Deliver to me an infant at the moment of its birth and I will make of it what you will....
- B.F. Skinner (1904-1990), psychologist
The brain is viewed as an appendage of the genital glands.
- Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), psychologist
A man must not swallow more beliefs than he can digest.
- Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), psychologist
Traditionally, humanity's greatest polarizers have been religion and politics. They are things most people simply don't discuss in public unless they're prepared to fight about them. Everybody has an opinion. Everybody has a stance. No one is willing to be swayed - at least not without a battle royale.
In recent years, especially in the face of seemingly mounting evidence that porn does irreparable harm to human lives, adult entertainment has joined the list of topics that set otherwise well-mannered people at each others' throats. On one side of the debate are the so-called social liberals, who claim, among other things, that pornography is a form of speech, and as such, deserves at least a modicum of Constitutional protection in the U.S. Some go so far as to say that porn not only isn't harmful, but might actually be beneficial to some people in some circumstances. On the other side are the nominative social conservatives who swear that pornography is a vile cesspool of depravity that leaves users changed in elemental psychological and physical ways.
Most in the latter group point to a relative handful of sensational crime sprees as evidence of the devastation that can be wrought by the consumption of porn. In the 1970s and '80s, scientists began to look for a possible relationship between porn and sexual violence, and a flurry of scientific studies were published that seemed to indicate exposure to pornography resulted in all sorts of dire consequences for adults:
* A 1974 report entitled "Where Do You Draw the Line?" documented Victor Cline's research findings at the University of Utah that as men become addicted to pornography, they begin to seek increasingly explicit material and act out what they have viewed.
* In a 1980 study at the University of Wisconsin, psychologist Edward Donnerstein concluded that brief exposure to violent pornography may lead to anti-social attitudes and behavior. Donnerstein surveyed male porn users and found them to be more aggressive towards women, less responsive to pain and suffering of rape victims, and more willing to accept myths about rape.
* A 1982 article by doctors Dolf Zimmerman and Jennings Bryant published in the Journal of Communication detailed how continued exposure to pornography affected beliefs about sexuality in general and attitudes toward women in particular. Among their conclusions: Porn desensitizes people to rape, whether the porn depicts violence or not.
* A previous report by Zimmerman and Jennings (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1981) concluded that repeated exposure to extreme pornography increased subjects' desire for increasingly violent and deviant materials.
* University of New Hampshire sociologists Murray Straus and Larry Baron correlated the availability of pornography with crime stats, concluding in 1985 that rape rates were highest in states where sales of adult magazines were highest and porn-law enforcement activity lowest.
The methodology and conclusions of some of the studies have been criticized off and on, mostly by scientists and others opposed to censorship. It's well accepted in the scientific community that, try as they might, even the most dedicated researchers can introduce human bias - their own or a subject's - into the most carefully crafted data-gathering exercises. In fact, humans being what they are, it's surprising all scientific inquiry isn't skewed by one hidden agenda or another. One school of thought says it is.
Still, the pornography research data as reported seemed to provide a reasonable explanation for the universally horrifying acts of a few well-known pornography consumers.
In the 1970s and '80s, serial killers Theodore "Ted" Bundy and David "Son of Sam" Berkowitz admitted their killing sprees had links to pornography. Bundy said an addiction to violent and sadistic porn that began prior to his teenage years turned him into the monster who was executed in 1989 after committing as many as 80 sex-related slayings. While Berkowitz was never accused of - nor did he admit to being - motivated primarily by pornography, police did find a large stash of "blue" materials in his small New York apartment. During interrogation, Berkowitz confessed that the murders for which he is currently serving a 365-year sentence gave him a sexual charge. After his capture, he told police that he became sexually aroused while he stalked and killed women, and he often masturbated while the brutal acts were fresh in his mind. On days when he could not find another suitable victim, he would return to the scenes of previous crimes and masturbate while calling up old memories.
More recently, the killing rampages of Jeffrey Dahmer and Cary Stayner also were tied to porn, though not as a causative factor. Dahmer, who during a span of 13 years killed a number of young men and boys, then butchered their bodies and sometimes ate their flesh, kept an extensive photographic record of his adventures in necrophilia with his victims. Sentenced to 15 consecutive life terms for his crimes, Dahmer was killed by another inmate only months after his arrival at the Columbia Correctional Institute in Portage, Wisconsin. Stayner, who was convicted of the sex-related slayings of four women in California's Yosemite National Park, demanded that interrogators provide him a large cache of child pornography in exchange for his confession. Sex-related killings are not the exclusive provenance of grown men, either. In 1997, for example, then-18-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer followed 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson into a women's restroom at the Primadona Hotel/Casino in Primm, Nevada, where he raped and murdered her. During his trial, Strohmeyer's attorney laid the blame for the teenager's actions squarely at the feet of pornography he had viewed on the Internet. He is currently serving a life sentence.
Lesser crimes related to porn are also often pointed to as evidence of the medium's evil effect. In November, for example, a Massachusetts man was charged with larceny and fraud after he ran up a $5,456 phone-sex bill in his father's name. He said he did it because he was addicted to the services.
In all but the last case, social scientists of all stripes seized upon details of the men's lives in attempts to explain what may be unexplainable. Is it some deep-seated trauma from childhood that drives a person over the edge and into an ever-deepening abyss of sex-related violence? Pornography - perhaps because it is such a controversial social phenomenon and so easily assailed - usually ends up on the list of causative factors, and observers insist with varying degrees of success and logic that cases like Bundy's and Strohmeyer's present the most compelling evidence that exposure to pornography early in life warps the human psyche irreparably.
Porn and the Law
Typically, when pro-censorship groups argue in favor of increased restrictions on so-called "adult materials," they turn for corroboration of their position to people like retired New York Police Department Detective Raymond M. Pierce. Pierce holds a bachelor's degree in behavioral science and a master's degree in forensic psychology from John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York and contributed to the Criminal and Civil Investigation Handbook, 2nd Edition (McGraw-Hill). Following his retirement, Pierce founded RMP International, a Crestwood, N.Y., consulting firm specializing in psychological profiling and wrongful death evaluation, among other things. He advises attorneys, corporate security and private investigators, and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies - and conservative, anti-pornography organizations like Morality in Media (www.moralityinmedia.org).
While Pierce was still a member of New York's finest, he spent a year studying psychological profiling at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Va. Pierce has described the experience as "an intensive study of serial murder, serial rape, understanding the criminal mind." After his FBI fellowship, Pierce established the Criminal Assessment and Profiling Unit of the NYPD Detective Bureau. He has impressive credentials, and it's no wonder people listen when he speaks.
Among the facts and figures attributed to Pierce that are quoted fondly and often by the anti-porn camp are:
* In general, offenders experience a heavier exposure to pornography than the general population.
* More than 75 percent of sex offenders are pornography users.
* Serial sexual murders, rapes, and assaults "almost always" involve pornography, either as a "ramping up" mechanism or during the act.
* Sexually aggressive pornography fuels rape, child molestation, and other sexually aggressive crimes by helping to convince the offender that his actions aren't out of the ordinary.
Other law-enforcement statistics about pornography and crime also find their way into the popular culture, where they are repeated ad naseum despite their obsolescence. In 1988, Charles Keating, then of Citizens for Decency Through Law, surveyed research and crime reports and noted that 77 percent of molesters of male children and 87 percent of molesters of female children admitted imitating the sexual behaviors they had seen modeled in pornography. In a review he conducted of 38,000 sexual assaults in Michigan from 1956 through 1979, Michigan State Police Detective Darrell Pope found that 41 percent of the assailants had viewed porn immediately prior to or during their crimes.
According to Pierce, the statistics he cites are based on his personal experiences and FBI research. Tellingly, in an interview Pierce gave to Morality in Media and the group subsequently published at its Website, Pierce indicates that it's not really the type of sexual conduct depicted in pornography that causes problems, but the state of mind of the individual viewing the material that determines the porn's effect. "I have no need to differentiate between 'softcore' or 'hardcore' pornography," Pierce told the interviewer. "I know what the media defines as 'softcore' and 'hardcore.' For me it's anything written, spoken, printed, photographed, or videotaped to elicit a sexual response from an individual. What the general public may consider softcore pornography, that's enough stimulation for a criminal. It depends on what goes on in the individual's mind."
Porn and Biology
So which is it that "pushes a person over the edge" and sends him on a violent binge: porn or some underlying mental instability?
According to Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D. (www.drjudithreisman.org), president of The Institute for Media Education and celebrated anti-porn author, lecturer, and educator, the two are intimately related. Calling pornography "private-space behaviors displayed in public-space forums in violation of self- and species preservation," Reisman takes the position that exposure to visual pornographic imagery changes the brain's cellular structure, and consequently, its performance.
In truth, science has demonstrated that visual memories are experienced and stored in a portion of the brain that also controls, among other things, emotions and the physiological responses necessary for self-preservation. In times of threat, this portion of the brain "overrides" the portion concerned with what humans consider the brain's "higher" abilities: cognition, analytical thinking, humor, text decoding (reading), verbal comprehension and expression, etc. Brain researchers call this the "law of strength;" it's intended to guarantee the organism's ability to fight or flee, as necessary, and humans at all ages and levels of mental ability are subject to it.
Citing recent research into the psychopharmacological ("brain chemistry") basis of human information storage and thought processes, Reisman says that in some brains, anxiety, fear, and shame - like that experienced during or immediately after the commission of a violent crime - can be mislabeled "sexual arousal" instead of "self-preservation arousal." Pornography also engenders sexual arousal. Pair that with the brain's unique way of processing images - especially emotionally charged images, like those in most pornography - and the stage is set for a sort of neurochemical meltdown, Reisman posits.
"Neurologically, the more bizarre, odd or grotesque an image is - the more it creates confusion, thus anxiety and often fear - the more likely the bizarre stimuli will be stored in the nervous system as a 'mismatch of schema,'" Reisman writes in a voluminous white paper entitled "The Psychopharmacology of Pictorial Pornography: Restructuring Brain, Mind & Memory & Subverting Freedom of Speech." "The human need to know and understand one's surroundings means that bizarre images challenge and attract our brain's attention and memory. Fine arts photography professor Dr. Richard Zakia [notes] that even the most poorly created images automatically cause an arousal, overcoming text."
The danger, Reisman says, is that the primitive image-storing portion of the brain, often called the "right brain," cannot distinguish "real" from "fantasy" images without the intervention of the more highly evolved "left brain," or analytical, interpretive brain. The right brain alone is incapable of understanding that not everything the eyes see is literal. (Hence the sage advice, "Believe little of what you hear, and only half of what you see.") Children and the mentally infirm not only are more susceptible to confusion because their left brains lack the experiential basis upon which to draw in differentiating "real" from "fake," but also are more likely to develop "incorrect" patterns of reference that will stick with them in the form of biological memory (the right brain phenomenon, that, for example, allows the body to sit or recline without conscious thought).
Basically, Reisman says, the brains of children who view pornographic imagery are molded physically in ways that will influence them for the rest of their lives. They accept the images at face value, and absent any mitigating interpretation (as from a parent or other responsible source), they incorporate them into their referential database as "the way things really are" instead of as part of a fantasy. The younger a child is when exposed to graphic, and especially violent or bizarre, sexual imagery, the more likely it is that his or her neurological pathways will be routed in inappropriate ways.
"Since the brain believes what the eyes see, in 3/10ths of a second, real, virtual or pseudo pornography restructures the brains-minds and memories of participants or even casual viewers," Reisman concludes. "That the brain's 'internal drug store' produces mood altering psychotropic drugs, and that right hemisphere emotions including fear, joy, anger, lust (instant rewards) dominate the left hemisphere's cognitive functions of speech, rationality, logic (delayed rewards), further implicates pictorial pornography as causally changing the nature of the polity. A picture is worth more than a thousand words, and even weighty words (unless repetitively broadcast in popularly credible forums) rarely cause long-lasting cellular change."
In an article she wrote for the June 8, 2002, edition of WorldNetDaily (www.worldnetdaily.com), "Stimulating Images, Damaged Minds," Reisman states her premise a bit more succinctly: "This list of health-based neurological observations about the instinctual brain-imprinted response to pornographic sights and sounds indicates that viewing pornography is a biologically significant event that overrides informed consent - and that is harmful to children's 'plastic' brains because it compromises their grasp of reality and thus their mental and physical health, their well-being and their pursuit of happiness.
"These physiological facts prove - except to pornography-friendly judges - that the sexual excitation of children, whether direct or mediated, certainly is contra-indicated."
Reisman primarily relies on brain-mind studies in areas outside pornography to support her theses, extending those studies to pornography by extrapolation and inference. Still, as difficult as they might be for those in the porn industry to accept, Reisman's arguments are perhaps the most convincing for the categorization of all pornography as matter that is "harmful to children" - but only if it is viewed accidentally or at the behest of an adult with less-than-savory intentions, as the adult entertainment industry does not market to or employ children.
Others argue an opposite position, however: that an individual's native brain functioning will lead him or her to seek pornography that "fits" with pre-existing mental and emotional predilections. A.F. Bogaert; H.J. Eysenck; N.M. Malamuth, T. Addison, and M. Koss; D. L. Mosher; M. Rimm, and M. Snyder and W. Ickes all present convincing research-based suggestions that antisocial personality characteristics encourage some individuals to seek out antisocial pornography. Further, the researchers speculate that use of extreme pornography by such individuals, combined with their pre-existing predispositions, may cause them to lose awareness of the constraints of reality on acting out behaviors depicted in such pornography. Related research by A. Barak, W.A. Fisher, S. Belfry, and D.R. Lashambe; Bogaert; Malamuth et al; Mosher, and Snyder and Ickes supports the idea that "normal" individuals do the converse: They not only choose to view "normal" (or non-extreme) pornography, but they actually avoid antisocial pornography and reject the sexual messages contained therein.
Still others argue, very convincingly, that what some consider porn actually may have therapeutic applications, even with young children.
Porn and Psychology
The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS; www.siecus.org) is a 38-year-old nonprofit organization dedicated to affirming that sexuality is a natural and healthy part of life. SIECUS develops, collects, and disseminates information, promotes comprehensive education, and advocates the right of individuals to make responsible sexual choices. Among its many functions, SIECUS acts as a clearinghouse for sex educators at public schools. SIECUS is supported by donations from a variety of public and private sources, including the U.S. government and the Playboy Foundation.
Noting that "[p]arents should be the primary sexuality educators of their children" and "[y]oung people develop their values about sexuality as part of becoming adults," SIECUS states in its Position Statement that "When sensitively used in a manner appropriate to the viewer's age and developmental level, sexually explicit visual, printed, or on-line materials can be valuable educational or personal aids helping to reduce ignorance and confusion and contributing to a wholesome concept of sexuality."
Al Cooper, Ph.D., director of the San Jose Marital and Sexuality Center (www.sex-centre.com) in San Jose, Calif., training director for psychological services at Stanford University, and editor of the book Sex & the Internet: A Guidebook for Clinicians (Brunner-Routledge, 2002), concurs. "Kids are interested in sex," Cooper says, noting that for generations children actively have sought out materials like National Geographic magazines - which hard-core pro-censorship types have termed "pornographic" - to explore the differences in men's and women's bodies. Despite the efforts of SIECUS and similar organizations, the U.S. is doing poorly with sex education, Cooper says, largely because of efforts to censor what social conservatives believe are "pornographic" components of traditional sex education classes. "The U.S. has the highest level of pre-teen pregnancy, STDs, and sex crimes in the world," he says. "Compare that to Scandinavian countries, which are more accepting [of sexuality], inclusive, educational, and empowering of women."
Although the Internet takes it on the chin for making pornography and other information about sexuality so readily available, initial indicators are that it will prove to be at least as helpful in sexually therapeutic environments for adults as the more traditional media of porn have been in the past.
"The Internet can equally threaten or aid a healthy, sex-positive, emotionally satisfying sex life," a chapter of Sex & the Internet co-authored by Cooper, Coralie Scherer and I. David Marcus reads. "Aware and informed therapists may find online interventions a potent adjunct to traditional psychotherapy for some of their clients.... For those who feel powerless, the Internet can provide a sense of strength. For those who feel out of control, the Internet can be used as an anchor. For those who experience emotional paralysis, the Internet can be a bridge to action. The Internet's triple-A engine [anonymity, accessibility, and affordability] provides a counterbalance to the fear, embarrassment, and shame that often accompany sexual concerns."
In much the same way, Cooper says he believes the Internet can be a powerful tool for helping children to discover sexuality. "Internet sex can be helpful for children," Cooper says. "The Internet can help them learn in a safe environment; practice in a safe place."
As an example, Cooper suggests that Internet chat rooms, appropriately monitored and moderated and divided into age-appropriate groupings, could provide children - especially those who are shy or embarrassed about their burgeoning sexuality, or those who are isolated from appropriate behavioral models in the real world - with friendly, non-judgmental environments in which to discuss topics that are quite normal and healthy at various developmental stages. In addition, "[the] Internet provides a virtual practice place for girls or kids with difficulties being assertive to learn to say no, to click someone away, and to be more assertive in sexual situations (it is easier to start these behaviors online than in real life or with offline friends who you have to see everyday)," according to Robert E. Longo, Steven M. Brown, and Deborah Price Orcutt, writing in Sex & the Internet. Longo, et al, also noted that "[f]or young people who can filter out accurate from distorted information, the Internet can be an incredibly rich source of information, particularly about topics generally not discussed with parents or in sex education classes, such as falling in love, breaking up, orgasms, and how to sexually pleasure a partner. A recent content analysis of questions submitted to a sexuality information Website for teenagers, sxetc.org, found just that. The kind of questions most frequently asked by teenagers pertained to issues related to sexual pleasure; exactly those areas that adults and schools omit talking about."
Such promise is not without peril, though, as Longo, Brown, and Orcutt go on to advise: "Teens with a positive sense of self, who have internalized positive modeling about sexual values, gender roles, and developmentally appropriate sexual behavior are somewhat inoculated from the impact of the media, including the Internet, which so often portrays sex in an extreme, stereotypical manner. Teenagers who are less sexually healthy tend to have few positive and realistic role models to help them learn about sexuality. They are more vulnerable to adopting as fact misinformation and distorted media messages about, for example, how men and women are supposed to act, what is a healthy relationship, and what is involved in a mutually pleasurable sexual relationship, areas seldom addressed in sexually explicit materials on the Internet.... [F]or those teenagers less able to tell fact from fiction, the Internet, with its vast amount of distorted sexual stimuli (pornography and otherwise), may only serve to propagate more misinformation and reinforce exaggerated beliefs about sexuality."
Even with the potential dangers associated with unmonitored use of the Internet, though, Longo, et al, conclude that the medium has a great deal of positive potential for educating youth about sex and society. "There are many benefits that should not be overlooked by parents and others overly cautious about the Internet's potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable images of violence and sex.... Human sexuality can be explored by children and adolescents through the use of age-appropriate Web sites.... Despite some very rocky roads one may cross on the Internet, children and adolescents can turn negative experiences [such as those surrounding sexual orientation] into positive ones and learn from them."
Cooper, Longo, and their colleagues certainly are not the first to suggest that images and other pornographic and/or violent material, properly experienced, can aid in children's development into ethical, moral individuals. In the Feb. 2001 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatricians, an article authored by members of the Committee on Public Education of the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended "[using] controversial programming as a stepping-off point to initiate discussions about family values, violence, sex and sexuality, and drugs."
The key to healthy sexual and psychological development in children and teens, it seems most researchers are saying, is that exposure to pornography and other deleterious materials - whether accidental or intentional - can and should be mitigated by more mature minds that are healthy in their own approach to sexuality. Children themselves seem to support this notion. Writing in response to an article about Internet filtering technologies on the BBC Website (www.bbc.co.uk), a girl identified as Gerka states, "I am only 14, [but] I know full well the dangers of the Net. Yes I do get junk mail; it's easy to recognize [sic] and I don't open it because I just can't be bothered bothering. Parents complaining about the Net being unsafe just makes me sick. They seem to think that around every corner is a virus or a danger of porn or whatever...."
Porn and Sociology
Pornography has been around for a long time, almost as long as humanity itself. Primitive cave paintings depict sexuality. Human genitalia and depictions of sexual acts were carved into monuments in Ancient Greece, and sexual motifs graced family dinnerware and the walls of family-oriented rooms in opulent homes in Greece and ancient Rome. In Pompeii, murals depicting nudity and sexuality decorated public spaces. In fact, it was not until the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity that sexuality and what are today known as the less-extreme forms pornography began to be viewed as something shameful; something from which children should be "protected." Does that indicate that, unlike the more "proper" folk of today, all people who lived prior to society's contemporary views about sex and pornography were "damaged," as Reisman suggests? If that were the case, it is unlikely that mankind as a species would have survived.
Perhaps, in the final analysis, society's concerns about pornography's presumed ill effects on children and the adults they become is not so much fueled by research, crime statistics, or religion as it is by the simple fear of growing old and losing that intangible something colloquially termed the "innocence of childhood." In an article entitled "What Are We Doing to Our Children?" published in the British magazine New Statesman, Bryan Appleyard writes:
The answer lies in our peculiarly exalted idea of childhood. And this, in turn, is the product of a depraved and deracinated culture. People know there is no moral consensus, and they resent any suggestion that there should be one. In the present political climate, they know also that their passing moods - sometimes glorified as 'the will of the people' - are of lasting political significance.... In such a climate, where people feel they have power but lack any strong feelings about how it should be deployed, they will seize on the easiest and most vulnerable target. And what, in a fragmented society, is the one good on which we can all agree? Childhood. Childhood becomes the one communal good, and its abuse, therefore, is the one agreed evil.
...[T]he infantilising effects of moronic mass entertainment ... serve to identify the easy excitements and unthinking wonder of childhood as some kind of human ideal. Equally, the sentimentalism of the mass media in an inanely populist political climate finds its quickest, simplest expression in the glorification of the child. All these media say the same thing - the child is the icon of virtue for a society that does not wish to grow up.
What is deeply wrong about this is that childhood is meaningless if it is not a preparation for adulthood. Childhood is wonderful not because it is a thing in itself, but precisely because it is a state of innocent wonder at the complex human and natural world into which the child is to be inducted. But if we find our only conception of virtue in the child, then there will be no adult world into which it can be inducted. Human life becomes a falling-off, a decline into the empty misery of adulthood. The child is effectively told that it is only worthwhile to remain a child. Growing up is pure loss.
Wendy Kaminer, a fellow at Radcliffe College's Public Policy Institute, may have summed things up best for the vast majority of people: "In the end, sexually explicit material is not nearly as harmful to children, or adults, as efforts to censor it. Whether they see it on the street, on computers in a library or a friend's home, or on TV, children will be exposed to sex. Most of us [who are adults now] were, and most of us managed."
