Neuroscience pulls few punches when examining the effects of porn. As medical researcher, Norman Doidge, reminds us, “[s]oftcore pornography’s influence is now most profound because, now that it is no longer hidden, it influences young people with little sexual experience and especially plastic minds, in the process of forming their sexual tastes and desires” (Doidge, 2007, p. 103).
We have to act. As writer, TV and radio host, and former presidential speechwriter, Colleen Caroll Campbell reminds us,
[i]n a society where pornography is so pervasive, it’s intimidating to face the truth about how it endangers our children, destabilizes our families and distorts our views of sex and one another. It’s easier to shout down the occasional unexpected criticism of pornography than to ponder its validity and change behaviour accordingly (Campbell, 2010).
Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, describes pornography as “sexual obesity – the widespread gorging on pornographic imagery” (Eberstadt, 2010).
Surely the measure of a healthy society is the level to which it nurtures and protects its young? The current climate is abusive to boys and girls. If we don’t speak out against the corporate sexualisation of our children and teens, and fight the pornification of our communities, what will the landscape be like for our children’s children? How will this new generation fare as adults and parents? How will their relationships fare?
We need to reclaim the hearts and minds of our children, our public spaces, and control over the products, games and clothing marketed to them, so children can have healthy, stress-free childhoods, and develop a positive sense of their sexuality as teenagers. Perhaps this issue is best summed up by British philosopher and academic, Roger Scruton: “This, it seems to me, is the real risk attached to pornography. Those who become addicted to this risk-free form of sex run a risk of another and greater kind. They risk the loss of love, in a world where only love brings happiness (Scruton, 2007).
Bibliography
Betkowski, Bev (2 March, 2007) ‘Study Finds Teen Boys Most Likely To Access Pornography’ Folio, University of Alberta, http://www.ualberta.ca/~publicas/folio/44/13/09.html.
Bindel, Julie (2 July, 2010) ‘The Truth About The Porn Industry’ The Guardian.
Interview with Ann Burgess, professor of nursing, University of Pennsylvania, 15 January, 1997 on ‘Pornography – Victims and Perpetrators’, Symposium on Media Violence & Pornography, Proceedings Resource Book and Research Guide, edited by D. Scott (1984).
Campbell, Colleen Carroll (27 May, 2010) ‘Freedom From Porn’ St Louis Post-Dispatch.
Doidge, Norman (2007) The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph form the Frontiers of Brain Science. Penguin, London.
Eberstadt, Mary (June/July, 2010) ‘The Weight of Smut’ First Things, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/05/the-weight-of-smut.
Flanagan, Caitlin (January/February, 2006) ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica: How Nice Girls Got So Casual About Oral Sex’ The Atlantic Online, http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200601/oral-sex
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Flood, Michael (2 November, 2009) ‘The Harms of Pornography Exposure Among Children and Young People’ Child Abuse Review, Vol 1.
Flood, Michael and Lara Fergus (2008) ‘An Assault on Our Future’, A White Ribbon Foundation Report.
Girlfriend (February, 2007) ‘Girlfriends Fess Up: The Original Sealed Advice: This Month’s Hot Topic: We Explore the Risks, the Consequences and the Long-Term Effects of Being a Promiscuous Girl’.
Hamilton, Maggie (2008/2009) What’s Happening To Our Girls? Too Much, Too Soon, How Our Kids are Overstimulated, Oversold and Oversexed. Penguin, Melbourne.
Hamilton, Maggie (2010/2011) What’s Happening To Our Boys? At Risk, How the New Technologies, Drugs and Alcohol, Peer Pressure and Porn Affect Our Boys. Penguin, Melbourne.
Miller, Mark Crispin (undated) ‘Merchants of Cool’, transcript, Frontline, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/interviews/crispinmiller.html.
Ruberg, Bonnie (28 August, 2007) ‘Peeking Up the Skirt of Online Sex Work: Topless and Proud’, villagevoice.com, http://www.villagevoice.com/2007-08-28/columns/peeking-up-the-skirt-of-online-sex-work/.
Scruton, Roger (17–19 May, 2007) ‘Profit as a By-Product Versus Profit as a Goal, Rethinking Business Management’ Witherspoon Institute Conference, Princeton University. Slight (13 November, 2006), http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/82582.
Wellard, Sally (15–21 March, 2001) ‘Cause and Effect’ Community Care, pp. 26–27.
We live in a pornography-saturated culture in which women are routinely targets of sexual violence and intrusion. We live in a rape culture that is increasingly pornified. Pornography is a form of propaganda for a rape culture.
But wait – we can hear voices rising up immediately to object that pornography does not cause rape.
In simplistic terms, pornography does not cause rape. There are men who use pornography and don’t rape. There are men who rape and don’t use pornography. There was rape before pornography was widely available, and there would be rape if pornography magically disappeared tomorrow.
Pornography doesn’t cause rape, if by ‘cause’ we mean that a specific man’s specific act of sexual violence can be established as the direct result of pornography use and would not have happened if he had not used pornography.
However, a rigorous analysis of the nature and effects of human communication, including propagandistic communication, does not begin and end with simplistic assertions about mechanistic notions of cause-and-effect. In the study of propaganda, we do not ask whether one specific message, or series of messages, was the sole cause of one specific person committing one specific act. Instead we investigate the way in which the style of human communication labelled ‘propaganda’ encourages certain ways of thinking about the world and makes inviting certain behaviors that flow from those ways of thinking.
An examination of pornography as propaganda for a rape culture leads to more complex and productive questions. For example, how are gender, power, and sexuality typically constructed in the contemporary industrial pornography that is widely available? How do these themes support or undermine the ideology of a rape culture? By whom and how is that pornography typically used? When such material is readily available to young people, what is the effect on their sexual development? What are the effects of the habitual use of pornography on people’s intimate experiences? Is there a relationship between those constructions and the levels of sexual intrusion and violence in contemporary culture? How is pornography racialized? And how does pornography train us to understand who we are in an industrial capitalist society?
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1 A longer version of this essay appeared in