Pornified: Part 1, The Scope of the Problem

Like most moral Americans, I am left feeling very self-satisfied after comparing myself to Miley Cyrus or Davecat, the two most public examples of sexual deviancy after Anthony Weiner. Cyrus, after mimicking sexual intercourse on national television (which has been dubbed “twerking”) appears nude in her most recent music video, where she sits astride a wrecking ball and makes out with a sledgehammer. Davecat was featured in The Atlantic earlier this year, as he made a very public apologia for his preferred method of achieving sexual climax-through the use of two $6,000 silicon sex dolls. At first blush, these examples are exceptionally deranged; two sexual misfits in a world which knows better than them. But after reading The Social Costs of Pornography, published by the Witherspoon Institute, my initial ease has turned sour.

Before I recount the contents of that book, let me address an objection to talking about pornography on a Christian website. According to the filtering site Covenant Eyes, 50% of Christian Men and 20% of Christian women report being addicted to porn. I raise this point because an easy cop-out can be made that “Christians aren’t like everybody else.” The extent to which porn affects the culture, which I will outline below, does not change when we look at religious or non-religious, Christian or non-Christian. Porn doesn’t discriminate, we all are victim to it.

The Social Costs of Pornography is a collection of papers by psychologists, philosophers and lawyers. In 2008, a three-day conference was held at Princeton University. At that conference, which bore the same title as the book, thinkers like Roger Scruton, Hamza Yusuf, Mary Eberstadt, Hadley Arkes and others came to the conclusion that porn had a massive impact on modern society and that impact was negative.Their papers were collected and published in the book that sits before me. We’ll start with Part 1, and a paper by Jill C. Manning, entitled The Impact of Pornography on Women: Social Science Findings and Clinical Observations.

Manning tells us there are 246 million internet users in the United States. She cites Al Cooper’s “Online Sexual Activity in the New Millennia”, published in Contemporary Sexuality, showing that 20-33% of those users are on the internet for primarily sexual purposes. Forty-two percent of users view pornography online. I’ll let you figure out how many million that is.

She notes that in November 2002, the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers held a meeting. In a press release from the Dilenschneider Group, of the 350 attendees, it was announced that 56% of their divorce cases involved one party having an “obsessive interest in pornographic websites”. We are a long way from the days when “no-fault” divorce was considered to be a good for society. Thanks to the work of intellectuals like Robert George, as well as the testimony heard from the children of divorced parents, we can clearly spell out the fallout from divorce. Kids lose the benefits and stability of a mom and a dad. The spouses break what was supposed to be a life-long, God-sanctioned, till-death-do-we-part-even-if-you-get-sick-or-I-lose-my-job oath, made in the presence of loved ones and their denominational clergy. The breaking of this oath has helped shift the cultural understanding of marriage from a conjugal bond to an emotional contract, which either party may depart from at will. The kids are left wondering why mommy and daddy don’t love each other anymore. Who has the chutzpah to tell then that there is a 56% chance that one of their parents has replaced the other with porn?

Those children are also victim to another assault by porn. In the journal Youth and Society, Kimberly Mitchell, David Finkelhor and Janis Wolak published that 34% of adolescents “report being exposed to unwanted sexual content online.” One is reminded of a particular episode of South Park; their parody of the Lord of the Rings. Trey Parker and Matt Stone give us a story where Butters (the most innocent character of the series) accidentally views a pornographic film. When the other kids take it away from him, he quickly morphs into a parody of Gollum. He spends the entire episode slinking around, muttering about the loss of his “precious”. This is not merely South Park hyperbole. Pamela Paul (from whom I borrowed the word ‘pornified’), in her paper From Pornography to Porno to Porn: How Porn Became the Norm highlights a chilling study from Columbia University:

Statistics show nearly all-if not all teenagers are exposed to pornography one way or another. A 2004 study by Columbia University found that  11.5 million teenagers (45%) have friends who regularly view internet pornography and download it. (Incidentally, teenagers with a majority of friends who do so are three times more likely to smoke, drink, or use illegal drugs than are teens who have no such friends.)

Teenagers can go from exposure to addiction relatively easily. The years of puberty bring with them some of the most powerful sexual urges ever experienced by males. At my Catholic high school, more than a few girls thought it was attractive to have unbuttoned blouses and hiked up skirts. The result was that one could glance casually at a girl and (thanks to a lack of self control and the new cocktail of hormones coursing through your body) suddenly be lost in a haze of lust and desire. Ana J. Bridges in her paper Pornography’s Effect on Interpersonal Relationships highlights the work of Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein, two behavioral psychologists at MIT. They drew a distinction between rational judgement in a “cold” or “hot” sexual state.

College age men were asked to answer questions about sexual interests and behaviors while in a “cold” state of mind (simply reading the questions) or in a “hot” state of mind (masturbating to pornographic pictures). They were asked about risky sexual behavior; sexual arousal, including whether they found elderly women, young girls, or shoes sexually arousing; sexual behavior, including their interest in slapping someone during sex, bondage, or engaging in anal sex or bestiality; and sexual violence, including their willingness to coerce someone in order to have sex. During the aroused state, they were significantly more likely to report behaviors, people and objects as sexually arousing and increased willingness to both engage in the behaviors and to use coercive methods to obtain sex.

Teenage males have both the exposure to pornography as well as frequent (sometimes unpredictable) “hot” flashes. These “hot” spells need not be the masturbatory episodes used in the study. A teenage male going through puberty can become aroused to the point of an erection without any intentional stimuli whatsoever. For these teens, there are two factors which make porn addictive. The first is that it provides an always available outlet for their sexual tensions. Secondly, due to the frequency of their “hot” states, resistance to porn is significantly diminished, even among those who express absolute resolve to avoid porn while in a cold state. Butters ends up lying in the bottom of a video bin, clutching the pornographic video to his chest. Numerous teens enter into adulthood with compulsive or additive habits built up with pornography.

It may be objected that it is better for teenage boys to let out their growing sex drives on masturbation and pornography than on their fellow female classmates. I can almost hear the way a parent might put this: “It’s better for that boy to be sitting at home with a computer than to be using my daughter as his little sex toy.” Ross Douthat argues as much when he compares porn to prostitution, with porn winning out:

There are no bullying pimps and no police officers demanding sex in return for not putting the prostitutes in jail. There are regular tests for STDs, at least in the higher-end sectors of the industry. The performers are safely separated from their johns. And freelancers aren’t wandering downtown intersections on their own; they’re filming from the friendly confines of their homes.

But this distinction wears down as soon as the real evidence comes to the surface. All those boys who grow up looking at porn are also learning with porn. Manning, in her paper, cites three separate studies that found “there was a strong association between pornography consumption and engaging in oral and anal sex.” One of these studies was published in the International Journal of STD &AIDS. The reason for this is that both oral and anal sex are activities which significantly increase the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, and both are activities depicted in pornography. Those depictions frequently include some violent element, either forced intercourse or some form of physical assault. The violence too is learned by those who view porn.

Mary Ann Layden argues this point in her paper Pornography and Violence: A New Look at the Research.  She argues that porn is responsible for creating what is called “the rape myth.” This is a mistaken belief, held by many and acted on by a few, that “women are responsible for rape, like to be raped, want to be raped and suffer few negative outcomes because of it.” In the paper, she tracks how porn creates “permission giving beliefs” in the viewer. Most people are visual learners. The visual medium of most porn, combined with a sexually charged atmosphere in which the viewing usually takes place, combines to make porn a very effective teacher. Certain activities displayed in porn yield huge sexual rewards both for the actors on screen and the viewing audience at home, or in their dorm room. “For example, a male masturbating to the images…of sexually aroused women being beaten, raped or degraded is learning that the subjects enjoy and desire this treatment and is thereby being taught that he has permission to act this way himself.”

Now, I can hear the objections. “Not all porn is violent.”; “What about erotica?”; “What about people who just watch movies with a lot of sex scenes?” Layden cites a paper that appeared in the journal Sex Roles, bluntly titled “The Effects of Viewing R-Rated Movie Scenes that Objectify Women on Perceptions of Date Rape.” In Layden’s words:

A similar effect is seen even when the pornography is not violent. Males who were shown non-violent scenes that sexually objectified and degraded women and were then exposed to material that depicted rape were more likely to indicate that the rape victim experienced pleasure and “got what she wanted.”

When I highlighted Layden’s paper in an opinion piece in my campus newspaper, and objection was raised: Rape has been decreasing since the 1980’s while the availability of porn has skyrocketed. Ross Douthat, in his Atlantic piece on porn argues the same:

…between 1980 and 2004, an era in which porn became more available, and in more varieties, the rate of reported sexual violence dropped, and by 85 percent. Correlation isn’t necessarily causation, but the sharpness of the decline at least suggests that porn may reduce sexual violence, by providing an outlet for some potential sex offenders.

But this is a thin objection at best. According to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, “every two minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted (including rape, attempted rape, and other sexually violent felonies), and every eight minutes someone is raped.” Mind you, these are only the cases that get reported. Anyone who thinks that every victim of rape or sexual assault has the courage to report the assault is living in a dream world. Sexual assault is a particularly draining type, where victims may try to rationalize rather than report it. I’ve personally heard women claim they somehow deserved it; “Maybe I didn’t say no loud enough…” or try to change their memory of it, “We were playing a game. I think I told him ‘no’ meant ‘yes’.” Regardless of the frequency of rape, there are documented links between the attitudes fostered by porn and the attitudes that lead to rape. Women’s Studies departments, especially departments that take part in “Take Back the Night” (an event aimed at raising awareness of sexual violence) ought to be out in front of this battle decrying porn as the potent source of sexual violence that it is.

This is sadly not the case. In the class “Introduction to Feminism” I took two years ago, porn was discussed as a sexually liberating experience, something to be encouraged as part of a healthy sex life. That is a belief which lacks any support in reality. What I hope I have shown is that thanks to the internet, which is bringing you this essay, porn has become almost universally available. It is now responsible for half of the divorces in this country. Further, porn has become a teacher of young men and women. They can get it. They use it. They then put into practice what they have learned. Be it physical abuse, unprotect anal sex, or general promiscuity; porn is a very effective teacher, with a significant number of adolescents and young adults as willing students. Whats worse is that the people and groups who fashion themselves as champions against sexual violence, tend to see porn as a requisite part of the sexual buffet. Where do we go from here?

Recently Hollywood has offered up its own critique of porn in the film Don Jon. We will see if that film accurately depicts the problem and proposes a reasonable solution. After that, it is worth pointing out what is fundamentally wrong with porn. Sure it may cause sexual violence and end marriages, but it only does that because there is something about us as humans which rejects pornography. Lastly, there is an objection to speaking about porn in such harsh terms, because some fear it precedes an authoritarian crackdown a la 1984. We can be morally prudent without being moralistic prudes. In the fourth and final installment, we’ll sit down with G.K. Chesterton to learn why rules aren’t always a bad thing and why, when it comes to porn, we could use a few more.