SIGNS OF THE TIMES: Sex robot boss says men prefer his dolls to real women because porn has WARPED their minds
INCLUDES, Demand for exorcisms is up threefold in Italy, so Vatican is holding conference
THE rise of free and easily-available internet porn is warping men's minds, a maker of sex robots has claimed.
The boss of sex doll firm 1amdoll USA says that online porn has changed what men find sexy — and now prefer his robots to real women.
Speaking to journalist and author Jon Ronson on his podcast The Butterfly Effect, the boss — known only as Brent — said that sites like PornHub and RedTube have raised the bar on what is seen as attractive to the point that they don't find real women sexy anymore.
"I've had a couple of customers who have said, 'I go to the bar and take a girl home at 3am and she's a little fatter than I'd like her to be or she's not as cute'.
"So they turn to the doll because the doll can be put in the position they want."
A sex doll brothel in a sleepy village in Scotland was forced to close after upsetting the neighbours.
And a pervert British grandad was jailed after he ordered a child-sized "flat-chested" sex doll as a "bed companion".
Fantasies and unrealistic body images found in online porn have been blamed for warping men's expectations of sex.
Brent argues that sex dolls allow men to live out their fantasies in ways that real women don't.
Demand for exorcisms is up threefold in Italy, so Vatican is holding conference
The Vatican hopes to step up its game
against demon possessions with a week-long international conference in
April to address a threefold increase in demand in Italy alone for the
services of exorcists.
The church is
particularly alarmed over the uneven skills of some of its current
exorcists and worried about priests who are no longer willing to learn
the techniques.
The assessment is a major finding of a four-day meeting in Sicily that included testimony on sects and Satanism, according to Vatican Radio.
One
of the organizers of the Sicily gathering, Friar Beningo Palilla, told
Vatican Radio there are some 500,000 cases requiring exorcism in Italy
each year.
He blames the increase in recent years
on a growing number of people seeking the services of fortune tellers
and Tarot readers. Such practices "open the door to the devil and to
possession," he said.
While many of the cases are
not actually related to demonic possession, but to spiritual or
psychological problems, he conceded, they nonetheless must be
investigated.
In any event, Palilla, a priest in Palermo, is calling for an across-the-board improvement in training.
"We
priests, very often, do not know how to deal with the concrete cases
presented to us: in the preparation for the priesthood, we do not talk
about these things," he said.
Palilla is particularly concerned about some do-it-yourselfers within the priesthood.
"A
self-taught exorcist certainly meets errors," he said. "I will say
more: it would also take a period of apprenticeship, as happens for many
professionals."
Palilla also said it is not enough
for the bishop to appoint a priest to become an exorcist,
but that neo-exorcists "should work alongside an expert to learn in the
field."
Exorcism is recognized under the Catholic Church's canon law but can only performed with high-level permission from within the church.
Four years ago, the Vatican backed the International Association of Exorcists, which was founded in 1990 and has licensed some 200 members on six continents.
The
weeklong international course will be held in April at the Pontifical
Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, an educational institute of the Catholic
Church in Rome.
Palilla said the gathering is
billed as the first in the world on exorcism with a goal "to offer a
rich reflection and articulation on a topic that is sometimes unspoken
and controversial."
