The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers

by Неизвестный

  The prevalence of teens with friends who view and download internet pornography increases with age, from nearly one-third of twelve-year-olds to nearly two-thirds of seventeen-year-olds. Boys are significantly more likely than girls to have friends who view online pornography: 25% of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls, and 46% of sixteen- and seventeen-year-old girls say they have friends who regularly view and download internet pornography, compared with 37% and 65% of boys in those age groups.8

  Bear in mind that most of these statistics are already outdated.

  Psychotherapists and family counselors across the country attest to the popularity of pornography among pre-adolescents. Even pre-adolescents are being treated for pornography addiction, says Judith Coché, a clinical psychologist who runs the Coché Center in Philadelphia and teaches psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. She describes one case in which the parents of an eleven-year-old girl found her creating her own pornographic website. When confronted, she said that pornography was considered “cool” among her friends. Perhaps it wasn’t a very good idea, she admitted, but all of her friends were doing it. Her parents were horrified. Coché says, “Before the internet, I never encountered this.”

  “I’ve had my own therapy practice for over twenty-five years,” she says. “I feel like I’ve seen everything.” She pauses and says almost apologetically, “I’ve been walking around my practice saying, ‘We have an epidemic on our hands.’ The growth of pornography and its impact on young people is really, really dangerous. And the most dangerous part is that we don’t even realize what’s happening.”

  Pornography is wildly popular with teenage boys in a way that makes yesteryear’s sneaked glimpses at Penthouse seem monastic. The prevalence of the internet among teenagers has made pornography just another online activity; there is little barrier to entry and almost no sense of taboo. Instead, pornography seems to be a natural right and an acceptable pastime. One teenage boy in Boston explained recently to the New York Times, “Who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?”9

  There is a reason for this. Like all good marketers, pornographers know it’s important to reel consumers in while they’re young. Pornography is integrated into the cable tv and videogame cultures, for example. MTV recently announced the launch of a Stan Lee/Hugh Hefner collaboration, Hef’s Superbunnies, an “edgy, sexy animated series” from the creator of the Spider-Man comic book series featuring a buxom team of specially trained Playboy bunnies.10

  Mainstream videogames regularly feature pornographic elements. One 2004 game, “The Guy Game,” which features women exposing their breasts when they answer questions wrong in a trivia contest, didn’t even get an “Adults-Only” rating. (The game manufacturer is being sued because one female included in the footage was only seventeen and didn’t give her consent to be filmed.)11 “BMX XXX” adds a pornographic sheen to bike stunts and racing. Another game, “Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude,” features full-on nudity as gamers live out the player lifestyle, trying to score hot babes. The manufacturers are fighting to obtain an “M” rating (the equivalent of a movie’s “R”) in order to ensure being carried at Walmarts across America.12

  Marketers have extended the porn brand to everything from sporting equipment to clothing. Two snowboarding companies, Burton Snowboards and Sims, now offer boards—clearly marketed to teenagers, the backbone of the snowboarding market—emblazoned with images of Playboy bunnies and Vivid porn stars. Sims boasts that the boards with photographs of porn starts Jenna Jameson and Briana Banks are their best sellers.

  SEXUALLY CUED TO A COMPUTER

  The effects of such ever-present pornography on kids who are still developing sexually has yet to be fully understood, Coché explains. She has talked to parents who have witnessed their sons playing computer games when pornographic pop-ups come onto the screen. “Pornography is so often tied into videogame culture and insinuates itself even into non-pornographic areas of the web. It’s very hard for a twelve-year-old boy to avoid.”

  As a result, boys are learning to sexually cue to a computer, rather than to human beings. “This is where they’re learning what turns them on. And what are they supposed to do about that? Whereas once boys would kiss a girl they had a crush on behind the school, we don’t know how boys who become trained to cue sexually to computer-generated porn stars are going to behave, especially as they get older.”

  Kids also absorb pornography very differently from adults. Not only are they like sponges, they are also quite literal. Not only younger children, but even young teenagers are generally not sophisticated enough to differentiate between fantasy and reality. They learn direct lessons from pornography, with no filter, and with no concept of exaggeration, irony, or affect.

  They learn what women supposedly look like, how they should act, and what they are supposed to do. They learn what women “want” and how men can give it to them. Watching pornography, boys and girls learn that women always want sex and that sex is divorced from relationships. They learn that men can have whomever they want and that women will respond the way men want them to. They learn that anal sex is the norm and instant female orgasm is to be expected. And they absorb these lessons avidly, emulating people they perceive to be role models.

  “Kids today are going to run into pornography online, not erotica,” explains Aline Zoldbrod. “They’re getting a very bad model. Pornography doesn’t show how a real couple negotiates conflict or creates intimacy.” For girls especially, Zoldbrod believes, pornography is a “brutal way to be introduced to sexuality,” since much of it is “rape-like” in its use of violence.

  Still, many older kids at least partly recognize the negative side. When asked in the 2001 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, 59% of fifteen- to twenty-fouryear- olds said they thought seeing pornography online encouraged young people to have sex before they are ready, and half thought it would lead people to think unprotected sex is okay. Half thought internet pornography could lead to addiction and promote bad attitudes toward women. In a 2002 nationwide Gallup poll, 69% of teenage boys between the ages of thirteen and seventeen said that even if nobody ever knew about it, they would feel guilty about surfing pornography on the internet. Not surprising, an even greater number of girls—86%—felt the same way.

  Interestingly, when asked about the effect of pornography for the Pornified/ Harris poll, young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four were most likely of all generations to report negative consequences. Four in ten of them believe pornography harms relationships between men and women, compared with only three in ten twenty-five-to-forty-year-olds. The internet generation is also more likely to believe that pornography changes men’s expectations of women’s looks and behavior.

  Adults also see the harm pornography does to young children and teenagers. When asked in the Pornified/Harris poll, “What is the greatest impact of pornography on children?” 30% of Americans said the fact that it distorts boys’ expectations and understanding of women and sex, 25% said that it makes kids more likely to have sex earlier than they otherwise might have, 7% cited the way it distorts girls’ body images and ideas about sex, and 6% said it makes kids more likely to look at pornography as adults (men were twice as likely as women to believe this).

  Only 2% of Americans actually believe that pornography helps kids better understand sexuality. And only 9% think that it doesn’t have any impact on children at all.

  PORNOGRAPHY’S EFFECTS

  Pornography in all its permutations affects children’s developing sexuality; the younger the age of exposure and the more hard-core the material, the more intense the effects. Boys who look at pornography excessively become men who connect arousal purely with the physical, losing the ability to become attracted by the particular features of a given partner. Instead, they recreate images from pornography in their brain while they’re with a real person.

  “It’s sad that boys who are initiated to sex through these images become indoctrinated in
a way that can potentially stay with them for the rest of their lives,” Gary Brooks says. “Boys learn that you have sex in spite of your feelings, not because of your feelings. Meanwhile, girls are taught that you don’t have intimacy without relationships.”

  No matter what kind of pornography teenagers look at, spending one’s prepubescence and puberty using porn can have lifelong implications. Masters and Johnson’s clinical director Mark Schwartz has seen fourteen- and fifteen-year-old boys who are addicted to pornography. “It’s awful to see the effect it has on them,” he says. “At such a young age, to have that kind of sexual problem.”

  Schwartz isn’t surprised about the growing number of young addicts in the Internet Age. At that age, “your brain is much more susceptible,” he explains. “Many of these boys are very smart and academically successful; a lot of computer geeks are the ones who get drawn in. It affects how they develop sexually. Think about a twelve-year-old boy looking at Playboy magazine. When you’re talking about internet pornography, you can multiply that effect by the relative size of the internet itself.”

  Research trickling in has begun to document the effects of pornography on kids, a difficult area to study given obvious ethical challenges. Certainly, there aren’t any parents who would consent to have their children view pornography in order to further research on the damage it causes.

  Still, some evidence has been gathered. A recent study of 101 sexually abusive children in Australia documented increased aggressiveness in boys who use pornography. Almost all had internet access, and 90% admitted to seeing pornography online. One-fourth said an older sibling or a friend had shown them how to access pornography online, sometimes against their will; 25% said that using pornography was their primary reason for going online. When questioned separately, nearly all of their parents said they doubted their child would access any pornography via the internet.13

  IT WASN’T LIKE THIS

  Touring around this country to promote my book Pornified, I heard again and again from concerned parents. “I know my fourteen-year-old son is looking at extremely hard-core pornography, but what can I do about it? He tells me he needs the computer for schoolwork.” “I have a ten-year-old daughter. I don’t want to even think about what boys her age are learning about the opposite sex online.” “My daughter found pornography that my husband downloaded on the family computer.” A pediatric nurse told me there was an incident in her practice in which toddlers acted out moves from a pornographic movie.

  A day’s worth of nationwide headlines inevitably brings up stories of children encountering pornography at the local library, child pornography arrests, and school incidents in which teachers are caught looking at pornography on school computers during school hours. It is terrible enough that adults are suffering the consequences of a pornified culture. But we must think about the kind of world we are introducing to our children. Certainly everyone—liberals and conservatives alike—can agree with the statement, “It wasn’t like this when we were kids.” And I can’t imagine anyone would have that thought without simultaneously experiencing a profound sense of fear and loss.

  ACQUIRING TASTES AND LOVES : WHAT NEUROPLASTICITY TEACHES US ABOUT SEXUAL ATTRACTION AND LOVE *

  Norman Doidge

  A. was a single, handsome young man who came to me because he was depressed. He had just gotten involved with a beautiful woman who had a boyfriend, and she had begun to encourage him to abuse her. She tried to draw A. into acting out sexual fantasies in which she dressed up as a prostitute, and he was to “take charge” of her and become violent in some way. When A. began to feel an alarming wish to oblige her, he got very upset, broke it off, and sought treatment. He had a history of involvement with women who were already attached to other men and emotionally out of control. His girlfriends had either been demanding and possessive or castratingly cruel. Yet these were the women who thrilled him. “Nice” girls, thoughtful, kind women, bored him, and he felt that any woman who fell in love with him in a tender, uncomplicated way was defective.

  His own mother was a severe alcoholic, frequently needy, seductive, and given to emotional storms and violent rages throughout his childhood. A. recalled her banging his sister’s head against the radiator and burning his stepbrother’s fingers as a punishment for playing with matches. She was frequently depressed, often threatening suicide, and his role was to be on the alert, calm her, and prevent her. His relationship with her was also highly sexualized. She wore see-through nighties and talked to him as though he were a lover. He thought he recalled her inviting him into her bed when he was a child and had an image of himself sitting with his foot in her vagina while she masturbated. He had an exciting but furtive feeling about the scene. On the rare occasions when his father, who had retreated from his wife, was home, A. recalled himself as “perpetually short of breath,” and trying to stop fights between his parents, who eventually divorced.

  A. spent much of his childhood stifling his rage at both parents and often felt like a volcano about to burst. Intimate relationships seemed like forms of violence, in which others threatened to eat him alive, and yet by the time he had passed through childhood, it was for women who promised to do just that, and them alone, that he had acquired an erotic taste.

  Human beings exhibit an extraordinary degree of sexual plasticity compared with other creatures. We vary in what we like to do with our partners in a sexual act. We vary where in our bodies we experience sexual excitement and satisfaction. But most of all we vary in whom or what we are attracted to. People often say they find a particular “type” attractive, or a “turn-on,” and these types vary immensely from person to person.

  For some, the types change as they go through different periods and have new experiences. One homosexual man had successive relations with men from one race or ethnic group, then with those from another, and in each period he could be attracted only to men in the group that was currently “hot.” After one period was over, he could never be attracted to a man from the old group again. He acquired a taste for these “types” in quick succession and seemed more smitten by the person’s category or type (i.e., “Asians” or “African-Americans”) than by the individual. The plasticity of this man’s sexual taste exaggerates a general truth: that the human libido is not a hardwired, invariable biological urge but can be curiously fickle, easily altered by our psychology and the history of our sexual encounters. And our libido can also be finicky. Much scientific writing implies otherwise and depicts the sexual instinct as a biological imperative, an ever-hungry brute, always demanding satisfaction—a glutton, not a gourmet. But human beings are more like gourmets and are drawn to types and have strong preferences; having a “type” causes us to defer satisfaction until we find what we are looking for, because attraction to a type is restrictive: the person who is “really turned on by blondes” may tacitly rule out brunettes and redheads.

  Even sexual preference can occasionally change.1 Though some scientists increasingly emphasize the inborn basis of our sexual preferences, it is also true that some people have heterosexual attractions for part of their lives—with no history of bisexuality—and then “add on” a homosexual attraction and vice versa.

  Sexual plasticity may seem to have reached its height in those who have had many different partners, learning to adapt to each new lover; but think of the plasticity required of the aging married couple with a good sex life. They looked very different in their twenties, when they met, than they do in their sixties, yet their libidos adjust, so they remain attracted.

  But sexual plasticity goes further still. Fetishists desire inanimate objects. The male fetishist can be more excited by a high-heeled shoe with a fur trim, or by a woman’s lingerie, than by a real woman. Since ancient times some human beings in rural areas have had intercourse with animals. Some people seem to be attracted not so much to people as to complex sexual scripts, where partners play roles, involving various perversions, combining sadism, masochism, voyeurism, and exhibitionism. W
hen they place an ad in the personals, the description of what they are looking for in a lover often sounds more like a job description than like that of a person they would like to know.

  Given that sexuality is an instinct, and instinct is traditionally defined as a hereditary behavior unique to a species, varying little from one member to the next, the variety of our sexual tastes is curious. Instincts generally resist change and are thought to have a clear, nonnegotiable, hardwired purpose, such as survival. Yet the human sexual “instinct” seems to have broken free of its core purpose, reproduction, and varies2 to a bewildering extent, as it does not in other animals, in which the sexual instinct seems to behave itself and act like an instinct.

  No other instinct can so satisfy without accomplishing its biological purpose, and no other instinct is so disconnected from its purpose. Anthropologists have shown that for a long time humanity did not know that sexual intercourse was required for reproduction. This “fact of life” had to be learned by our ancestors, just as children must learn it today. This detachment from its primary purpose is perhaps the ultimate sign of sexual plasticity.

  Love too is remarkably flexible, and its expression has changed through history. Though we speak of romantic love as the most natural of sentiments, in fact the con- centration of our adult hopes for intimacy, tenderness, and lust in one person until death do us part is not common to all societies and has only recently become widespread in our own. For millennia most marriages were arranged by parents for practical reasons. Certainly, there are unforgettable stories of romantic love linked to marriage in the Bible, as in the Song of Songs, and linked to disaster in medieval troubadour poetry and, later, in Shakespeare. But romantic love began to gain social approval in the aristocracies and courts of Europe only in the twelfth century— originally between an unmarried man and a married woman, either adulterous or unconsummated, usually ending badly. Only with the spread of democratic ideals of individualism did the idea that lovers ought to be able to choose spouses for themselves take firmer hold and gradually begin to seem completely natural and inalienable.