a) There do not seem to be any sarcasm markers, so this shouldn't be that hard of a call.

b) Unpopular opinions should not be downmodded on this site merely for being unpopular. (I don't even know if this one is unpopular -- it merely is thought to be unpopular, like expressing a moral judgment on something is verboten in polite society, which is of course a moral judgment in itself. There are approximately 47 people here who said some variation of "Ick, I don't want to be associated with porn" without being censored, so I see no particular reason to bust the chops of someone who doesn't like porn qua porn rather than merely not liking porn qua job opportunity.)

Sure. It was really the "who are conditioned to see women as body parts for their own enjoyment" which I thought may well be sarcastic.

I don't think most people need much conditioning to have a sex drive...

Oh, I truly believe it. Perhaps I was too terse and should have expanded a bit.

It seems self-evident to me that if a man is using porn heavily for self-gratification, he's not going to view a randomly-met woman as a whole person (and vice versa? I don't really know), but instead will be judging her based on how "hot" she appears to him, or how she might feed his fantasies. (That's the "just body parts" in my original quip.)

This is tremendously corrosive for society as a whole, and both sexes suffer the results.

There was a HN link a while back (Three Myths about Porn: http://www.reuniting.info/science/three_myths_about_porn) which I think made a pretty good argument that online pornography is like crack cocaine to the male brain--a complete overload of normal circuits. (Even if the point of the containing site is, um, rather bizarre.) And it leaves many, many men hopelessly addicted.

>> "It seems self-evident to me that if a man is using porn heavily for self-gratification, he's not going to view a randomly-met woman as a whole person (and vice versa? I don't really know), but instead will be judging her based on how "hot" she appears to him, or how she might feed his fantasies. (That's the "just body parts" in my original quip.)"

Sorry, but the majority of men in my experience do that anyway. So either they're all 'using porn heavily for self-gratification', or they're just red blooded males who like the way women are put together.

I hate to say it, but I think you should lighten up a bit...