Inquisition 21
 |
 |
|
|
| Log In
|
|
|
|
|
| Search Articles
|
|
|
|
|
| Comments
|
|
|
You don't have to,
but if you log in,
you can add comments.
|
| Page Referral
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Harm of Pornography
|
|
|
|
“We don’t exploit women - we exploit middle aged men with credit cards.” So explains a woman pornography publisher. Read this and more in a long article by British writer, Kevin Kirk, titled ‘The Harm of Pornography’.
The Harm of Pornography
Kevin Kirk
“We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” John F. Kennedy - February 26, 1962
In this essay I have decided not to focus specifically on child pornography, primarily because the amount of research available is very limited and therefore very difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from. In addition, by virtue of the fact that the mere possession of child pornography, or a facsimile, is regarded as such a heinous crime, then an objective assessment by an uncritical scientific viewpoint is almost impossible.
There is an impetus for lumping child pornography in with the mainstream adult pornography and much of that comes from the prohibition industry’s own expansion of ‘abhorrent’ imagery from that purely involving children to that involving adults. If their theories are correct, and I can find no compelling evidence that they aren’t, then child pornography would have the same effects on the audience, albeit with different ‘targets’, as the more mainstream adult variety.
The prohibition industry, which inhabits a strange world full of smoke and mirrors, is already conflating the two (witness the current priority of the US attorney general to ban all ‘obscene’ material – in direct contravention of various supreme court judgments – and the UK government’s proposal to ban all ‘violent’ pornography on the flimsy pretext that it ‘caused’ the murder of the schoolteacher Jane Longhurst, which, of course, is total nonsense) and so by studying the available conclusive research on adult pornography then the results can be extrapolated to cover the child pornography niche.
There are three schools of thought currently available: these are the ‘scientific’ researchers, the statisticians and the ideologues. The latter are primarily the religious right (who have a thumping cheek as more sexual violence is committed with the words of the bible on the nutcases’ lips than have ever been committed by those who watched a bit of smut), extreme feminists and their apologists, such as terminally weak politicians like Vera Baird’s lapdog Martin Salter who is forever dancing round his mistress’s ankles yelping and seeking her approval (and to think that the good people of Reading should actually vote for a jellyfish like this, never mind the people of Redcar – Vera Baird’s constituency – who voted for someone who has a pathological hatred of half her constituents), Law Enforcement Agents who are looking for easy busts of people who are unlikely to offer any resistance, unlike real criminals, and the assorted hangers on who are making such a good living projecting hatred and division in society. This latter group relies primarily on advocacy research (i.e. they work backwards from the conclusion) and selected parts of historical research, much of which has been disproved, a fact that they conveniently forget when they reach their own conclusions.
In order to avoid falling into the very same trap as this latter group, I decided to study all the scientific research that is available to try and understand how they reached their conclusions.
Almost as soon as I embarked on the research I found that any research findings that showed a limited or null negative effect (or positive effects) are usually quashed or buried and are certainly never reported on. This fact was confirmed by the writer M Pally (Sex and sensibility Hopwell, NJ: Ecco Press. 1994) who said “Unfortunately, only studies which report significant findings are normally published. As a result, a great number of studies showing no effects, and thus supporting the limited effects model, never make it to public view.” ‘Limited effects’ in this instance meaning that the subject had little or no adverse reaction to viewing pornography.
To my mind it is almost impossible to undertake scientific research by using a single snapshot in time on a group of people, usually students, and then create a meaningful experiment from which an objective conclusion can be drawn. There are a number of reasons for this:
The first is the nature of the viewing and the target audience. Pornography is not, as a rule, viewed as a group as it is, by its very nature, a lonely occupation. Secondly the subjects were almost entirely students and so unrepresentative of society as a whole. Moreover there was no recording of whether the subjects were tired, hungry, thirsty or even their personal sexual proclivities (for example how may of them were homosexual). Their emotional states prior to the experiment were not recorded either; for example were they angry or unhappy.
To my mind for the experiments to have any meaning, they should be undertaken over a number of years from childhood through to adulthood with a careful note being made of their social background, access to adult material at a young age, upbringing, substance abuse and even their diet.
One of the most quoted experiments by the anti pornography advocates was by Neil Malamuth (1978) who conducted a study using three groups of male subjects. One group would read aggressive pornography (depicting a rape), another group read non aggressive pornography, and the third were given a neutral stimuli (National Geographic). After exposure, all subjects were insulted by a female and were then put in a situation where they could apply an electric shock to the female. Half of the group was told it was permissible to be as aggressive as they wished (disinhibitory communication), while the other half were given a message to make them self conscious about aggression (inhibitory communication).
No negative results were found in the inhibitory group, but in the disinhibitory group the highest levels of aggression were recorded for those who had been exposed to the aggressive pornography.
The ‘conclusion’ was that the aggressive pornography led on to sexual aggression, which in turn was extrapolated into rape. Let us just suppose that a group of young men, of the sort were prepared to take part in lab tests instead of being out chasing girls, had been insulted by a female and were then encouraged to give her an electric shock with no repercussions then the chances of them doing so would, in my opinion, be very high irrespective of whether they’d watched a porn movie or not.
Yet this wasn’t factored in to the equation.
There were a number of other factors were either overlooked or ignored. The first was that if there was an inhibitory factor built in (such as laws or societal disapproval) then despite the aggression in the viewed material then there was no increase in sexual aggression towards the woman. The second, and more important, point was that although the subjects were sexually aroused they were unable to relieve their sexual tensions through masturbation, which in itself increased their aggression.
Ironically because of the latter point, it not only nullified the experiment but actually pointed towards either a cathartic or limited effect. It should also be noted that a lack of sleep would produce exactly the same result.
No mention was made as to whether the subjects actually liked the woman, who had insulted them, or found her sexually attractive. It also presupposed that women could go round insulting men who were not supposed to get annoyed in return.
Another experiment that is trotted out is by Donnerstein and Berkowitz (1981) which was conducted by subjecting males to one of four types of material: aggressive pornography with positive outcome (depiction of a rape where the woman enjoyed the encounter), aggressive pornography with negative outcome (rape where the woman reacted negatively), nonagressive pornography (willing sexual intercourse), and a neutral stimuli. Before watching the film, participants were either angered or treated neutral by a female.
The results were that nonangered males who viewed the positive-aggressive film increased their aggression against the female. Among angered males, both the aggressive-positive and aggressive-negative films produced an increase in aggression towards the female instigator. From this, Donnerstein and Berkowitz conclude "that aggressive pornography can directly influence aggression against women."
My conclusion would have been that men who were angered by women tended towards being angry back, irrespective of whether they’d viewed pornography or not. But then I’m not a well paid ‘scientist’ who has been funded to find negative effects.
Again the masturbatory release mechanism was denied to the subjects and none of the other factors, noted above, were either noted or taken into account.
Using a similar experiment Donnerstein attempted to gauge the effect of aggressive pornography relative to non-pornographic aggressive material. Male subjects were first angered or treated neutral by a female accomplice, and were then assigned to watch one of three films; aggressive pornography, aggressive non-pornography (woman is tied up but no nudity or sex), and finally a consensual sex film.
The result was that the combination of angered subject and aggressive pornography produced the highest aggression levels. Significantly, the study also found that the aggressive non-pornographic film produced higher levels of aggression than did the pornographic film. This leads Donnerstein to conclude that violent pornography is related to aggression against women, but that this may be a factor of the violence in the film, not its sexual content: "Again we see that aggressive pornography is a strong contributor to violence against women. The main factors in this aggressive facilitation, however, seems to be the aggressive nature of the film.” (Malamuth and Donnerstein, 1984).
This ‘conclusion’ bothered me because it was quite obviously the level of violence inherent in the film that caused the most aggression, yet no court would find a violent film ‘obscene’ and society seems to have no problems (at least up to now) with horrendously violent films but does have a major problem with nudity or sexual encounters. I am not for one second advocating the censorship of, say, action/adventures that feature violence, but am instead asking for the debate regarding adult sexual material to be put into context.
To my mind one important control was missing and that was that none of the groups were insulted by a man instead of a woman prior to viewing the material noting the level of aggression toward the man afterwards.
Donnerstein popped up again in an experiment on what effect violent films have on subjects. Donnerstein and Linz (1985) showed 10 hours of R-rated (non pornographic) slasher films, X-rated violent pornography, and X-rated nonviolent pornography to male subjects over the course of 5 days. The study found that the R-rated slasher films produced the greatest desensitization.
Their conclusion was “Initially, after the first day of viewing, the men rated themselves as significantly above the norm for depression, anxiety, and annoyance on a mood adjective checklist. After each subsequent day of viewing, these scores dropped until, on the fourth day of viewing, the males' levels of anxiety, depression, and annoyance were indistinguishable from baseline norms.”
Subjects were also found to believe the films less debasing and degrading to women and more enjoyable. It is interesting to note that he later retracted all his findings by announcing: “that the same result could be achieved by riding a bicycle.”
And to prove that old adage that you can’t keep a good man down Linz popped up again in a 1988 experiment, which exposed male groups to 8 hours of unedited feature length films. The groups saw slasher films, nonviolent comedies, sexually explicit nonviolent movies, or a no exposure control group. The study concluded that: “Sexually violent slasher films that were originally anxiety provoking and depressing became less so with repeated exposure. Men exposed to the slasher films also reported seeing less violence with continued exposure, and films found to be degrading to women were judged to be less so after prolonged exposure.”
‘Found to be degrading to women’? That bothers me greatly as it is a very subjective definition, and confirms the obvious bias the researcher has, and as none of the groups were actually subjected (at least from my reading of the research) to sexually violent slasher films, I can’t see how they could reach that conclusion. It is important to note that in these studies the desensitization effects were strongest among the non pornographic but physically violent films.
After exposure, participants saw a documentary re-enactment of a real rape trial, and were then asked to assess the female victim. Participants who had seen the R-rated physically violent films, with little or no sexual content, found the victim to be more responsible for being raped, more worthless, and her injuries less severe. It is worth noting that the participants exposed to nonviolent pornography showed no effects.
Unfortunately these results were in direct contradiction to that of the censorship brigade’s favorite experiment which was conducted by Zillmann and Bryant in 1982 who explored "the consequences of continued exposure to pornography on beliefs about sexuality in general and on dispositions towards women." In this experiment, 80 male and 80 female participants were randomly selected into one of four conditions. In the massive exposure group, participants watched 36 erotic films (roughly 5 hours of film) over a six week period. In the intermediate exposure group, participants saw 18 erotic films and 18 non-erotic films. The no exposure group saw 36 non-erotic films, and finally there was a control. All pornographic films shown were nonviolent.
After exposure, participants were introduced to a rape case and asked to recommend a prison sentence for the offense. Participants were also asked to indicate their support for the female liberation movement on a 0 (no support) to 100 (maximum support) scale.
The massive exposure group was found to have recommended significantly shorter prison terms for the rape case than all other groups. This was the case among both men and women and to be honest represents a certain amount of common sense as it has been proven that longer prison sentences are not a deterrent to rape, which is primarily an opportunistic offence.
However from this, Zillmann and Bryant conclude that "such exposure, it seems, made rape appear a trivial offense."
Pornography makes rape appear to be a trivial offence to women?
What absolute nonsense.
I cannot for the life of me see any circumstances that would make rape appear to be a trivial offence to women, or indeed to the majority of men.
The massive exposure group, including the women, was also found to be significantly less supportive of the women's liberation movement. Or was that less supportive of the feminist movement? There is a huge difference. The extreme feminist movement has caused huge harm to women, as well as men, by trivializing motherhood and shaming women who want to stay home and bond with their babies into going out to work instead. From what I can see a lot of women are being made to feel inadequate because they can’t have it all; a glittering career, a nice home and a brood of healthy, well adjusted children.
My totally unscientific viewpoint is if women want to stay at home and look after their babies then let them.
There is another side effect of this strident campaign by the feminists on the evils of men and that is the louder and longer they scream the more contempt they, and by extensive all women, are held in by men. It used to be that a man would open a door for a woman or offer up his seat on a train but the feminists say that it is sexist and symptomatic of males proving their superiority, whereas I say its plain good manners.
No wonder women are being held in greater contempt, yet no-one has conducted any research into this area because it is not politically correct to do so. Call me unfashionable but my conclusion would be that strident feminism has had more of an effect on the ‘desensitization’ of men that pornography ever could.
Besides no-one else has been able to replicate Zillmann and Bryant's findings of negative attitudes towards women after exposure to nonviolent pornography. For example, Padgett and Brislin-Slutz (1987) conducted an almost identical study, massively exposing male and female participants to 5 straight days of nonviolent pornography, and then assessing their attitudes towards women and rape. Their results found no difference between pre and post test measures, and no difference between the porn viewing group and the control.
Similarly, many other studies, including, oddly enough, a 1985 study by Donnerstein and Linz, exposing participants to several experimental conditions (violent porn, nonviolent porn, control) have found that exposure to nonviolent porn produces few or no adverse attitudes towards women. From a review of this literature, Linz (1989) notes "We would have to conclude that the data, overall, do not support the contention that exposure to nonviolent pornography has significant adverse effects on attitudes toward rape as a crime or more general evaluations of rape victims."
Malamuth, Reisin, and Spinner conducted an experiment in 1979 which exposed male and female participants to magazine portrayals of aggressive (rape and BDSM) and consensual pornography. Next, they were exposed to a videotaped interview of an actual rape victim, and then asked to answer a questionnaire assessing their perception of the victim and their attitudes towards rape.
The conclusion was that there was no significant difference between participants exposed to the violent pornography and those exposed to the nonviolent pornography. The conclusion drawn from this by the censorship lobby was that all pornography had the same effect, which they took as proof positive that all pornography led on to the subjugation of women, which is quite a (unsubstantiated) leap. Whereas common sense says the opposite, has it not occurred to anybody that a lot of women find pornography empowering?
While it is true that that women are not as keen on visual representations of pornography (photographs and films) as men that doesn’t mean to say they don’t like it. Women tend to prefer the written word (the more cerebral end of the market) because they can exercise their sexual imaginations and even become part of the plot. This may stem from the fact that sexual arousal for a woman comes from the brain whereas for men it comes primarily from the genitalia.
Men are pre-programmed to find the sight of a woman attractive and women like to be admired, if that weren’t the case then the cosmetics industry wouldn’t survive. Many of the female porn stars enjoy the fact that men will get aroused watching them.
To be honest, I put a lot of the feminist’s wrath towards porn down to plain outright jealousy. It can’t have escaped anyone’s notice that the more strident the feminist is, the less attractive she is. They aren’t admired, mainly because there is nothing admirable about them, so they want to stop other, beautiful, women being admired in turn.
One thing is for sure: they do not speak for the majority of women.
In another study, Malamuth, Haber, and Feshbach (1980) exposed participants to either a sadomasochistic or nonviolent pornographic story. The participants then read a description of a rape where the victim clearly opposed the assault, and were then asked to recommend a prison sentence for the offender. Again the results drew the conclusion that exposure to the sexually violent story and attitudes towards rape were not linked.
And Krafka, in a 1997 experiment, exposed female participants to one of the following: a feature length violent pornography, nonviolent pornography, or non or mildly sexual but violent film. The participants were pre and post tested for self-perception attitudes like self-esteem and fear of victimization. Results showed no significant reductions in self-esteem between the experimental groups.
Zillmann and Bryant again cropped up in 1989 when they conducted an experiment to test nonviolent pornography's effect on traditional values about marriage and family. They randomly assigned participants into porn viewing and control groups, and exposed them to this material during hourly sessions over a six week period.
After one week, participants were asked to complete a family values survey. Their results found that endorsement of marriage as an important institution fell from 60 percent in the control group to 39 percent in the treatment group. The treatment group also wanted fewer children. However what wasn’t mentioned was that the older, more settled, men in his study group left when they were told they would be watching pornography, leaving only the younger men who for the most part did not have enduring relationships and were, of course, living in student environments. But his control group continued to contain those older men, with the result that their experience of marriage and the desirability of one's current partnerships may have coloured the balance of attitudes about that subject. Similarly, the fact that they were both older and obviously more conservative may have been responsible for the other differences in attitudes between the two groups.
My feeling is that the same results could be obtained by exposing the groups to either a enlightened tax system where marriage and child rearing were rewarded or the current UK tax system where marriage is penalized and motherhood (i.e. staying at home and bonding with their children) is deemed to be anti social; viz all mothers should work and pay taxes and let the state rear their young.
Our parents were able to survive with only one partner working but now it is almost impossible because the state takes over 56% (and rising) of the family income in order to pay for useless government flunkies. No wonder we are getting out of touch with our own children.
And, don’t forget, therein lies the seeds of the current paedophile panic. As Judith Levine pointed out on her essay ‘The Pedophile panic” that many of the fears of mothers that led to the panic came from them handing over the child rearing duties to strangers.
Zillmann and Bryant finally concluded, after all their bizarre ‘research’, "those massively exposed to pornography will become distrusting of their partners in extended relationships.”
What on earth do they mean by an extended relationship? A ménage a trois? Both partners sleeping around? Bisexual relationships? What?
And another little gem; “Another likely consequence is a growing dissatisfaction with sexual reality." Which I take to mean men are dismayed that their wives don’t have bigger breasts or are willing to undertake energetic sexual gymnastics, or has been found in a US study, they wouldn’t take part in oral sex. So their raison d’etre for banning porn is that it makes us dissatisfied with what we’ve got.
Hmm, my take on that is it can be ‘cured’ by decriminalizing prostitution.
Similarly, Linz and Malamuth in 1993 concluded that exposure to pornography "fosters a lack of respect for social institutions such as the family and traditional sex roles for women." You could substitute the word ‘pornography’ for ‘a penal tax system’ and still come up with the same conclusion.
Especially if we consider that the ‘traditional sex role’ means staying at home and looking after the children.
To be perfectly honest, I can’t get excited by any of this ‘research’ pro or anti (and the overall results tended, when taken as a whole, to cancel each other out). The methodology was flawed, the researchers drew the most bizarre conclusions and there was no attempt to measure the cathartic effect of pornography on the more socially inept members of society who couldn’t instigate or maintain a consensual relationship.
For example it is common sense (experimentally confirmed by Zuckerman in 1971 and again by Kelley and Byrne in 1983) that pornography is used by many people (male and female) as a way of achieving sexual arousal, so for the experiments to have any meaning whatsoever then the subjects should have been allowed to masturbate before they applied ‘sanctions’ against the woman who had insulted them, as would happen in the real world.
Very few people view pornography then take to the streets with no sexual release. I believe and again common sense tells me that given this masturbatory release then the results would have been far different.
And I’m not alone in my thinking; Brannigan and Goldenberg in 1987 came to a similar conclusion.
In other words the experiments are not worth the paper they are written on particularly in light of the fact that they, with the exception of Dolf Zillman, who one writer called “a right-wing moralist anti-pornography researcher”, have all since tempered, or even disowned, their conclusions. Even John Court, a former leader of the Festival of Light who made his name by presenting what he said was evidence of that link, has been forced to retract. When he was urged to confirm that research showed evidence of a link between pornography and violence, he said: "What I am saying is that we do not have evidence that there is such a causal link. I cannot sustain it from my data and I don't know anybody who can."
However these flawed conclusions are still being used to undermine the human rights act (ie the right to impart or receive information) on the pretext that the derogation is protecting the nation’s morals. Have the politicians actually had a good look at our nation’s morals lately? Sexual assaults are rampant as are teenage pregnancies and, indeed, sexually transmitted diseases. It is my considered opinion that if the politicians spent less time listening to dungareed, crop haired, hardline feminists and more time reflecting on the actual effects of pornography on society then we’d all be better off.
The sensible, more thoughtful, end of the feminist movement has also come out in opposition to the censorship of pornography. In their leaflet “Censorship Hurts Women”(Available here) NCAC's Working Group on Women, Censorship & Pornography (made up of 75 leading Feminists) said “ We anti censorship feminists hate misogynist representations of women -- whether in advertising, sitcoms, or pornography. But we don't all agree on what's misogynist. And we hate rape and abuse even more. But pictures are not themselves violence. And censorship will never stop violence. In fact, the most monstrous regimes in history used censorship to help carry out their aims. Hitler was especially unhappy about ‘degrading’ images of women and eager to wipe out smut.”
The politicians can’t say they didn’t know of any research that supported the view that pornography should be uncensored. Yet there is a considerable amount of research, which they sponsored, that came to this conclusion but which was suppressed because of political dogma.
For example the 1970 US Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the ‘Lockhart commission’, uncovered no link between adult exposure to pornography and bad behavior and called for dismantling legal restrictions on pornography.
Not only that, the panelists failed to find harm to children in viewing adult material so much so that they went so far as to suggest it could ‘facilitate much needed communication between parent and child over sexual matters’. And heavens knows we need it given the number of teenage pregnancies - 90,000 in 2003 of which over 8,000 were amongst girls under 14, a rise of 2.5% and the worst in Europe - and the huge increase in sexually transmitted diseases amongst the young.
A recent (2005) Home Office report has suggested that if parents talked to their children about sexual matters it reduced the number of teenaged pregnancies, yet in the current climate if they do then the police consider that to be sexual grooming or even abuse.
Think how it would sound in court if you as a parent should ‘start to talk generally to your child about sex and relationships from an early age — naming body parts for example’ as advised by the government on its direct.gov.uk website? And how would it sound to a social worker who has been charged in finding evidence that you abused your child and start asking the child questions and they trot out that daddy told them all about penises and vaginas and what they are used for.
This is NOT joined up government in action here.
In the UK the 1979 Home Office Committee on Obscenity and Film Censorship (the Williams Committee), said: “so-called obscene or pornographic or sexually explicit material (call it what you will) should be freely available to consenting adults.” And later the 1990 Home Office Research Report, "Pornography: Impacts and Influences", (by Dr Guy Cumberbatch and Dr Dennis Howlitt) which found no evidence of any link between the availability of pornography and sexual crime, and effectively endorsed all previous findings that sexually explicit material is harmless.
They even went as far as to say: “The evidence does not point to pornography as a cause of deviant sexual orientation in offenders.”
Even the much derided (because it was so blatantly biased – of the 11 members of the panel, 6 were well known anti pornography advocates) Meese commission on pornography convened in 1985 by US attorney general Edwin Meese could not establish factual links between sexually explicit materials and antisocial behavior either.
But it didn’t stop them concluding there was, indeed, a causal link despite the lack of evidence.
When I read the report I was struck by the tragic-comic nature of the solicitations and responses. Every person who appeared before it was hand picked and pre-vetted to ensure they all sang from the same hymn sheet (an apt metaphor given that more pastor’s wives appeared before it than people actually working in the industry) and they took great pains to ensure that no scientific evidence that contradicted their pre-formed view was ever considered. And they didn’t commission any of their own. The whole commission’s viewpoint was guided by hearsay ‘evidence’.
The public isn’t stupid, as long as they are informed of the facts, and the commission’s conclusions were so blatantly biased that the general public not only ignored them but took the opposite view.
It didn’t stop the commission from recommending that the age limit on the definition of a child for the purposes of child pornography to be raised to 18 though, which has filtered down through the UN convention to form the lower age limit we have today. The reason they gave was that it was difficult to distinguish between a 15 and a 16 year old, which of course created the anomaly that it was now difficult to detect the difference between a 17 year old and an 18 year old; which in turn has led for calls for the age to be raised to 25.
To highlight the farcical nature of the whole thing we need look no further than the fact that the commission couldn’t even come up with a legal definition of the very thing they were supposed to be investigating and they had to slap a gagging order on one of their researchers (the Canadian sociologist Edna Einsiedel) because she opined that there was no established link between pornography and actual sexual crimes but was merely an ‘inference’. The US Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, was then asked to report independently but he too reported that no evidence of harm from pornography could be found. So they decided to quash that report too.
Indeed, researchers have found evidence that there isn’t even an inference. Interviews of sex criminals, including child molesters, reveal that the children who eventually became rapists were usually exposed to pornography less, or later, than other kids.
According to Johns Hopkins University's John Money, one of the world’s foremost authorities on sexual abnormalities, "the majority of patients with paraphilias" - deviant sexual fantasies and behaviours - "described a strict anti-sexual upbringing in which sex was either never mentioned or was actively repressed or defiled.”
Which ties in with what Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, said in that repressions, which disrupt the process of infantile sexual development in particular, lead to a strong tendency to later neurosis in adult life. (1923)
Did you ever wonder why the English speaking nations lead the world in requiring ‘therapy’? Well now you know.
There has also been a number of serious research projects undertaken - by what I choose to call the statisticians - which came to the same conclusion by via a different route.
The most prominent being that undertaken by the eminent Berl Kutchinsky who is the Professor of Criminology at the Institute of Criminology and Criminal Science at the University of Copenhagen who said in the conclusion of his report based on his research of the subject of sexual violence and the easy availability of adult material: “The aggregate data on rape and other violent or sexual offences from four countries where pornography, including aggressive varieties, has become widely and easily available during the period we have dealt with would seem to exclude, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this availability has had any detrimental effects in the form of increased sexual violence.”
Kutchinsky Report Available Here or Here
It was mainly based on his evidence that the Danish parliament didn’t bring in really draconian laws regarding child pornography because, in his opinion based on his ongoing research, that it would make the matter worse. His findings were based on hard evidence from the crime statistics of 4 countries where pornography had been legalized and has been continually updated (1970; 1985; 1987; 1991).
Other research goes further, saying that pornography can have beneficial effects on society like that undertaken by Milton Diamond of the University of Hawaii - Manoa John A. Burns School of Medicine, Department of Anatomy and Reproductive Biology, Pacific Center for Sex and Society in Honolulu and Ayako Uchiyama from the National Research Institute of Police Science Juvenile Crime Study Section 6, Sanban-cho, Chiyoda-ku in Tokyo (published in 1999) who concluded that “ In sum, the concern that countries allowing pornography would show increased sex crime rates due to modeling or that adolescents in particular would be negatively vulnerable to and receptive to such models or the society would be otherwise adversely effected has not been vindicated. It is certainly clear from our data and analysis that a massive increase in available pornography in Japan has been correlated with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes and most so among youngsters as perpetrators or victims.”
Read their report here or Read it Here
What is striking about their conclusion is that the decriminalization of pornography leads to a decrease in crimes against children. If their conclusion is correct, and it is based on actual crime figures, then we should be removing all censorship of pornography as a matter of urgency. But instead the politicians are taking a diametrically opposite view and are, instead, increasing the repression.
So what about child pornography?
Does it indeed lead on to actual abuse?
Professor Max Taylor, head of the EU funded COPINE project and arguably the world’s leading child pornography expert, said: “The relationship between adult sexual interest in children and child pornography is complex and poorly understood. Not all convicted child-sex offenders express an interest in child pornography. On the other hand, very many people who have no criminal record, and who seemingly have no known sexual interest in children, demonstrate an interest in child pornography by accessing and downloading images. The relationship between collecting child pornography and sexual assaults on children is also not clear.”
David Finkelhor, the director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, funded in part by the US Department of Justice, after a study was completed that revealed that rates of reported child sex abuse in the US have dropped by 30 percent in the past 10 years, concluded: "There is no evidence that the Internet is fueling an explosion of child sexual abuse." And that: "pornography is not one of the major causal factors" in the abuse of kids.”
Indeed even the police themselves admit this is the case. For example in an International Investigative Psychology Conference held on December 12th 2005, Dr Stuart Kirby, Detective Chief Superintendent with Lancashire Police (who himself holds a PhD in Psychology), said "When you look at all the research that has been done nationally, the consensus is that there has not proven to be a link between the viewing of pornography and the committing of hands-on offences.”
And in the Lords, on 11th March 2004, after a question was tabled by Lord Hylton: “What correlations have they found between individuals with access to child pornography and offences of sexual abuse of children, whether in the United Kingdom or overseas.”
Baroness Scotland of Asthal replied: “People who sexually abuse children are often found to be in possession of indecent images of children. There is evidence to suggest that child pornography can be used in an attempt to legitimise their sexual activities with children and to ‘groom’ or encourage compliance from their victims. However, we are not currently aware of any evidence to support a direct causal link between access to child pornography and the commission of sexual offences against children.”
What she forgot to come up with was the ‘evidence to suggest that child pornography can be used in an attempt to legitimise their sexual activities with children and to "groom" or encourage compliance from their victims’. I’ve never seen any, it is merely an inference, like just about all the other assertions in this rather one sided debate. Anyway no-one has ever explained why the ‘child abusers’ don’t use legally available adult pornography to do the same thing rather than the risky child porn.
And finally the NCS (now SOCA) themselves admitted grudgingly: “The Lucy Faithful Foundation, in its work with offenders, recognizes that some offenders abuse children without first viewing or collecting images of abuse.” (My italics).
Eh?
Does the NCS seriously want us to believe that we had no child molesters before we had child porn?
They’re trying hard but they just can’t seem to grasp that we are not going to go for the ‘Trust me I am a policeman’ stuff when we have a wealth of scientific and learned research telling us the opposite.
Maybe the truth as to why the police and the child exploitation industry persist in the notion that pornography leads on to abuse can be summed up by Nadine Strossen, who is president of the American Civil Liberties Union, who said: “..the idea that porn leads to sex crime presupposes a particularly degraded view of humanity and the capacity to make choices, which appeals to anti-pornography feminists .”
Of course it is the crime figures that would really tell the truth and they too seem to support the assertion that porn is not harmful, indeed can be cathartic and thus beneficial. The countries where there is the strictest censorship on pornography are the countries where there are the most violent sexual assaults (indeed the most violence overall).
The US comes top in the world (according to the crime.org website: a woman is raped every two minutes in America) with Australia and Canada hot on their heels. The UK currently has the 6th highest number of sexual assaults per head of population internationally and is top in Europe, a depressing position that it has held for many years.
To put these results into hard figures; women have a massive 35 times greater chance of being raped in the US than in Japan (in the UK that figure is 12 times). The US leads the world in violent sexual assaults with women having a 1 in 25 chance of being raped. Hardly a proud boast. But in the face of these statistics what do politicians do? They bring in even more repressive laws.
I, for one, am furious that the politicos are prepared to sacrifice my wife and daughters on the altar of political dogma, particularly when the current UK law does not allow me to protect them. I am supposed to let the police handle it if they are attacked, yet in a recent case the big, brave policemen wouldn’t enter a house where a madman was holding a woman and her daughter hostage, until after they’d completed a ‘risk assessment’ which wasn’t completed until many hours later, at which point the women were dead.
The current police thinking appears to be that it’s safer (for them) to allow the assault to take place and then arrest the perpetrator afterwards. When are they going to learn that we, as a society, pay them fabulous wages (some of the highest in the public sector, particularly for the semi skilled) in order for them to take risks on our behalf and for our safety? Not to sit in the station filling out forms and cataloging their vast porn collections. Sir Ian Blair (the Commander of the Metropolitan Police Force) asked what type of policing we the public want.
He really hasn’t got his finger on the pulse of public opinion has he?
Instances of rape have almost trebled since 1993 before all this nonsense started to the present; going from a little over 4000 in 1993 to over 12,000 in 2003/2004 according to Home Office figures.
You would have thought that politicians would have heeded these warnings and considered the research carefully before they rushed out ever more draconian laws but they don’t seem to care. Strutting their moral stuff on the national stage seems to be of far more importance than actually preventing these terrible crimes.
Tougher sentences are not what is needed here but a whole heap of common sense is. And that is in very short supply. As Churchill acknowledged, censorship doesn’t work; you can’t legislate against things that people want to do and for which they can see no harm (witness drugs). It never has and it never will.
According to Charles Bradlaugh: “Without free speech, no search for truth is possible... no discovery of truth is useful... Better a thousand fold abuse of free speech than denial of free speech. The abuse dies in a day, but the denial slays the life of the people, and entombs the hope of the race."
When will our politicians get the message? Repression is the polar opposite of both creativity and dynamism, two things we are going to need if we are going to alleviate the financial tsunami that’s heading our way.
The problem is that politicians currently have a very hard-line feminist viewpoint. Given another context, I’d find it irresistibly amusing that, despite the fact that the male politicians are prostrating themselves on the altar of extreme feminism, they are still secretly despised by the feminists.
Even more amusing is the fact that they are getting tangled up in the same laws they helped to create; for example one of the first casualties of the laws on curb crawling (soliciting prostitutes) was the Director of Public Prosecutions, Alan Green.
Amongst the prominent feminists, whom I label as ideologues, are the infamous duo of the late (and totally unlamented) Andrea Dworkin (who was as blatantly anti semitic – witness her book “Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation” - as she was anti male and once offered to smuggle a suitcase full of heroin into the US in return for $1,000 and an air ticket) and ‘Professor’ Katherine Mackinnon who in 1983 said: “Pornography is the celebration, the promotion, the authorization and the legitimization of rape, sexual harassment, battery and the abuse of children. All for the purpose of the sexual pleasure of men. Simply put, pornography eroticizes dominance and submission, of which rape, battery, sexual harassment, and the sexual and physical abuse of children are also forms of practice. It is affirmatively employing the enforcement of others' powerlessness.”
Which to my mind can be summed up, very simply, by her saying: “I hate men.”
She seems to conveniently forget three important facts; one that at least half the participants in porn movies are men, two that a lot of women actually enjoy pornography and three a great deal of pornography is either gay or lesbian.
They also said that all heterosexual sex was actually rape as women cannot give their consent. Funnily enough it was at this point that they lost many of their most ardent followers. For example; "I personally was a member of an Andrea Dworkin study group in the 1970s,” said Dr. Carol Queen. "It was a bunch of women who got together to read feminist books, and while Dworkin was clearly passionate about her cause, once she put out that book on rape, that said penetration equals rape, that really aced it for all of us. When we saw that, we were like, No, no ... no-no-no-no-no."
I’m not sure who is the most stupid; Dworkin for saying it or the politicians for believing her. If we take her ‘conclusions’ to their logical result that the human race would die out unless procreation was reduced to a syringe and a photo of Pamela Anderson.
This didn’t stop the Canadian Supreme Court in R Versus Butler deciding that, based on McKinnon’s viewpoint, just about all forms of porn was evil and should be stopped. According to First Amendment attorney Reed Lee: "What the court did in Butler is divide the area of pornography into three groups. It said, a lot of pornography just depicts men and women in all kinds of sexual situations, engaging in consensual activity, and that will not be obscene in Canada. It said some depicts force and rape and that sort of thing, and it said, 'Ordinarily, this will offend the contemporary community standards,' and then it said there's this middle group of subordination and stuff which may or may not. So the Butler court appeared to set out, once and for all, categories for what is acceptable in Canada and what isn't." The Court's decision cited extensively from briefs prepared by the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), with the support and participation of Katharine McKinnon. Andrea Dworkin opposed LEAF's position, arguing that feminists should not support or attempt to reform criminal obscenity law when she said: "Obscenity laws are also woman-hating in their very construction. Their basic presumption is that it's women's bodies that are dirty". Talk about mixed messages!
The first casualty of the Mackinnon/LEAF led judgment was Dworkin when Canadian Customs impounded her book ‘Pornography: Men Possessing Women‘. The intensely homophobic Canadian Mounties also decided that the judgment gave them carte blanche to raid all the gay (thus proving that they always get their man) and lesbian bookshops in Canada. I find it striking that whenever a new sexually repressive law is passed it is always the poor gay community that suffers first.
Gay equality is still being promoted through gritted teeth.
In the US the dynamic duo lobbied Minneapolis with the premise that pornography undermined women’s constitutional rights, which in turn lead to the following incredible declaration: “Pornography is central in creating and maintaining the civil inequality of the sexes. Pornography is a systematic practice of exploitation and subordination based on sex which differentially harms women. The bigotry and contempt it promotes, with the acts of aggression it fosters, harm women's opportunities for equality of rights in employment, education, property rights, public accommodations and public services; create public harassment and private denigration; promote injury and degradation such as rape, battery and prostitution and inhibit just enforcement of laws against these acts; contribute significantly to restricting women from full exercise of citizenship and participation in public life, including in neighborhoods; damage relations between the sexes; and undermine women's equal exercise of rights to speech and action guaranteed to all citizens under the constitutions and laws of the United States and the State of Minnesota.”
What absolute tosh!
There was no proof whatsoever, just wild assertions.
Mind you it didn’t stop the city council attempting to enact the law and it was only by the common sense of the mayor that it didn’t pass at that time (1983). It was however passed and signed into law by the city of Indianapolis in 1984, but was struck down again in 1986 by the 7th circuit court of appeals, in the case of American Booksellers v. Hudnut, as an unconstitutionally vague restriction on protected speech.
Dworkin didn’t just want porn banned but wanted to go further by attacking the pornographers. For example when she (inevitably) appeared before the Meese Commission she asked them to consider: "creating a criminal conspiracy provision under the civil rights law, such that conspiring to deprive a person of their civil rights by coercing them into pornography is a crime, and that conspiring to traffic in pornography is conspiring to deprive women of our civil rights". She seemed to be under the impression that any woman appearing in porn would only do so because she was forced in some way by a misogynist male.
She seems to have missed the point that the majority of the pornography currently being produced in the US is made by companies owned by women, one of whom said: “We don’t exploit women, we exploit middle aged men with credit cards.”
Hugh Heffner doesn’t run Playboy, his daughter does. And it was Paul Raymond’s daughter who ran Men Only before she died.
Dworkin did notice that the religious right, as embodied by Meese, were posing a threat to the feminist movement and in 1983 (in her book “The Politics of Domesticated Females”) she wrote "Why do right-wing women agitate for their own subordination? How does the Right, controlled by men, enlist their participation and loyalty? And why do right-wing women truly hate the feminist struggle for equality?"
Which brings us to Dr. Diane Russell. She runs some sort of advocacy center for female victims of violence (all major credit cards accepted) and produced an astounding essay entitled “Porn causes Rape”. She starts by citing research that seems to indicate that a substantial portion of men have a propensity towards rape. She quotes Briere and Malamuth (again!) who found that of 356 male respondents, 60 percent indicated that under the right conditions, there was some likelihood that they would rape or use force against a woman.
Similarly, Goodchilds and Zellman in 1984 found that 50 percent of high school males interviewed believed it acceptable "for a guy to hold down and force her to have sexual intercourse in instances such as when 'she gets him sexually excited' or 'she says she's going to have sex with him and then changes her mind."
And from this she hypothesizes that pornography leads on to rape; which is such a huge leap it left me gasping for breath.
The glue she used to tie this all together was the ‘findings’ of the laughably flawed Meese Commission, which she quoted extensively. Her hypothesis meandered through the following reasoning (I kid you not, these are her words): Pairing sexually arousing stimuli with rape which in turn leads on to increasing males self generated rape fantasies while sexualizing dominance and submission and finally creating an appetite for increasingly stronger material.
Culminating in what?
Armageddon presumably.
I think her premise was flawed from the start by again making the leap that all sexually stimulating material was paired with rape. In order to arrive here she cites Zillman, Donnerstein and Malamuth and concludes that pornography undermines the male’s internal inhibitions to act out rape fantasies, and that it undermines potential victims ability to avoid or resist rape.
Words fail me.
Some of her diatribe lets us in on how she managed to get aroused by watching someone peeling an orange (a Citrus Fetish! – that’s a new one on me) and suggests that anyone wanting anything more hardcore is a sexual deviant. She also said that anything she liked was erotic but whatever anyone else happened to like was pornographic.
I’m still not sure how her solipsism adds anything to the debate.
And her views are in direct contradiction to other feminists. For example the leading feminist writer Erica Jong said “Zealots will always want to enforce their position. And zealotry I think is a greater danger to women than pornography." Other viewpoints include "Sexual freedom and freedom for sexually explicit expression are essential aspects of human freedom." attributed to Nadine Strossen who is a professor at the New York Law School and Leonore Tiefer, who is a leading psychologist and sex therapist, said: "Women are more in danger from the repression of sexually explicit materials than from their free expression."
When discussing the censorship of pornography one mustn’t forget our dear friend Dr Victor Cline. Dr Cline calls himself a scientist and therefore completely objective in his findings. Which is slightly at odds with the fact that he sits on the censorship committee of the Church of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons) and is a cheerleader and fundraiser for the Lighted Candle Society, which is attempting to prove that pornography is addictive using brain scanners. He sincerely believes that masturbation is sexually deviant, which cannot be cured even by ‘extensive reading of the scriptures’. He is firmly in the ‘tie your kid’s hands to the bedposts to stop them abusing themselves’ camp.
Even though his objectivity is seriously in question it doesn’t stop politicians like the Liberal(!) peer David Alton quoting him when the question of the censorship of pornographic material is raised; which, incidentally, is totally at odds with his party line, agreed during the 2005 conference, which recommended the lifting of restrictions on most pornography. Some of Dr. Cline’s work may be seen online here in which he discusses how he cures addiction to pornography.
I’ve never really understood why the addiction to pornography and masturbation are regarded as so heinous. They doesn’t give rise to any physical problems, unlike drug or alcohol addiction, in fact they have a lot of benefits to health, at least according to a study conducted by Queens University in Belfast which concluded that “ ..men who reported the highest frequency of orgasm enjoyed a death rate half that of the laggards” You can read more about the health benefits by clicking here. It is well worth reading because it shows the effects this feminist led sexual repression is having on male health – it even says that seminal fluid is good for women’s teeth (try that one out on your wife) and that unprotected sex is good for women as substances in semen help regulate female hormones, which in turn stops them getting moody. So sex, and if you can’t get that masturbation, is good for us. So why is porn (as an aid to masturbation) so wicked? No one will give us a straight answer - just that it’s bad.
An advocate of the porn addition theory is James B. Weaver who is a Virginia Tech professor who studies the impact of pornography. He and his team have compared pornography to heroin, and called on Congress to finance studies on ‘porn addiction’ (preferably via a thumping grant to him and his team presumably) and launch a public health campaign about the dangers. "We're so afraid to talk about sex in our society that we really give carte blanche to the people who are producing this kind of material."
He is joking right?
US based pornographers of all stripes are, in 18 U.S.C. 2257, laboring under the most repressive reporting and record keeping strictures ever conceived; with the requirement to keep model details for decades which can be inspected at any time of the day or night by Law Enforcement with no notice. Laws, incidentally, that wouldn’t be tolerated in any other industry. Hollywood certainly doesn’t labour under such strictures.
Anyway it’s precisely because of the repressive laws on porn, and sexuality of all kinds, that we are so frightened to talk about sex in our society. So it’s a bit rich trying to turn that argument on its head purely in order to attract public funding. Anyway given his viewpoint prior to the research, I doubt if anyone would believe the conclusions he came to.
On a personal level I have an instinctive distrust of anyone who constantly quotes himself in his ‘research’ findings in the absence of anyone else.
On this subject we also have Mary Anne Layden, co-director of a sexual trauma program at the University of Pennsylvania, who advises Senator Sam Brownback’s Commerce subcommittee on Science’s investigation into pornography (The previous committees kept coming to the wrong conclusions) who says that pornography's effect on the brain mirrors addiction to heroin or crack cocaine.
And the proof is?
She describes one of her patients, a business executive, who arrived at his office at 9 AM each day, logged onto Internet porn sites, and didn't log off until 5 PM.
She didn’t say whether he ran a porn website, either that or he had a very understanding boss. Anyway isn’t that exactly what the police are doing in their ‘abusive images units’?
I had to laugh when she suggested that congress fund “billboards and bus advertisements to warn people to avoid pornography, strip clubs and prostitutes.” Personally I couldn’t think of a higher profile form of advertising; it’ll have the punters flocking in. Just like the government funded (and hilariously funny – although I don’t think that was the intention) movie ‘Reefer Madness’ which turned a generation of teenagers onto the wonders of smoking weed. Incidentally the movie is copyright free as it was produced by the US government and you can watch it by clicking here or here.
These people may be clever, but they don’t have much in the way of common sense.
It’s not only the politicians and psuedo-academics, but the courts, particularly in the UK, that think that the addiction to porn should be stopped. For example Lord Justice Kennedy, who while dismissing an appeal at the Divisional Court in February 1998, said: “..there was a public morality purpose to be served in protecting the less innocent from further corruption and the addict from increasing an addiction.”
Sexual repression serves a public morality purpose?
Nope, sorry, I just can’t get my head around that at all.
Especially when we consider what James W. Prescott, Ph.D, who is a developmental neuropsychologist with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare said: “Human sexuality is so powerful that its repression can make us kill the things we love most. It can propel us to uncontrolled violence -- even against babies and children.”
Sigmund Freud said: “...the repressed instinctual drive, as an energy-form, is not and cannot be destroyed when it is repressed - it continues to exist intact in the unconscious, from where it exerts a determining force upon the conscious mind, and can give rise to the dysfunctional behaviour characteristic of neuroses.”
He went on to say that in all cases the cure is effected essentially by a kind of catharsis or purgation - a release of the pent-up psychic energy, the constriction of which was the basic cause of the neurotic illness.
So how do we go about this release or catharsis?
Well one way is through normal sexual relations but if they are not available, possibly because of the subject’s inability to form, or sustain, consensual relationships then pornography can become a substitute.
How did I reach this conclusion?
Well one well known reason is the so called "Danish experience." In 1967 the Danish government lifted all restriction on pornography (except for a lower age limit of 16 for purchasing porn). Yet, rather than experiencing a wave of sex crimes as some had predicted, sex crimes actually declined.
Further cathartic effects for pornography can be found in data about child sex offenders and rapists. Child sex offenders have been shown to have had very little, if any, exposure to pornography (as found by Faust in 1982 and again by Byrne and Kelley in 1984).
Byrne and Kelley also proved that a majority of rapists come from sexually repressive family backgrounds a finding that was the same as previous conclusions reached by Goldstein and Kant in 1973.
Professor Kutchinsky, whilst researching the Danish Experience, found that from 1965 to 1982 sex crimes against children declined from 30 per 100,000 in '65 to about 5 per 100,000 in '82. He also found that rape rates also declined by a similar amount. From this he concluded that this is likely the effect of pornography providing potential sex offenders an alternate means of sexual satisfaction, most likely through masturbation.
Abramson and Hayashi in their 1984 study said about Japanese pornography - which is often violent, including graphical rapes: “[the] Japanese view the availability of such stimuli as a cathartic valve. It is presumed to provide vicarious satisfaction of a socially unacceptable behavior. In a culture that endorses strict codes of behavior and highly defined roles, the depiction of rape also provides a context in which Japanese men can vicariously abandon all of the explicit signposts of good behavior.”
The cathartic effect of pornography is almost never mentioned during any debate on pornography but instead adjectives like ‘abhorrent’ and deviant’ are bandied around thus allowing the personal (or public) distastes of the various politicians to become enshrined in law. Common sense must lead even the most critical observer to conclude that pornography works by the ‘substitution effect’ where sexual gratification can be obtained by substituting the arousal of pornography together with masturbation for that of acting it out on real people.
When I reviewed all the scientific research (as opposed to the nonsensical ‘experiments’) I couldn’t for the life of me understand why our politicians are not taking it into account. I know that the feminists don’t like the idea of any form of sexual satisfaction for men, except on their terms (using fruit presumably), but politicians should, before they formulate laws that will have such devastating consequences on society.
Their viewpoint was summed up by Jack Straw, when he beat up the, supposedly independent, British Board of Film Censors (I just don’t buy this ‘classification’ coyness) because they’d passed “Crash”, when he said pornography was “totally without merit.”
After I had admired the statement as the most succinct, and accurate, autobiography I’d ever read (he ought to use it as his ‘Who’s Who’ entry) I realized that he’d not taken the time to review any evidence but based his judgment purely on personal distaste.
Which is diametrically opposed to the human rights act that he’d helped pass the previous year. He didn’t even bother to read that or any of the judgments handed down by the European Court of Human Rights. If he had then he’d realize that the act upheld the right of people to view material that others might find abhorrent.
No wonder he cordially shook hands with Robert Mugabe; suppressors of human rights stick together. The BBFC, supposedly independent, has always had its head appointed by the Home Office and will ban, or severely cut, anything that the state finds offensive, or goes against official doctrine. The cat was let firmly out of the bag way back in 1937 when the BBFC president Lord Tyrrell said, somewhat injudiciously: “we may take pride in observing that there is not a single film showing in London today which deals with any of the burning questions of the day”. Then, as now, pornography (latterly disguised under the ‘harmful to children’ banner) has always been used as a screen to hide political censorship.
Which could be a good reason for just about every totalitarian state having a problem with pornography. For example both Hitler and Stalin were vehement in their hatred of porn as are China - did you know the UK the totally pointless Child Exploitation [sic] and Online Protection Agency, headed by Jim Gamble of Operation Ore fame, are liaising with their Chinese counterparts on how to impose Internet censorship? While at the same time the US government is investing heavily in proxy servers to circumvent the ‘great firewall of China’, as their censorship servers are known, so people can get access to prohibited material - and not forgetting Iran and Burma.
As does the British National Party!
To answer the question as to why we should turn to Gore Vidal who said: “In order for a ruling class to rule, there must be arbitrary prohibitions. Of all prohibitions, sexual taboo is the most useful because sex involves everyone. To be able to lock someone up or deprive him of employment because of his sex life is a very great power indeed.”
One way politicians legitimize their decisions, and gloss over their abuse of power, is, in the absence of real scientific evidence that supports their viewpoint, via political coercion of supposedly independent scientific groups.
For example Marjorie Heins, a First Amendment attorney and the director of the Free Expression Policy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship (and author of "Not in Front of the Children: 'Indecency,' Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth," a book that chronicles the ideological and political underpinnings of censorship from Plato to the Victorians to the present day.) said: “I was on a media panel a couple of weeks ago, and one of the panelists was a representative of the American Medical Association. A couple of months ago, the AMA joined with the American Psychological Association and signed on to this very dubious statement that claimed that the link between media violence and harm to minors had been proven.
This panelist was very frank: He said, "We signed on to that statement as a political decision. There were things we needed from Senator Brownback, and from Senator Lieberman, and this seemed like a reasonable trade-off."
Haven’t they got any principles they stand on? Or is everything for sale?
Perhaps they should rename it the Amoral Medical Association.
Let’s hope they are not quite so cavalier with the Hippocratic Oath by turning it into the hypocritical oath; for example by denying medical treatment to porn down-loaders in return for political favors.
And, of course, it undermines any conclusions that Brownback’s committee should reach.
These are horribly murky waters and tend to overshadow the real downside of pornography, which is the effects on society of state censorship.
Even though there is no conclusive proof that porn has any seriously negative effects on society (and there never will be, because there isn’t) it hasn’t stopped the English speaking nations bringing in ever more draconian laws censoring it.
Which themselves have wrought extremely serious harm on society; far worse than could ever be achieved by the porn itself.
For example the criminal justice system, once the envy of the world, has been undermined so badly it is now held in contempt, which is a terrible state of affairs. It is almost impossible to get a fair trial (or in some cases even legal aid) if you are accused of a sex crime; despite the fact that there is absolutely no derogation allowed by article 6 of the Human Rights Act.
Miscarriages of justice are now common, of which Operation Ore was the most serious, where police and customs have undermined the criminal justice system for their own ends or where the prohibition led to corruption on a massive scale.
Perhaps the best known case of corruption involved the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad, which was charged with prosecuting the purveyors of ‘obscene’ material. Unfortunately they had a tacit arrangement with the pornographers that in return for bribes they’d turn a blind eye to the importation of Scandinavian Pornography (smuggled into the UK inside crates of Danish Bacon) provided it was only ‘sold under the counter’.
But that arrangement came unhinged with the May 1970 issue of the magazine OZ, which was subtitled the ‘School Kids Issue’ because it had been edited by schoolchildren under the supervision of the regular editorial staff.
As it featured the cartoon character Rupert Bear with an erection the Obscene Publications squad decided that it was pitched at children and decided to prosecute on the basis of that good old favorite ‘harm to children’. The outcry over the subsequent trial sparked a major corruption inquiry in Whitehall, which ended in the jailing of the senior officer responsible for the magazine's prosecution.
Hitherto secret home office papers, released under the 30 year rule, show the public and celebrity (including John Lennon, David Hockney and ex BBC supremo John Birt) backlash to the sentencing of Richard Neville and the other editors (Felix Dennis - now a media baron - and Jim Anderson). That in turn led to Scotland Yard's biggest ever anti-corruption drive after it was pointed out to the then home secretary, Reginald Maudling, that the police were singling out liberal magazines (or those promoting an ‘alternative’ or hippy lifestyle) for prosecution while Soho pornographers were plying their trade scot free.
Maudling questioned Detective Chief Inspector George Fenwick, who was then in charge of the porn squad, who said that pornography could not be stamped out because it had existed for centuries. Which to my mind undermined the raison d’etre for his squad’s very existence. He also suggested that porn wasn’t on sale in Soho as had been alleged.
This assertion was undermined when the Oz convictions were quashed on appeal; when Lord Chief Justice Widgery sent his clerk, a former merchant seaman, to Soho (the porn center of London) one lunchtime to buy £20 worth of the hardest porn he could find. And he found plenty of the very basest kind, that made OZ appear like a papal bull.
The Home Secretary then ordered an enquiry. However the Police closed ranks (just like they are now over the flaws in Operation Ore) and the Home Secretary’s’ enquiry was met with a wall of silence. However in February 1972, it cracked, when the head of the Scotland Yard’s elite flying squad (the ‘Sweeney’), Commander Kenneth Drury, was found to have just spent a two-week holiday in Cyprus with James Humphreys, one of the biggest porn barons around. Bizarrely Drury claimed they were looking for Ronnie Biggs, the escaped train robber, who was known to have been in Brazil at that time.
Brazil, Cyprus, its an easy enough mistake to make.
This prompted another investigation, this time led by the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Robert ‘Mr Clean’ Mark, which unveiled the shocking corruption at the heart of the police. Four years later Mr Justice Mars-Jones named Fenwick as the "chief architect" of the corruption and sentenced him to 10 years' imprisonment. In all over 400 officers were either imprisoned or forced to quit the police after it was found that they were all on the payroll of the porn barons.
This was by far and away the biggest corruption scandal involving the UK police force and all because of the nonsensical ban on porn.
Ironically it opened the way to a de facto semi-liberalization of pornography and suddenly magazines, like Penthouse and Paul Raymond’s Men Only, started to appear that featured full frontal, uncensored, nudity - but with no sexual contact. We weren’t ready for that yet.
Up to that point only nudist magazines like Health and Efficiency, which featured nude adults and children in naturist settings, were available. What makes it particularly ironic is that the pictures scanned from these very magazines form the bulk of what is being prosecuted as child pornography now and, indeed, were the main constituents of the ‘child pornography’ sites Thomas Reedy, of Landslide, was sentenced to over 1,000 years in jail for.
To my mind this official corruption had far more pernicious consequences for society than the pornography ever could. Witness the fact that with the partial liberalization there wasn’t a wave of moral decay unleashed on society.
So there you have it: Pornography leads to corruption, miscarriages of justice and can lead to the breakdown of families and even assaults on children. But only if its repressed; if its legalized then these problems will, if the real research is to be believed, go away.
But the government in the UK has invested far too much money and political capital finding this ‘evil’ and have even created a, totally useless, Child Exploitation [sic] and Online Protection centre with an initial budget of £25 million a year (salaries start at £25K for junior posts with most position paying around £60K a year and is run by Jim Gamble, who trousers over £125,000 every year, not counting his junkets and huge expense account) to police our bedrooms. So they aren’t likely to back down now even if their arguments are looking increasingly threadbare.
Mark my words, within a few years there will be a massive corruption enquiry regarding either CEOP and/or SOCA which will make the antics of the Met Porn Squad seem tame and rather quaint. And all so that the execrable Vera Baird QC, MP, hardline feminist and a blight on humanity can project her hate across society.
On the other hand they could stop this madness now and relax the censorship because it’s the sensible course and all these problems will go away. But they won’t do that will they?
Stephen Saunders comments
I want to comment on Kevin's article on pornography. Much of it is sound of course, but frankly I think it ill becomes a libertarian website to be trotting out the old sexist crap that unreconstructed feminists are lesbians and ugly. That's as untrue and ridiculous as saying that all men are rapists or that all men who have viewed/downloaded child porn are paedophiles.
What really got my goat though was Kevin's assertion that Andrea Dworkin was an anti-Semite. I profoundly disagree with many of Dworkin's tirades against men and porn, and believe that she was basically mad because she described the porn she claimed to detest in prurient, titillating detail.
But anti-Semitic? Er no, she was Jewish - as I am, being the child of a Jewish mother. Dworkin was deeply critical of Jewish men, Zionism and Israel, which is not the same as anti-Semitism. She saw the injustices being committed in Israel and spoke out against them, rightly so in my view, and she wrote seriously and movingly about her experiences of growing up as a Jewish girl in America and as a Jewish woman who came to see the outrages against Palestinians being committed in the name of Jews generally.
Kevin is totally entitled to his views, and I advocate no censorship of them, of course. But I would prefer it if the alternative to the absolutism of our times wasn't just more of the same, from a different angle.
 |
|
|
