His Porn, Her Pain, Confronting America's PornPanic with Honest Talk about Sex

by Marty Klein

  “OK, OK, I get it—I have an unusual situation here.” “Yes!” I said, “You’ve created an unusual situation, which you maintain every week. Right?” “Right,” he said, sounding like he was starting to understand. “So Jevon, we have to figure out what this means, right?” “Yeah, Doc, I get your point. Maybe collecting 50,000 thumbnails is about something other than the thumbnails themselves?” “Exactly,” I said with a smile.

  After a few sessions, I learned more about Jevon’s journey. He had already spoken to his minister, his physician, and his brother-in-law. They all told him he had a porn problem, and that he had to give it up. He had tried this approach on several occasions, but he couldn’t bring himself to destroy his carefully assembled collection, and whenever he tried to stop masturbating to porn, he’d eventually “fall off the wagon,” as he put it. Jevon ruefully took this as evidence that there was indeed something wrong with him, even though he couldn’t figure out what. After all, his hobby wasn’t really hurting anyone, was it?

  So his epiphany with me—this his collecting 50,000 porn thumbnails might be about something other than the porn thumbnails—was a novel approach to his mystery, which no one had suggested. That’s the problem with living in a PornPanic: People get distracted by the porn aspect of a situation and have trouble seeing any other part of it.

  So Jevon and I talked and talked. We talked about women, about sex, about porn, and about lots of other things.

  I found out he wasn’t having very much sex with his wife, about which he felt quite sad. She was disappointed that he hadn’t gone further up the ranks of the postal service, and she often expressed her resentment about this, comparing him to his more financially successful brothers. Jevon and his wife only shared physical affection on a sporadic basis, and he was always feeling emotionally hungry—or anxiously awaiting the next abrupt loss of emotional nourishment.

  He had almost no friends on the job, because people didn’t feel comfortable socializing with the boss, and there was really no one at his supervisory level.

  One day I asked him to give his porn thumbnail collection a name. After about ten seconds he named it The Gang. Why? “Because they’re always there for me, and with them I’m comfortable; I have a familiar feeling, like I belong.”

  I wrote down Jevon’s words, and then read them back to him. His face flushed, he looked down for a long time, and then he faced me, slowly shaking his head. “What kind of man says that?” he asked. “Am I really keeping a huge collection of naked ladies on video so I have a place where I can relax and feel like I belong?”

  His eyes showed grief as he shook his head. We continued the following week.

  “The question of you masturbating and the question of The Gang are two separate things,” I said after we settled in and briefly discussed his week. “There are plenty of other ways to masturbate. How you relate to The Gang is a much bigger question, isn’t it?”

  “I guess so,” he said. “I guess getting rid of the collection doesn’t mean I can’t relax or masturbate in other ways.” “Right,” I said, “although getting rid of the collection presumably means not building another one, right?” “Oh,” said Jevon, “I hadn’t thought about that.” Unconsciously, he had automatically assumed he’d just start another one—build another gang. “That really shows that there’s something more going on here than just thumbnails, doesn’t it,” he asked glumly. Of course he was right—a great insight.

  He didn’t really have a porn problem; he had a problem he was expressing through porn. Everyone knows this common dynamic—people abandoning their families for golf don’t really have a golf problem; people forgetting their mother-in-law’s birthday every year don’t really have a memory problem. But when the vehicle for expressing a problem is porn, somehow people forget this and assume the person has a porn problem.

  There was nothing wrong with Jevon’s reality testing—he knew the whole thing was a fantasy, a game he played with himself, using videos as playing pieces. It just so happened that the videos showed explicit sex, instead of famous home runs or horse races. Regardless, “the thought of doing without my Gang, I dunno, it’s a little scary,” he said more than once.

  So we had solved the mystery of the massive porn collection. Now we could discuss things that really mattered—like how he was going to say goodbye to The Gang and how he could get more intimacy in his life.

  He needed to talk with his wife.

  They needed to reconnect, which meant they each needed to reveal their needs and their disappointments at letting their relationship go. I suggested couples counseling, but Jevon thought his wife would be skeptical. “As long as you two talk, and talk meaningfully, it doesn’t matter how you do it,” I said. “A therapist, a pastor, long walks in the park, face-to-face in the kitchen—as long as you talk.” He agreed.

  So they talked. Apparently, it was pretty rough. They talked more. They discussed separating. They decided against it. Jevon went on an anti-depressant, which helped him open up to her a little more. He talked about how he needed affection, how a few kind words from her meant the world to him. She was surprised—she didn’t think he needed much from her, and she thought sex was at the top of his list. When she found out how lonely he felt, her heart melted.

  He decided to masturbate less, to consciously turn toward his wife when he wanted comfort or connection. They resumed having sex a little. The anti-depressant, plus his own fear of failure, made that complicated, too. But they stuck with it, and the sex slowly improved.

  Jevon was still nervous about facing life without The Gang. But he had made some significant steps and was on his way.

  Chapter Seven

  HOW DOES PORN AFFECT CONSUMERS?

  Every good citizen should be concerned about any consumer product whose use inevitably leads to violence, mental illness, and community dysfunction—which anti-porn activists assert about pornography.

  Sociology professor Ronald Weitzer of George Washington University has identified a particular theoretical approach to prostitution and pornography—the Oppression Paradigm. “This perspective,” he says, “depicts all types of sex work and pornography as exploitative, violent, and perpetuating gender inequality. This paradigm does not hold that exploitation and violence are variables”—present or absent in varying degrees—“but are instead constants central to the very definition of prostitution, pornography, and stripping.”1

  As we’ll see here in the words of many anti-porn activists, this approach “substitutes ideology for rigorous empirical analysis.”2 It’s a key part of the cultural shift from porn as a problem of immorality to porn as a problem of public health and danger. In other words, it’s a key aspect of today’s PornPanic.

  As Eithne Johnson says, “Feminist anti-porn presentations [at colleges and activist events] rely on an understanding of pornography as ‘patriarchal propaganda for violence against women’ and on women’s victim status … They appear to have been designed to shock and frighten the audience through the use of slide shows depicting violent and highly atypical imagery.”3 In this way, anti-porn educators “teach” audiences how to “properly” perceive porn’s “real” messages.

  From all the anguish, claims, and demands for the abolition of pornography over the past 40 years, one would think there was ample evidence demonstrating the individual and social harms of consuming pornography. Political and religious movements devoted to eliminating pornography often claim to be based on fact, vaguely noting that “Research shows” or “Mounting evidence makes clear.…”4

  A typical example is Robert Jensen, who dismisses empirical research, preferring anecdotes “instead of being paralyzed by the limitations of social science.”5 Susan Brownmiller rejects science as unnecessary altogether: “Does one need scientific methodology in order to conclude that the anti-female propaganda that permeates our nation’s cultural output promotes a climate in which acts of sexual hostility directed against women are not only tolerated but ideologically encourage
d?”6

  If you’re going to try to regulate the private behavior of 50 million people, the answer is simple: Yes.

  Is there any evidence that consuming pornography is actually dangerous? President Lyndon Johnson’s commission looked but couldn’t find any evidence. President Richard Nixon’s commission looked but couldn’t find it. And the Meese Commission—specifically chartered by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 to prove porn dangerous—couldn’t find it, either. The report stated its belief that porn is dangerous, but admitted they could find no evidence to prove it. Three presidential commissions. No evidence—they each explicitly said so.

  The Canadian government’s report? Same “reluctant” conclusion: insufficient evidence that porn is dangerous. The British government’s report? No empirical data to link pornography and harm.

  Since the 1970s, activists like Susan Brownmiller and Robin Morgan have confidently stated that pornography “degraded” and actually harmed women, with no evidence whatsoever. Since then, a chorus of feminists, religious conservatives, politicians, and anti-sex work activists has repeated this alleged truth so frequently that the public thinks it’s true. And like the legendary Holy Grail that fervent believers have pursued for a thousand years, they claim that this precious, wondrous thing—data showing porn’s dangers—surely exists.

  Because without this proof, all that people like Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, Donna Rice Hughes, John Stoltenberg, and Pamela Paul have is their anger and their mistrust of sexuality, or men, or both. Without it, they quote Dear Abby and Oprah, a handful of old, discredited studies, an increase in plastic surgery and anal sex, and the self-serving anecdotes of the “porn addiction” industry.

  As if wishing could make it so, they make enough noise to create the illusion that real data exist. Besides, they face no intellectual competition from the media, political class, the therapy profession, or any other part of society. In today’s porn-prejudiced world, how many reasonable men are going to stand up and say, “I use porn and it hasn’t affected me?” How many women will stand up and say, “My husband uses porn and it doesn’t hurt us?” How many dentists, junior high school teachers, city councilmembers, janitors, soccer coaches, church board members, and marriage counselors who use porn will stand up and say, “I’ve used porn for years and plan to continue?”

  Anti-porn activists are so attached to their ideology that they persevere despite the lack of data. When society-level research couldn’t support their conclusion, they turned to ongoing investigations on the individual level. Still cited today by anti-porn activists, these projects gave undergraduates a narrow set of attitudinal choices after showing them pornography and concluded that porn influenced the guys’ attitudes about rape.7

  But no one has been able to replicate these troubling results—in fact, when given open-ended choices, subsequent lab subjects related to women far more gently than in the original study.8

  And no one has shown that rape-tolerating attitudes expressed in a lab by college students lead to an increase in actual rape in the real world anyway. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, American colleges, where rates of porn use are extraordinarily high, have lower rates of sexual violence than comparable communities elsewhere in America.9 Nevertheless, activist Gail Dines still passionately claims that, “Porn tells men that they have no sexual boundaries, morality, or compassion for women. It strips them of their humanity.”10 Jensen adds—without any data whatsoever—that “pornography demands that men abandon empathy” for women and for female performers.11

  So what is a good citizen to conclude?

  There simply is no public health crisis caused by the widespread consumption of pornography. There is, rather, a long-term, one-sided propaganda war.

  Today there’s talk of America’s “rape culture,” and how our society has to acknowledge and challenge it, using every tool including eliminating porn and eliminating rape jokes.12 “America’s rape culture” seems to be the preface to every conversation condemning pornography.

  But here’s a fact systematically ignored by rape activists and the mass media: While there’s still too damn much rape, the rate of rape has gone down since Internet porn flooded America’s homes. Documented by the government, reported in places such as the Journal of Sex Research, the University of Hawaii’s Pacific Center for Sex and Society, and Northwestern University Law School,13 the rate of rape in the United States has steadily declined since the explosion of Internet porn. (Yes, rape is underreported—now, as it has been every year.14)

  So how can activists claim that porn viewing leads to rape and other awful consequences? Only by ignoring the facts. And so Morality in Media (recently rebranded as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation) and other groups point obsessively to “violent porn”—a media product showing pretend behavior—and claim it’s responsible for sexual violence in the real world. They never tell the truth about the decline in the rate of sexual violence. That wouldn’t be a very good fundraising tool. Besides, activist Dines says the science doesn’t matter. She “knows” there’s a connection: “At the core of contemporary pornography is contempt for women. One need not look at the most violent or sadomasochistic pornography to reach this conclusion.”15 Of course that’s all she ever shows or discusses.

  Anti-porn activists are right about one thing, of course—there is some vicious, sadistic porn available (although they dramatically overestimate how much there is, and how popular it is). Some of us wonder how anyone can maintain an erection while watching it (and indeed, very few people do watch it). But how does this affect the viewer of such material when he walks out of his house? Depending on which science you look at, the answer is either “mostly not” or “not at all.” Let’s look at what the two most respected names in the field say.

  UCLA researcher Neil Malamuth posits a Confluence model, in which pornography is like alcohol: Its effects depend on the person (and to a lesser extent, the cultural context). He notes that for most people, moderate use of either one leads to relaxation. But for a few people, moderate use is difficult to maintain, and too much use can lead to disaster. So what are the risk factors that identify men who are vulnerable to negative outcomes of high porn use?

  Hostile masculinity, expressed as narcissism, attitudes accepting violence against women, and sexual arousal to violence or power over women;

  Impersonal orientation to sexuality, a result of growing up with high parental conflict, physical or emotional abuse, and anti-social features in adolescence

  Men with both of these constellations are more likely to engage in sexual violence (of course, “more likely” is still an extremely small number). According to Malamuth, porn affects this high-risk group differently than other men, and violent porn affects them even more strongly.16 “Pornography use can be a risk factor of sexually aggressive outcomes, principally for men who are high on other risk factors and who use pornography frequently,” he says.17

  After reviewing a range of data and possible theories to explain them, researchers at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health essentially agreed with this conclusion, without taking a position on exactly who would be most vulnerable to the effects of high levels of violent pornography:

  “From the existing evidence, we argue that individuals who are already predisposed to sexually offend are the most likely to show an effect of pornography exposure and are the most likely to show the strongest effects. Men who are not predisposed are unlikely to show an effect; if there actually is an effect, it is likely to be transient because these men would not normally seek violent pornography.

  “Overall,” they conclude, “there is little support for a direct causal link between pornography use and sexual aggression.”18

  Veteran Canadian sex researcher William Fisher recognizes the value of Malamuth’s work, but feels it leaves too many questions unanswered—and overlooks some of its own assumptions. For example, Fisher says that an individual man’s sex drive is a key variable
: that it is correlated positively with use of porn, with use of aggressive porn, and with sexual aggression.

  Fisher also believes that what some psychologists call “attachment style” influences both men’s and women’s emotional experience of pornography. Interestingly, when Fisher repeated Donnerstein’s lab studies (which essentially found that undergraduate men who looked at violent porn then had harsher attitudes toward women), he gave subjects an additional option—to speak with the women afterwards. Fisher reports that most men did so, and then did not show the increase in violent attitudes toward women that Donnerstein found.19

  So the scientific evidence is consistent on one fact: Watching non-violent porn, or viewing violent porn only occasionally, doesn’t encourage sexually violent behavior in the real world. You will virtually never hear about this scientific consensus from PornPanic activists.

  However, the evidence does suggest two different possibilities. Either:

  1. Some men are at higher risk for sexually violent behavior if they watch a lot of violent porn (which, contrary to Dines’ claim, you have to seek out if you want to view it),

  or

  2. Watching a lot of violent porn does not increase one’s risk for sexually violent behavior.

  Note that “at higher risk” is not the same as “leads to.” There isn’t a scientist alive who claims that someone sits around minding his own business, watches some porn (violent or otherwise), and suddenly decides to get up and rape somebody. And yet that fiction is exactly what many anti-porn activists want you to believe.

  Of course, people who choose to watch a lot of violent porn are not a random sample of Americans. People who choose that form of entertainment may have atypical hormonal issues, personality structures, relationship styles, substance abuse, previous experiences, or other ongoing issues that make them more likely to engage in sexually aggressive behavior. Indeed, reports of search terms by porn consumers almost never show words like “violence,” “harm,” “pain,” or “degradation” among the most popular terms.