The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers

by Неизвестный

  Sexual sadism54 illustrates plasticity in that it fuses two familiar tendencies, the sexual and the aggressive, each of which can give pleasure separately, and brings them together so when they are discharged, the pleasure is doubled. But masochism goes much further because it takes something inherently unpleasant, pain, and turns it into a pleasure, altering the sexual drive more fundamentally and more vividly demonstrating the plasticity of our pleasure and pain systems.

  For years the police, through raids on S&M establishments, knew more about serious perversions than most clinicians. While patients with milder perversions often come for treatment of such problems as anxiety or depression, those with serious perversions seldom seek therapy because, generally, they enjoy them.

  Robert Stoller, M.D., a California psychoanalyst, did make important discoveries55 through visits to S&M and B&D (bondage and discipline) establishments in Los Angeles. He interviewed people who practiced hardcore sadomasochism, which inflicts real pain on the flesh, and discovered that masochistic participants had all had serious physical illnesses as children and had undergone regular, terrifying, painful medical treatment. “As a result,” writes Stoller, “they had to be confined severely and for long periods [in hospitals] without the chance to unload their frustration, despair and rage openly and appropriately. Hence the perversions.”56 As children, they consciously took their pain, their inexpressible rage, and reworked it in daydreams, in altered mental states, or in masturbation fantasies, so they could replay the story of the trauma with a happy ending and say to themselves, This time, I win. And the way they won was by eroticizing their agony.

  The idea that an “inherently” painful feeling can become pleasurable may at first strike us as hard to believe, because we tend to assume that each of our sensations and emotions is inherently either pleasurable (joy, triumph, and sexual pleasure) or painful (sadness, fear, and grief ). But in fact this assumption does not hold up. We can cry tears of happiness and have bittersweet triumphs; and in neuroses people may feel guilty about sexual pleasure, or no pleasure at all, where others would feel delight. An emotion that we think inherently unpleasurable, such as sadness, can, if beautifully and subtly articulated in music, literature, or art, feel not only poignant but sublime. Fear can be exciting in frightening movies or on roller coasters. The human brain seems able to attach many of our feelings and sensations either to the pleasure system or to the pain system, and each of these links or mental associations requires a novel plastic connection in the brain.

  The hardcore masochists whom Stoller interviewed must have formed a pathway that linked the painful sensations they had endured to their sexual pleasure systems, resulting in a new composite experience, voluptuous pain. That they all suffered in early childhood strongly suggests that this rewiring occurred during the critical periods of sexual plasticity.

  In 1997 a documentary appeared that sheds light on plasticity and masochism: Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Bob Flanagan performed his masochistic acts in public as a performance artist and exhibitionist and was articulate, poetic, and at times very funny.

  In Flanagan’s opening scenes we see him naked, humiliated, pies being thrown in his face, fed with a funnel. But images flash of his being physically hurt and choked, hinting at far more disturbing forms of pain.

  Bob was born in 1952 with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder of the lungs and pancreas in which the body produces an excessive amount of abnormally thick mucus that clogs the air passages, making it impossible to breathe normally, and leads to chronic digestive problems. He had to fight for every breath and often turned blue from lack of oxygen. Most patients born with this disease die as children or in their early twenties.

  Bob’s parents noticed he was in pain from the moment he came home from the hospital. When he was eighteen months old, doctors discovered pus between his lungs and began treating him by inserting needles deep into his chest. He began to dread these procedures and screamed desperately. Throughout childhood he was hospitalized regularly and confined nearly naked inside a bubblelike tent so doctors could monitor his sweat— one of the ways cystic fibrosis is diagnosed— while he felt mortified that his body was visible to strangers. To help him breathe and fight infections, doctors inserted all sorts of tubes into him. He was also aware of the severity of his problem: Two of his younger sisters had also had cystic fibrosis; one died at six months, the other at twenty- one years.

  Despite the fact that he had become a poster boy for the Orange County Cystic Fibrosis Society, he began to live a secret life. As a young child, when his stomach hurt relentlessly, he would stimulate his penis to distract himself. By the time he was in high school, he would lie naked at night and secretly cover himself with thick glue, for he knew not what reason. He hung himself from a door with belts in painful positions. Then he began to insert needles into the belts to pierce his flesh.

  When he was thirty- one, he fell in love with Sheree Rose, who came from a very troubled family. In the film we see Sheree’s mother openly belittle her husband, Sheree’s father, who, Sheree claims, was passive and never showed her affection. Sheree describes herself as being bossy since childhood. She is Bob’s sadist.

  In the film Sheree uses Bob, with his consent, as her slave. She humiliates him, cuts into the skin near his nipples with an X-Acto knife, puts clamps on his nipples, force- feeds him, chokes him with a cord till he turns blue, forces a large steel ball— as big as a billiard ball— into his anus, and puts needles in his erogenous zones. His mouth and lips are sutured shut with stitches. He writes of drinking Sheree’s urine from a baby bottle. We see him with feces on his penis. His every orifice is invaded or defiled. These activities give Bob erections and lead to great orgasms in the sex that often follows.

  Bob survives both his twenties and his thirties and in his early forties has become the oldest living survivor of cystic fibrosis. He takes his masochism on the road, to S&M clubs and art museums, where he enacts his masochistic rituals in public, always wearing his oxygen mask to breathe.

  In one of the final scenes a naked Bob Flanagan takes a hammer and nails his penis, right through its center, to a board. He then matter- of- factly removes the nail so that blood spurts all over the camera lens, like a fountain, from the deep hole through his penis.

  It is important to describe precisely what Flanagan’s nervous system could endure, in order to understand the extent to which completely novel brain circuits can develop, linking the pain system to the pleasure system.

  Flanagan’s idea that his pain must be made pleasurable colored his fantasies from early childhood. His remarkable history confirms that his perversion developed out of his unique life experience and is linked to his traumatic memories. As an infant, he was tied into the crib in the hospital so he couldn’t escape and hurt himself. By age seven his confinement had turned into a love of constriction. As an adult, he loved bondage and being handcuffed or tied up and hung for long periods in positions that torturers might use to break their victims. As a child, he was required to endure the powerful nurses and doctors who hurt him; as an adult, he voluntarily gave this power to Sheree, becoming her slave, whom she could abuse while practicing pseudomedical procedures on him. Even subtle aspects of his childhood relationship to his doctors were repeated in adulthood. The fact that Bob gave Sheree his consent repeated an aspect of the trauma because, after a certain age, when the doctors took blood, pierced his skin, and hurt him, he gave them permission, knowing his life depended on it.

  This mirroring of childhood traumas through the repetition of such subtle details is typical of perversions. Fetishists— who are attracted to objects— have the same trait. A fetish, Robert Stoller said, is an object57 that tells a story, that captures scenes from childhood trauma and eroticizes them. (One man who developed a fetish for rubber underwear and raincoats was a childhood bedwetter, forced to sleep on rubber sheets, which he found humiliating and uncomfortable. Flanagan had a number of fetishes, for medica
l paraphernalia and the blunt metals from hardware stores— screws, nails, clamps, and hammers— all of which he used, at various times, for erotic- masochistic stimulation, to penetrate, pinch, or pound his flesh.)

  Flanagan’s pleasure centers were no doubt rewired in two ways. First, emotions such as anxiety that are normally unpleasant became pleasant. He explains that he is constantly flirting with death because he was promised an early death and is trying to master his fear. In his 1985 poem, “Why,” he makes clear that his supermasochism allows him to feel triumphant, courageous, and invulnerable after a life of vulnerability. But he goes beyond simply mastering fear. Humiliated by doctors who stripped him and put him in a plastic tent to measure his sweat, he now proudly strips in museums. To master his feelings of being exposed and humiliated as a child, he becomes a triumphant exhibitionist. Shame is made into a pleasure, converted into shamelessness.

  The second aspect of his rewiring is that physical pain becomes pleasure. Metal in flesh now feels good, gives him erections, and makes him have orgasms. Some people under great physical stress release endorphins, the opiumlike analgesics that our bodies make to dull our pain and that can make us euphoric. But Flanagan explains he is not dulled to pain— he is drawn to it. The more he hurts himself, the more sensitized to pain he becomes, and the more pain he feels. Because his pain and pleasure systems are connected, Flanagan feels real, intense pain, and it feels good.

  Children are born helpless and will, in the critical period of sexual plasticity, do anything to avoid abandonment and to stay attached to adults, even if they must learn to love the pain and trauma that adults inflict. The adults in little Bob’s world inflicted pain on him “for his own good.” Now, by becoming a supermasochist, he ironically treats pain as though it is good for him. He is utterly aware that he is stuck in the past, reliving infancy, and says he hurts himself “because I am a big baby, and I want to stay that way.” Perhaps the fantasy of staying the tortured baby is an imaginary way of keeping himself from the death that awaits him should he allow himself to grow up. If he can stay Peter Pan, endlessly “tormented” by Sheree, at least he will never grow up and die prematurely.

  At the end of the film we see Flanagan dying. He stops making jokes and begins to look like a cornered animal, overwhelmed with fear. The viewer sees how terrified he must have been as a little boy, before he discovered the masochistic solution to tame his pain and terror. At this point, we learn from Bob that Sheree has been talking of splitting up—evoking every suffering child’s worst fear, abandonment. Sheree says the problem is that Bob is no longer submitting to her. He looks utterly brokenhearted— and in the end, she stays, and nurses him tenderly.

  In his final moments, almost in shock, he asks plaintively, “Am I dying? I don’t understand it . . . What is going on? . . . I’d never believe this.” So powerful were his masochistic fantasies, games, and rituals, in which he embraced painful death, that it seems he thought he had actually beaten it.

  As for the patients who became involved in porn, most were able to go cold turkey once they understood the problem and how they were plastically reinforcing it. They found eventually that they were attracted once again to their mates. None of these men had addictive personalities or serious childhood traumas, and when they understood what was happening to them, they stopped using their computers for a period to weaken their problematic neuronal networks, and their appetite for porn withered away. Their treatment for sexual tastes acquired later in life was far simpler than that for patients who, in their critical periods, acquired a preference for problematic sexual types. Yet even some of these men were able, like A., to change their sexual type, because the same laws of neuroplasticity that allow us to acquire problematic tastes also allow us, in intensive treatment, to acquire newer, healthier ones and in some cases even to lose our older, troubling ones. It’s a use- it- or- lose- it brain, even where sexual desire and love are concerned.

  PORNOGRAPHY AND VIOLENCE: A NEW LOOK AT THE RESEARCH

  Mary Anne Layden

  Pornography is a potent teacher of both beliefs and behaviors, and in fact provides the ideal conditions for learning. It can teach not only specific sexual behaviors, but general attitudes toward women and children, what relationships are like, and the nature of sexuality. Certainly some important reactions are inborn and instinctual, but the great majority of our beliefs and behaviors have been learned. Once we learn them, we also learn if it is acceptable to engage in the behaviors and are sometimes stimulated to do just that. For many reasons, as we shall see, pornography is a very effective teacher of beliefs and behaviors, and one that also teaches its users that the behaviors are acceptable and stimulates them to do so. However, what it teaches and what it stimulates can be toxic.

  FACTORS AFFECTING LEARNING

  We learn better using images than words, because images carry more information in a more compact form. A split-second look at an image can convey more information than a split-second look at words. Words are often perceived as opinions, while images are often perceived as events or facts. We argue in our head against words or opinions, but much less often against events or facts, particularly images. The vast majority of pornography is visual.

  We also learn better when aroused. If something activates our sympathetic nervous system, we are more prepared to remember the information received at that point. The arousal may come from excitement, fear, disgust, or sexual tension. Pornography can produce any of these emotions. We tend to remember any experience we have in those aroused states.

  And learning is better if it is reinforced. Behavior that is rewarded is likely to be repeated while behavior that is punished is less likely to be repeated. Sexual arousal and orgasm are extremely rewarding experiences. We may be innately predisposed to enjoy the rewards of sexual arousal and orgasm, but we learn how and when and with whom we can experience those pleasures. If a novel sexual behavior produces an orgasm, we are more likely to repeat that behavior and add it to our sexual template and repertoire.

  Learning is also better if we see others perform a behavior and observe what happens. Seeing others who are modeling behaviors rewarded or punished will have some of the same effects on us as if we were rewarded or punished ourselves. We don’t have to directly experience those rewards and consequences. We learn to repeat or avoid those behaviors by seeing their effect on the models.

  Imagery that contains role models who are demonstrating sexual behavior and being rewarded for it, that produces sexual arousal in the viewer and is followed by an orgasm, can be extremely effective in producing deeply learned beliefs and behaviors.

  Pornography can offer all these elements—images, arousal, reinforcement, the example of others—so it is a potent teacher of both beliefs and behaviors. It provides the ideal conditions for learning.

  One category of beliefs we learn is called “permission-giving beliefs.”1 These beliefs give us permission to engage in a behavior we would like to engage in or are already engaging in. They tell us there is no need to stop, change, or reduce the behavior—they tell us, for example, that what we are doing is normal, that it doesn’t hurt anyone, and that everybody is doing it.

  Marshall has stated that “this may be pornography’s most insidious influence; namely, the acceptance of the attitudes (some obvious, some more subtle) expressed in pornography. Pornographic depictions of sexuality distort the truth about desires of women and children, and legitimize men’s sense of entitlement, and use of force, violence, and degrading acts by the male actors.”2 In other words, pornography has the ability not only to teach social attitudes and behaviors, but also to give permission to engage in them. Permission-giving beliefs become releasers of behavior.

  Pornography is an ideal teacher of these releaser beliefs. It can teach specific sexual behaviors and general attitudes toward women and children, teach what relationships are like, and teach the nature of sexuality, thus giving permission for a wide range of actions. For example, a male masturbating
to the images of smiling children having sex with adults or of sexually aroused women being beaten, raped, or degraded, is learning that the subjects enjoy and desire this treatment and is thereby being taught that he has permission to act this way himself.

  So pornography can be a teacher, a releaser, and a trigger of behaviors. Pornography is not only potent but multifaceted in its effect. Pornography can teach what to do, with whom to do it, when and how often to do it, that it’s okay to do it, and then stimulate the urge to do it now.

  It is not surprising that many psychologists call internet pornography the new “crack cocaine” when you note the combination of the power of pornography with the ready, 24/7 availability of pornography on any computer, much of it free, accessible in the privacy and anonymity of the home.

  Some of the messages of pornography teach beliefs and behaviors. Some of these behaviors are pathological, illegal, or both, and are toxic on many levels. The illegal behaviors are rape, child molestation, pedophilia, prostitution, domestic violence, sexual harassment, and some paraphilias (e.g., sexual deviances such as exhibitionism, voyeurism, and bestiality). Some of pornography’s messages about relationships, sexuality, and women may be damaging and pathological, even if the behaviors are not illegal.

  This learning produces effects in attitudes toward sexual violence, relationships, the attractiveness of a partner, and women’s liberation; and in sexual violence behaviors, pedophilia, sexual harassment, prostitution, sexual deviance, and physically risky behavior.