Once First Amendment arguments are exhausted, advocates of pornography will often turn to the ‘substitution theory’ to defend this horrible industry. The argument goes something like this: “Although we may not like porn or find it distasteful, isn’t it better that people who have these deviant desires channel them through a ‘fantasy outlet’ rather than acting them out in society?” In this view, porn is actually doing a public service by redirecting deviant sexual desire towards the realm of the imaginary.
But this argument is coming under attack by an alarming new study that was just reported in the New York Times, which found that 85% men who downloaded child pornography had a history of sexually abusing children, from inappropriate touching to rape. The research was carried out by psychologists at the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons and is the first in-depth survey of such online offenders' sexual behaviour done by prison therapists who were actively performing treatment.
What we may reasonably extrapolate from this empirical evidence is that porn does not redirect desire away from society towards the harmless realm of the imaginary—rather the opposite—porn could in fact be nurturing deviant desire, turning men into monsters. And yes, it is true that this study was specific to pedophiles, but are they so different in terms of their mechanisms of desire? Why should we not also extrapolate that porn distorts sexual behavior in general? After such findings, can anyone really believe that all the obscene smut out there continues to orbit in some harmless fantasy dimension?
And as porn becomes increasingly brutal, the danger becomes ever graver. Prof Robert Jensen of the University of Texas has chronicled the shocking encroachment of explicit cruelty and brutality into mainstream porn. In his article, “A cruel edge: The painful truth about today's pornography -- and what men can do about it” he writes: “When the legal restrictions on pornography slowly receded through the 1970s and ‘80s, and the presentation of sex on the screen was by itself no longer quite so illicit, anal sex became a standard feature. Anal sex was seen as something most women don’t want; it had an edge to it. When anal sex became routine in pornography, the gonzo genre started pushing the boundaries into things like double-penetrations and gag-inducing oral sex – again, acts that men believe women generally will not want. The more pornography becomes normalized and mainstreamed, the more pornography has to search for that edge.”
As far as combating the scourge of pornography, Jensen is realistic about the challenges, yet maintains the moral high-ground: “To criticize pornography is not repressive. To speak about what one knows and feels and dreams is, in fact, liberating. We are not free if we aren’t free to talk about our desire for an egalitarian intimacy and sexuality that would reject pain and humiliation. That is not prudishness or censorship. It is an attempt to claim the best parts of our common humanity -- love, caring, empathy, solidarity. To do that is not to limit anyone. It is to say that people matter more than the profits of pornographers and the pleasure of pornography consumers. It is to say, simply, that women count as much as men.”
To this I can only add, “Amen.”
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To view the news article visit:
http://www.thestar.com/living/article/237841
For Robert Jensen’s, “The painful truth about today's pornography -- and what men can do about it” visit:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/%7Erjensen/freelance/pornography&cruelty.htm
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