above and below this one, but it's the one that sticks with me the most.
Porn: I haaaate porn. I think it's the least sexy thing imaginable, and I think voyeurs are terrible in bed. Watching porn enough can turn even a decent person into another imagistically-oriented drone who can't get off without looking at strangers "performing" (usually rather unrealistically) sex. This makes sex about getting off on "kicks", so porn watchers often have to keep finding more over-the-top images because the tamest ones stop working over time. They end up being totally visual and not tactile (a woman's nightmare!)
I think the worst thing to do to a teenage male is expose him to all kinds of cheap sexual imagery and pornography, because it plays to all of his worst, most adolescent (read: narcissistic, masturbatory) impulses and fantasies. We have a society full of adolescent men who never grow up sexually because they don't have to--sex remains forever something dirty that they think they need to "trick" women into doing with them, feel embarassed by, and then run from. They lose out just as much as women do, in the long run, because they don't learn how to form lasting bonds and attachments, the stuff that makes intercourse actually satisfying.
That said, I don't think censoring porn is a good idea. First of all, that becomes one of those "slippery slopes" where definitions can't be agreed upon. Second, it's ridiculously difficult to enforce. But ultimately, perhaps the worst effect is that most efforts to stamp out pornography only tend to reinforce negative cultural tendencies like "slut-shaming" and devaluing women based on perceived sexual experience. The better thing to do would seem to be start kids early on respecting others and try to make them see sex as an expression of positive rather than negative attachments or feelings. I think many people (males especially) have no idea how to vent their rage, anger, or other negative emotions through anything but intercourse/sex, and their partners end up bearing the brunt of this. They use sex only to make themselves feel powerful and not to express positive feelings like care, trust, admiration, infatuation, etc.
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