The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers Read online

  Most of the essays in this collection were originally delivered at a consultation called “The Social Costs of Pornography,” held at Princeton University December 11–13, 2008, sponsored by the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey, in collaboration with the Social Trends Institute of Barcelona and New York, and the Institute for the Psychological Sciences of Arlington, Virginia. This was, to our knowledge, the first multidisciplinary scholarly exploration of the issue in the Internet Age, including among its presenters and participants sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, economists, political scientists, philosophers, lawyers, and journalists, as well as citizens who had been involved in the formulation of public policy on the issue over the years.

  The group was not uniform in politics or in religion—there were members of both political parties, some noted as conservatives and others as feminists, some who were secular in orientation, others who were Christian (Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, and Muslim—and they did not aim to organize a specific proposal for public action. But over the three days they discovered a remarkable consensus among themselves that pornography was damaging society in new and troublesome ways, and that the late twentieth-century consensus that it is harmless entertainment that law and society could safely permit was thoroughly mistaken and must be challenged in the public square.

  Our collection of the consultation papers—augmented with an additional paper and an appendix summarizing research findings on specific issues—is grouped under three headings. The first set of papers gathers and analyzes evidence of the harm done by contemporary pornography, viewed from a variety of perspectives. Over the past two decades, pornographers have used technology to make pornography more easily accessible, first with the VCR in the 1980s, then with the internet in the 1990s. As a consequence, the use of pornography has become privatized, moving from red light districts in seedy parts of town or adult bookstores along well-traveled highways to bedrooms, living rooms, and even offices.

  During the technological migration, pornography moved into the cultural mainstream as well, becoming a central component of popular culture. Looking at the pervasive use of provocative imagery, Pamela Paul writes that the entire culture has become “pornified.” The pornification of culture and the widespread use of pornography have negative consequences for individuals and couples. Contrary to the view that pornography will enhance sexual experiences, women and men are reporting that it has damaged their personal sexual satisfaction, their relationships, and their ability to be intimate with their spouses.

  As Norman Doidge shows, men find that pornographic attitudes have invaded their minds and relationships as well as their computers. Previously, most research on the negative effects of pornography focused on how women were objectified and victimized. Today, the negative impact on men has been documented as well. As men’s use of pornography increases, they become more desensitized and find it more difficult to achieve satisfaction and intimacy with their wives. Clinical findings reveal that pornography use can become addictive, and users find it very hard to stop even when facing the loss of their relationships, families, and jobs.

  Violence is pervasive in pornography. As Mary Anne Layden documents, studies show that people who watch scenes of sexual violence are less likely to think violence is harmful. Sex offenders use pornography to groom victims. Anyone who looks at and becomes a user of pornography learns something from it. Users learn not only about specific sex acts, but about values, for pornography surreptitiously teaches behavior, beliefs, and attitudes. Teens are increasingly exposed to pornography, and some view it on a regular basis. No one knows what the impact of this early exposure will be on their ideas about sexuality or on their sexual behavior.

  Today, women and teen girls are struggling to cope with a sexual cultural climate that has been molded by pornography, affecting their understanding of themselves and the character of their relationships with men, as Jill Manning and Ana Bridges each explain. Wives of pornography users are often devastated when they discover their husbands’ secret habits. They feel betrayed and even more hurt and confused when their husbands can’t or won’t stop using it. A recent survey has found that 56% of divorce cases involved one partner compulsively using pornography.

  The mainstreaming of pornography has led as well to more women consuming it. Women users exhibit the same problems as men users: They become desensitized to the content; they have difficulty forming long-term intimate relationships; and they are more likely to separate sexual gratification and emotional involvement.

  Empirical evidence of this kind cannot be ignored, but it also cannot give a complete account of what is wrong about pornography. That demands ethical reflection: an understanding of the human person and the human good, and then a consideration of the use of pornography in light of that understanding. This is the subject of the second set of papers.

  Scruton’s essay offers what might be called a phenomenological account of human sexual desire, seeing the disorder of pornography in the search for sexual pleasure apart from desire for another person as a person, in other words, apart from love. Hadley Arkes takes a natural law approach to show that pornography is wrong in principle, not only for its harmful consequences, since it violates the natural exclusivity and intimacy of sexual relations, and he explains that what is wrong in principle cannot be ignored by law without teaching that wrong is right, or at least “all right.” A Muslim reflection on sexual purity by Hamza Yusuf completes this part of the volume, drawing on Plato as well as the Koran.

  There follow in the third set of papers several that address issues of law and policy in relation to the regulation of pornography. Actually, it is probably more precise to say that these essays lay out some of the challenges of bringing the power of law and public opinion to bear against the widespread availability and use of pornography, even in light of our new awareness of its social costs in the contemporary context, and they counsel caution and prudence in the design of remedies.

  Historically, obscene materials were suppressed by the states and by the federal government, but around the middle of the twentieth century censorship began to relax, first in response to changes in public opinion, then as a result of the judiciary’s extension of First Amendment protection to many materials that would have once been ruled obscene, finally as a consequence of a policy decision to stop prosecuting alleged obscenity when children were not involved.

  While appreciating the wisdom in some of the earlier standards, as well as what was ill-advised in the old ways, both James Stoner and Gerard Bradley agree that the question is not one of nostalgia for a past era but of finding a way to address the serious harms of pornography in a context governed by constitutional doctrines and powerful interests that weigh against any effort at regulation. Although, as K. Doran shows, pornography is big business, and although, as Bradley reiterates, the value of public morality has been widely misunderstood, the situation is not hopeless in the face of mounting evidence of unmistakable wrong and measurable harm. In fact, even though contemporary constitutional law allows full regulation only of hard-core and child pornography, actual regulation in most jurisdictions and certainly on the internet does not at present approach what is constitutionally permitted. The question in the end is a matter of public opinion and political will.

  While the companion Statement of Findings and Recommendations includes several proposals for reform in its conclusion, the present volume does not advocate a program for action. Rather, the aim of the authors has been to survey and try to understand a serious evil in society and to alert the public that pornography is an issue that deserves their attention. For many readers, perhaps especially those in the learned classes, hearing that alert will entail reconsidering opinions they formed long ago and now take for granted. We think, however, that the time has come for looking at the issue with fresh eyes: Pornography is different, the social context is different, and there is new evidence that pornography does immediate and sustained harm. What to make o
f the evidence and argument, and what to do in the face of it, we leave to every reader to discern.

  PART ONE:

  EVIDENCE OF HARM

  FROM PORNOGRAPHY TO PORNO TO PORN: HOW PORN BECAME THE NORM

  Pamela Paul

  “It’s all mainstream now!”

  That’s what Seth Rogan’s character Zack says to his best friend and intended love, Miri, in an effort to get her to make a pornographic film with him. The film is Zack and Miri Make a Porno, the latest gross-out comedy/romance from Kevin Smith, and one of many recent comedies (and romances, shockingly) to make light of pornography. Indeed, in Rogan’s last romantic hit, Knocked Up, his character’s “job” is creating a pornographic website. The women in the film? After a quick, symbolic “yuck!,” they become willing participants.

  It is all mainstream now. Over the past ten years, technological advances, cultural shifts, and social attitudes have transformed the pornography landscape. Today, men, women, and children are affected by the ubiquity and mainstreaming of pornography in unprecedented ways. The internet, in particular, has made pornography more anonymous, more accessible, and more affordable than ever before, bringing in new users, increasing use among existing fans, and catapulting many into sexual compulsiveness. Children are being exposed to pornography earlier than ever before, in ways that will profoundly affect their sexuality and their lives.

  Not only is pornography itself more ubiquitous, the entire culture has become pornified. By that I mean that the aesthetics, values, and standards of pornography have seeped into mainstream popular culture. Young girls brazenly pose in pornographic ways on their MySpace pages, even creating porn-like videos of themselves gyrating and preening before untold numbers of strangers. Porn stars are regularly featured in the same tabloid magazines that profile actors, singers, and other celebrities, equating those who sell sex with those who create art on the basis of other talents (though, of course, one could argue the relative merits of that “art”).

  PORNOGRAPHY IS EVERYWHERE

  All of this would not be possible without the hyperspeed spread of pornography over the past two decades. Today, the number of people looking at pornography is staggering. Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs (about one in five of all rented movies is porn), and the 11,000 porn films shot each year far outpaces Hollywood’s yearly slate of 400. Four billion dollars a year is spent by consumers on video pornography in the United States, more than on football, baseball, and basketball. One in four internet users looks at a pornography website in any given month. Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66% of eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old men visit a pornographic site every month.

  Pornography regularly makes headlines and sells products, even within the mainstream culture. In 2004, Janet Jackson notoriously bared her breast during the Super Bowl, in prime-time family television viewing hours. Shortly thereafter Paris Hilton’s amateur sex video became an internet sensation. More media attention followed—Howard Stern fled to satellite radio and soon porn star Jenna Jameson and Playboy bunny Pamela Anderson were topping the best-seller lists with a memoir and a roman à clef, respectively. A glossy coffee table book of porn star portraits accompanied by essays from writers such as Salman Rushdie and Francine du Plessix Gray was published. Showtime ran a special in which porn stars, Jameson among them, bragged about the power women have in the pornography business. Today, celebrity couples boast about their trips to the hottest strip clubs. Characters on prime-time sitcoms extol the benefits of porn. Even mainstream women’s magazines advise women to enliven their marital bedtime routine by turning on late-night Skinemax.

  The message is that pornography is everywhere—and only ever-so-slightly scandalous. It is good for you, and especially good for relationships. Pornography is hip, sexy, and fun.

  But particularly on the internet, where much of pornography today is consumed, the type of sexuality depicted often has more to do with violence, extreme fetishes, and mutual degradation than with fun, much less with sexual or emotional connection. For those who haven’t double-clicked: These aren’t airbrushed photos of the girl next door or images of coupling; they are vivid scenes of crying women enduring aggressive multiple penetration.

  These are images created by pornographers for a single purpose: to help men masturbate and get them to pay for it. Sex, in pornography, is a commercialized product, devoid of emotion, stripped of humanity, an essentially empty experience. As one porn fan put it, after an evening of porn surfing, “You feel like, yeah, that was a release, but I don’t know, maybe not the best thing. Like eating a bag of potato chips.”

  BAD FOR WOMEN AND MARRIAGE

  “You get into a slippery slope,” cautions Massachusetts-based psychologist and sex therapist Aline Zoldbrod. “The majority of porn out there is degrading and has only gotten worse. The women are plasticized; there’s no longer as much diversity or naturalism as there was two decades ago.”

  Zoldbrod believes many young men today are terrible lovers because they learn about sexuality from pornography. “In real life, sexually-speaking, women are slow cookers and men are microwaves. But in pornography, all a man does is touch a woman and she’s howling in delight. Today, pornography is so widely used by young men, they learn these falsehoods. There’s good evidence that the more porn men watch, the less satisfied they are with their partner’s looks and sexual performance.”

  Advice columnists across North America receive letter after letter in which women complain about their partner’s pornography. Men who watch a lot of porn seem to focus more intensely on the visual, even when in bed with a woman, asking her to emulate the look and moves of porn stars. Women have distorted body images and feel the need to remodel their appearances—no matter how they personally feel about pornography.

  Though pressured to accept pornography as a sign of being sexy and hip, many women admit that in practice they are hurt by their boyfriend’s use of porn. A twenty-four-year-old from Baltimore complained to me about how her boyfriend got lap dances at a strip club every month. “If he were to do that with a woman in front of me on the living room couch, that would be considered cheating. Why is it somehow okay just because he’s at a strip club?” Another woman told me, “All of my girlfriends and I expect to find histories of pornographic websites on our computers after our boyfriends use it. They don’t bother erasing the history if you don’t give them a lot of hell.” The implications troubled her. “I fear we are losing something very important—a healthy sexual worldview. I think, however, that we are using old ideas of pornography to understand its function in a much more complex modern world.”

  Women view men’s relationship with pornography as a sign of betrayal, even cheating. A thirty-eight-year-old mother of two from Kentucky said finding her husband’s secret stash of porn “pretty much wiped out the trust in our relationship.” Once she knew about his years-long subterfuge, she recalled, “I would find myself worrying all the time. If I were going to take a trip for my job, I’d wonder about what he might look at while I was gone.”

  Pornography thus creates deception and distrust in relationships. Most women have no idea how often their boyfriends and husbands look at pornography because the men do not tell them. Usually the deception is deliberate, though many men deny to themselves how often they look at it, and most simply don’t think about quantifying the amount they view. While men consider trust crucial for a healthy relationship, they seem willing to flout that trust when it comes to pornography—deceiving their significant others into thinking they’re either not looking at it at all or are looking at it less frequently. Fitting pornography into one’s life isn’t always easy.

  More women are installing programs such as Net Nanny® on their computers to limit their home computer internet access to PG websites. According to one filtering company, WiseChoice.net, more than half the company’s 3,000 customers are adults who use the software not to block their kids’ access
but to keep themselves and other adults from looking at porn.1 In a 2004 Elle/MSNBC.com poll, one in four women said she was concerned that her partner had an “out-of-control habit” with online pornography.

  Matrimonial lawyers attest to a growing docket of cases in which pornography was a major source of tension, if not the cause of the divorce. “Pornography wrecks marriages,” says Marcia Maddox, a Virginia-based attorney.

  BAD FOR MEN

  Yet lest pornography get written off as a “women’s problem,” consider the extensive negative effects of pornography on the primary users, men. According to a large-scale 1994 report summarizing eighty-one peer-reviewed research studies, most studies (70%) found that exposure to nonaggressive pornography has clear negative effects— and that is not the only kind of pornography most users view.2

  Countless men have described to me how, while using pornography, they have lost the ability to relate to or be close to women. They have trouble being turned on by “real” women, and their sex lives with their girlfriends or wives collapse. These are men who seem like regular guys, but who spend hours each week with porn—usually online. And many of them admit they have trouble cutting down their use. They also find themselves seeking out harder and harder pornography.

  In interviews for Pornified, a book I wrote about pornography’s effects, men—even those who were avid porn fans—confessed that their pornography habits had damaged their sex lives. Men who use pornography say they are losing the ability to relate to, be close to, and achieve orgasm with real women.