The Lighted Candle Society
We don’t have data that says what the long-term outcome of pornography use in marriage or open marriages are and so it becomes very irresponsible to be promoting something that there are clear risks and hazards associated with it.
Hi kids! It’s time for our favorite game here on RebeccaHartong.net! Yes, it’s time to…
Spot the logical fallacies!
Okay. Let’s just consider this to be just a warm-up round, since the fallacies in the statement I quoted are so glaringly obvious. Did you see them? Of course you did!
- Conflation!
Conflation is where two distinct concepts are treated as though they were one. In this example, pornography use within marriage is treated as though it were the same thing as “open marriage” where partners are free to have sexual relationships with other people. [And do check out the link for Conflation. If any group has experience with logical fallacies, it's the Creation Science people! In fact, they demonstrate several fallacies in the course of defining them! It's most amusing.] - Appeal to ignorance!
An appeal to ignorance (also called “arguing from ignorance”) occurs when a person assumes that because the truth of a premise isn’t known for sure, it’s reasonable to assume that it IS true. Since they don’t have data about the long-term effects, there’s really no rational basis for assuming that porn use has “clear risks and hazards”.
But this is all academic. You really need to watch this video and then visit the sites for both The Lighted Candle Society and it’s “sister site” Her Story Lives. The first is a general anti-porn organization and the second is a site for women (primarily) to discuss how their spouse’s porn use has messed up their lives.
To be honest, my first inclination with the “Her Story Lives” web site was to mock these women. But, I suppose that the husband’s porn use really is a big problem in some marriages and, for women who haven’t felt like they could talk about it with anyone, a web site like that probably is helpful. I do think, though, that attacking porn itself is a waste of time and energy. When a person is compulsive about their porn use, the source of the problem is within the person himself. Lots of people use porn in a responsible way that doesn’t mess up the rest of their lives. It’s like with liquor. Most people who use it are “social drinkers” — not raging alcoholics. The difference comes from within the individual. The Lighted Candle Society people will try to persuade you that there’s science backing up their claim that pornography is “addictive” but that’s simply not true. For a full discussion, I refer you to Penn & Teller’s recent episode of Bullshit!: “War on Porn”.
Anyway. Here’s the video I was quoting up above. They would have done so much better if they hadn’t chose an opening narration by a woman with an unusually irritating whiny voice. Her voice makes me want to hunt her down, smack her up side the head and yell at her, “Snap out of it, for God’s sake! Get yourself a vibrator and tell your husband to go fuck himself!” Enjoy!
Posted by RebeccaHartong on July 15, 2008 under Kooks
Rebecca,
“We don’t have data that says what the long-term outcome of pornography use in marriage or open marriages are and so it becomes…”
My understanding of this sentence is different. I read it as “the outcome of pornography use within marriage or within open marriages”, not that pornography use within marriage is treated as though it were the same thing as open marriage.
Is it my English?
No… there’s nothing wrong with your English. That’s not an incorrect interpretation. I’m basing my interpretation, though, on the overall context of these people’s campaign against pornography. I don’t think they’d get particularly excited about the use of pornography by people in “open marriages” because they’d most likely already think the people in that sort of relationship were already going to hell anyway.
Also, if you watch the video I linked to, they talk about some episode of the Oprah Winfrey show where Oprah was (supposedly) encouraging people to use porn within their marriages OR to get into an “open marriage” kind of thing in order to deal with their sexual issues.
I was thinking the same thing. I found unlikely that these people would favor something like open marriage. I had a quick look at the web site and it strongly focuses on traditional family values so it is very unlikely they would open up to something like this. So from that larger context you most certainly are right. It is their own English that is lacking somehow as what they write is ambiguous without knowing the larger context.