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Pornography now is so widespread in the United States that it deserves to be addressed seriously as a major public health crisis, a panel of activists says.
On the eve of a two-day conference on sexual exploitation this weekend, they suggested that porn be tackled in the same manner as teenage smoking or drunk driving.
"There's an untreated pandemic of harm from pornography," said Dawn Hawkins, executive director of Morality in Media, which has campaigned against pornography since 1962.
"There's a lot of science now proving that pornography is harmful," Hawkins told reporters at the National Press Club in Washington. "We know now that almost every family in America has been touched by the harm of pornography."
The Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation summit in the Washington suburb of Tysons Corner aims to look at pornography as a complex social problem that needs to be framed as a public health issue.
Participants include health professionals, social workers, academics, feminists, faith leaders, campaigners against human trafficking and former members of the multibillion-dollar adult entertainment industry.
"This is a business with considerable political clout," said Gail Dines, a sociology and women's studies professor at Wheelock College in Boston and author of "Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality."
Porn sites get more visitors per month than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter combined, a third of all downloads contain porn and the Internet now hosts 4.2 million porn websites, said Dines, who is also president of the international feminist group Stop Porn Culture.
"Porn is without doubt the most powerful form of sex education today, with studies showing that the average age of first viewing porn is between 11 and 14 -- and let me tell you, this is not your father's Playboy," she said.
"These degrading misogynist images have become the wallpaper of our lives and they are robbing young people of an authentic healthy sexuality that is a basic right of ever human being."
Donny Pauling, a former adult film producer for Playboy and others who also ran a network of adult websites before quitting the business in 2006, said he has personally seen the ill effects of the porn business on the women who appear in front of the camera.
He doubted that Miriam Weeks -- a 19-year-old women's studies student at elite Duke University who caused a national stir recently when she came out as moonlighting Internet porn star Belle Knox -- feels as "empowered" as she has claimed.
"I don't buy her story," Pauling said. "I recruited more than 500 first-timers into the business and there's never been one that came back and thanked me."
Mary Anne Layden of the University of Pennsylvania, who specializes in sexual trauma, said pornography has been a factor in every case of sexual violence that she has treated as a psychotherapist.
"The earlier males are exposed to pornography, the more likely they are to engage in non-consensual sex -- and for females, the more pornography they use, the more likely they are to be victims of non-consensual sex," she said.
In an interview with Rolling Stone earlier this month, Weeks revealed that she started watching pornography at the age of 12 -- and that she was once raped at a high school house party.
"There is going to have to be programs out there that get kids to understand how porn is manipulating them," Dines said.
And Layden suggested that if the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention got "interested in this as a public health issue, we can have success in the way that we had success with the issue of cigarette smoking."
© (c) 2014 AFP
13 Comments
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driftnet
No one would watch porn if they could get the real thing enough. Hungry people tend to think mostly about food.
If they think porn is so bad, they are going about fighting it in totally the wrong way.
It has to be recognized that sex is a powerful human desire that does not just go away and is not worth the misery and work of making it go away (see Japan, suicide and plummeting birth rates).
You either embrace sexuality and teach everyone to do it right, or your throw it to the wind and accept how it lands.
nath
I completely agree, drfitnet
bass4funk
You summed it up!
driftnet
I am not going to say all porn and pornographers are pure as snow, but I am seriously more worried about the manipulations of the anti-porn folks. They would take us back to Comstockian times, with medical books being illegal to mail if they depict genitals, young men told they will go blind and get hairy hands if they touch it, and women having their sensitive bits burned off if they are deemed to be nympho.
Even now, they have their hooks in sex education classes, where all the students are taught to fear, but not taught the proper way to initiate a sexual relationship. In misery, they turn to porn. And now these folks want to cut that off too!
1glenn
"There's a lot of science now proving that porn is harmful....."
I have never seen a single scientific article proving that porn is harmful. I have never seen even a single scientific article that has investigated this subject. And yet the director of "Morality in Media" claims that the scientific research has already been done.
People who make false claims in the name of science scare me.
badsey3
Porn is a great way to dehumanize people and split them from reality negatively. -Basically, unrealistic movies about dehumanization. People that "believe" in porns really struggle and from a spiritual standpoint really lag (can't get past the dehumanization). Really all of this is just part of a eugenics movement (depopulation) with abortions being the more real part of it.
garymalmgren
**Dear badsey san. I really don't understand your post.
Point 1. Basically, unrealistic movies about dehumanization.
Most movies are unrealistic, aren't they?
Point 2. People that "believe" in porns really struggle and from a spiritual standpoint.
Is there any proof that anyone actually believes in porn? Priests and others in religious orders have been sexually dehumanising their victims way before the modern age of porn.
But maybe they do struggle from a spiritual standpoint. Who knows?
Point 3. Really all of this is just part of a eugenics movement.
What are you talking about. One group of people thought that anouther groups is inferiorand wants to exterminate them = porn.
Point 3. with abortions being the more real part of it.
Sorry, sarcasm got the better of me
Oh this part I understand. Porn equals a vast conspiricy to promote abortions.
And we can readily see the results because everytime people watch porn they are overcome with an unstoppable desire to go out and perform or have an abortion. **
RowanM
@driftnet that's completely untrue. To use your analogy, people who aren't hungry still like to imagine nice food. I mean, lots of people watch the food network and don't actually know how to cook. People with a very healthy sex life can still like porn. Just like people who have very healthy sex lives will still masturbate. It serves to different wants and needs than actually having sex.
dcog9065
All it is is market forces. People can't get enough of sex and with porn it's accessible whenever wherever.
Describing it as a health hazard is completely silly.
gokai_wo_maneku
Practically every TV program and movie made in the US is an introduction to porn. The heavy sexuality is bearly seathing underneath. Even Big Bang Theory, which is a comedy, has casual sex every 5 minutes. It is only natural people are taken from these programs directly to porn. "porn culture" is the word for it. People keep commenting on strange Japanese sexuality, but we are about 50 years behind the US.
kaynide
Sorry, but I can't take the claim seriously. Not without specific links as to what health problems are happening here... are they talking a single case of carpal tunnel on some kid living in mom's basement?
Simply put, there is nothing parents can do to prevent children from eventually seeing porn. There's a lot they can try to do and slow the process, but facts of life is that kids are smarter than you think and they WILL figure it out. ...or in Japan just go to the conbini and grab a magazine...
Here's an actual "news" source: Canada tried to do a study on sexuality to see the effects on men and had to give up because they couldn't establish a control group. They literally could not find a single man 20 or older who had not consumed porn. http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2011/08/18/research-suggests-all-men-watch-pornography_n_930349.html
Wife and I are happily married and on occasion, when we're feeling particularly naughty, we might take a delve into the depths of the internet to see what trouble we can find.
Ah_so
Well, internet porn is not such a big issue in Japan - the country is still living in the DVD age. Apparently, according to acquaintences, there are no good Japanese "youtube-style streaming sites". Personally, I have no idea what these things are and have no interest in looking for them, at all, Ever.
The only solution is to bring back dial-up internet connections. If people had to wait 20 minutes for a 5 second clip, then i am sure interest in these images would vanish immediately.
The Spokesman
Without a baseline agreement on what constitutes a "healthy sex life" there is no way to be on the same page and come to any sort of useful conclusion.
Also there is a big difference in using/viewing/liking porn and having an unhealthy obsession for or need for porn.
In my view, a healthy sex life would include at least 3 new partners a year and sex lasting about an hour 3 times a week at least, with plenty of variety in actions. For most people, that is impossible to achieve for many reasons I find to be just sad and unnecessary. But I have a strong feeling that if the world changed, and that became standard, porn consumption would plummet and so would masturbation frequency. And along with those, unhealthy overdose of porn cases would also plummet.
And of course the bottom would drop out of the market for ever more abusive type porn.
Might have something to do with how you treated them, eh Mr. Pauling? Not that I can say I ever heard of a woman thanking anyone for a sexual experience. Or if a man did, getting any sort of a response besides "meh". For some reason women don't want this at the front of their minds. Even some of the most sexual and deviant women I know don't want to talk about it as part of casual conversation, which to me is just bizarre. To me, its just another part of life, and I find it disconcerting that so many women can be so into it one minute and abhorred by it the next. But they don't generally visit you to thank you for sexual experiences.