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Like Big Tobacco, Big Porn Peddles Poison to Children
The first time I watched anonymous, naked bodies entangled in sweaty sex was during my junior year of college. My flushed-face was riveted to the screen. The psychology course called "Human Sexuality" was so popular at Virginia Commonwealth University I'd taken the class during summer break. Fall and spring semesters filled too fast. No surprise. Porn flicks were a feature of the curriculum. I had perfect attendance.
This was the 1980s. The internet as we know it was only a figment of Al Gore's genius. But with today's broadband you don't have to go to a lecture hall or a seedy theater on Richmond's West Grace Street to see three-ways, four-ways or other sexually explicit forays. Neither do our kids. Any 14-year-old knows this. With Wi-Fi capable Xbox 360s, PSPs, iPhones, laptops, desktops, whatever, hardcore porn doesn't require college accreditation, cellophane wrapping or proof of age. No credit card, Paypal account or adolescent embarrassment is necessary. Just click the little box on the website that says you're 18 or older (You double promise? I double do) and you're granted instant access. Any time you feel bored, anxious, insecure or lonely (staples of youth) come back for a quick fix. Like the rush? The red light is on 24/7.
Web filters? Sure, they make us parents feel better. But children know enough about search engines, tags, cookies, security overrides and unprotected Wi-Fi hotspots to turn "parental controls" into a misnomer. If your kid doesn't, you can bet (s)he has a friend or a friend of a friend who does. So it's a good chance that before kids have a chance to fully grasp the difference between lust and love and negotiate the impulses of puberty, they're being exposed to sex as defined by its internet acronyms, e.g., BDSM, MILF, BBW, GILF.
Don't know what those mean? Paste any or all into Google. If you want, cut and paste the entire string using Google's strictest "SafeSearch" filter, the setting that declares without a doubt that it will block "web pages containing explicit sexual content."
I'll wait.
OMG!
Yeah, now you know.
Last Monday President Obama signed into law landmark legislation that gives the feds all power to regulate the marketing of tobacco products. In a Rose Garden event decorated with children, Obama told us why the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act was better late than never. "One out of every five children in our country are now current smokers by the time they leave high school," he said. "Each day, one thousand young people under age eighteen become new, regular, daily smokers. ... I was one of these teenagers, and so I know how difficult it can be to break this habit."
By all accounts, Big Tobacco crossed the line decades ago when it went after our children with what Obama called "a constant and insidious barrage" of advertising. The nicotine capitalists knew effective marketing. If they could hook us early our lungs (and wallets) might be stained for life. However long and diminished that life might be.
By contrast, internet porn dwarfs tobacco in scope, availability and constant, insidious advertising. Its reach is so broad it cannot be quantified. Riding radio waves through countries that attempt to block it with various filters (e.g., India, China, Cuba, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.) and those that defer to free speech and the ACLU, it jumps around like live electrical wiring. Any attempt to track it is futile. A YouTube video with 7.7 million views appears to reveal hard facts about it (e.g., every second 28,258 internet users are viewing porn; every second $89 is spent on internet porn; every day 266 new porn sites appear online; 35 percent of internet downloads are porn), but its calculations are drawn from data circa 2005-2007. In the Wild West of the internet that's a generation ago. More telling, the video is a marriage of legit mainstream U.S. media (GOOD Magazine, nominated for two 2008 National Magazine Awards) and a British porn star (Kelle Marie, nominated for the 2009 Adult Video News Best All-Girl Sex Scene).
The best evidence of porn' reach is maybe anecdotal and live. As I type this sentence on Thursday, June 25 at 4:25 p.m. EDT, there are 31,709 viewers spread among the 1,056 webcams of a single, unremarkable website. Most of the webcams are transmitting free, live sex acts (solo, couple, group, straight, gay, shemale) from the homes of the United States, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Thailand and beyond. With a web domain listed in Florida, an IP address in Toronto and its owner registration in Amsterdam, the website is an example of modern globalization. And to view it I didn't have to log in, give my name, age, e-mail, phone, credit card, nothing. That's one porn website, not even a highly ranked one when scored by Amazon's internet traffic counter Alexa.com. (No, I will not give you the website's URL. Ask your kid to Google the information I just provided.)
We need not argue about what constitutes "porn" or "addiction." Both are moot points here. Every hour and day that children spend engrossed in the "mature" websites yielded by Google "SafeSearch" is one more habit-forming hour or day. In the short term, grades, athletics, friendships and talents are diminished. Long term, it could be their family life, careers and overall potential.
In the April/May issue of Policy Review, Hoover Institution fellow Mary Eberstadt compares today's general ambivalence toward porn to our long-ago indifference to tobacco. Different products, stark similarities. Consumers of pornography like consumers of tobacco, she points out, explain their habits with near-identical, flawed rationalization:
"Everybody does it." "At least I'm not consuming something worse." "I'm not affecting anyone but myself."
Eberstadt writes, "Just as secondhand smoke finally shattered the 'so-what?' social consensus about tobacco, so might the potential harms to others marriages, jobs, and relationships disrupted; loved ones and children inadvertently exposed ultimately threaten to deep-six the current 'so-what?' consensus about pornography."
When the naked greed of Big Tobacco was belatedly called to task by Capitol Hill in the 1990s its CEOs flaunted corporate wealth. As Obama said last Monday, they spent "millions upon millions" to lobby Congress and attempt to polish tobacco's public image. In ads and testimony the lies and denials were emphatic. Heavens no, children were not a target of tobacco marketing. No, nicotine is not addictive. Oh, it is? No, we did not know it was addictive. On and on. The root of all evil knows no shame.
Today, like R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris before it, Big Porn peddles more than product. It wields influence. Corporate heavyweights such as General Motors, AT&T, AOL Time-Warner, Comcast Cable, and hotel chains Marriott, Sheraton and the Hilton have in the past or do now get their cut of porn's mind-boggling profits. By extension, so do stockholders.
Federal legislation intended to shorten porn's internet reach has been repeatedly knocked down on constitutional grounds. Billed as a tool to keep minors from being exposed to explicit sexuality, the failed Child Online Protection Act would've made it illegal for anyone to display or broadcast porn on a website that didn't require an access code or proof of age. Supreme Court justices thought the law overreached and that the same objective could be accomplished by good parenting and web filters. The ACLU argued that the law would be useless anyhow. It didn't have the authority to regulate the content of foreign-based websites. So eleven years after President Clinton championed it and President Bush attempted to resurrect it, the law has never been enforced. In January it died when the Supreme Court refused to hear further appeals.
Eberstadt, for one, is not hopeful that Obama will pick up the sword. Obama's deputy attorney general is David Ogden, a fellow Harvard Law School alum who has won censorship cases in favor of Big Porn and who unsuccessfully argued against the web filters required by law for computers in public schools and libraries.
Of the poison that Big Tobacco peddled unchecked to our kids, Obama said on Monday, "We've known about this for decades, but despite the best efforts and good progress made by so many leaders and advocates ... the tobacco industry and its special interest lobbying have generally won the day up on the Hill."
Finally, the Hill has fought back.
Heaven help us if it takes as long to defeat Big Porn.
Follow Greg Barrett on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Greg_Barrett
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The article I site below interviewed young boys who said they wished they could learn more about sexuality as well as porn, a cry for help distinguishing fantasy from reality. I included other good sources about it too.
Hilton, G. (2007). Listening to the boys again: an exploration of what boys want to learn in sex education classes and how they want to be taught. Sex Education 7(2), pp. 161-174.
Isaacs, C. & Fisher, W. (2008). A computer-based educational intervention to address potential negative effects of internet pornography. Communication Studies 59(1), pp. 1-18.
Kipnis, L. (1999). Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America. Durham: Duke University Press.
Marriott, E. (2003, November 8). "Men and Porn." Guardian. Retrieved March 10, 2009, from http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/nov/08/gender.weekend7/print
Norris, J. (1991). Effects on responses to sexually explicit material containing violence. The Journal of Sex Research 28(1), pp. 67-76.
Peter, J. & Valkenburg, P. (2006). Adolescents' exposure to sexually explicit online material and recreational attitudes toward sex. Journal of Communication 56, pp. 639-660.
http://www.time.com/time/2004/sex/article/the_porn_factor_in_the_01_print.html
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/
Hall, A., & Bishop, M. (2007). Pop-porn: pornography in American culture. New York: Greenwood Publishing Group.
I agree with other comments, I think regulating porn on the internet could be impossible. Also, porn is everywhere, not just the internet. The internet is not the center of the porn problem, rather it is our culture.
HOWEVER I've done a ton of research on the implications of porn use, and it can be really really bad for a person. But the one thing that struck me was that porn is not automatically horrible, it's when the person cannot distinguish the fantasy of porn with the reality of life. That is why sex ed is so important, especially when porn is so ubiquitous. Kids need to have a healthy perspective on their sexuality, and they need to respect their partners.
Yet porn tends to promote a harmful sexual perspective alone. A lot of porn is made for men, thus catering to perceived male desires. This leads to the stereotypical porn plot line where women sleep with guys at the drop of a hat. Porn that features violence towards women creates this unsafe crossing of sexual desire with violence, and it can lead to a person believing that women really want it, even when the man is brutalizing her. Research on sexual offenders found that they held incredibly unhealthy perceptions of women that were usually fueled by porn. BUT all of them also lacked healthy sexual education. These offenders were unable to counter balance the messages from porn with a healthy understanding of reality.
Arguments about legally restricting internet porn are moot because it isn't possible. The internet has involved the world in an unprecedented social experiment in which children routinely have access to images of people having sex.
IMO, children should not use the internet unsupervised. Parents might consider the internet to be like a relative who has dirty magazines lying around the house. You can choose to keep the kids away from that house, or you can talk to the kids in an age-appropriate manner, or you can watch the kids while they visit and make sure they don't look at the porn.
Sigh. I would just like to point out one small fact. IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE PARENTS TO KEEP PORN AWAY FROM KIDS!. Geez, could we stop begging Uncle Sam to protect us from everything? I mean, hasn't he raped us enough? If parents would choose to be parents instead of letting the schools and government do it for them kids wouldn't go looking for this stuff.
To Recless - You were raped by Uncle Sam? Sigh.... I guess Sammy's parents didn't teach him/them delayed gratification and mutual respect growing up. In fact, speak to anyone who has ACTUALLY been raped. Your use of the word "rape" here is sadly self-indulgent, and an excellent example of the ambivalence Greg refers to in his article.
Have you read Greg's book, "The Gospel of Father Joe"? It's about adults choosing to be advocates for children - all children - in any way we can. It's actually good for us. Imagine that?
Just as Corporate Dictatorships (including mega-churches) have become our slave masters, so the porn industry is too. Parents don't single-handedly influence our children no matter how responsible they/we are. Many kids are on their computers because it's not safe to go out and play anymore. Pedophiles are hired in leadership positions for kids' activity programs, and they're gaining more and more courage and arrogance "because they can". We are allowing it.
There's no reason on earth why American citizens can't use some common sense and participate in keeping the well-being of children at the forefront of our consciousness.
Oh wait! We don't want that responsibility, do we? Well, then I guess either the porn industry will become another new Master or our legislators will have to step in and set some boundaries.
Great blog Greg. I had to laugh when I read the comment that you're "embarrassing yourself". LOL.... That's exactly the kind of peer pressure kids get, but at least their peers are KIDS who may not know better.
I'm really disappointed that the majority of the commenters in this blog seem to believe that every money-mongering slime ball has the right to peddle their goodies, and that children don't have the right to grow without having those goodies in their face!
I actually believe that the current porn situation is WORSE than tobacco! Think about it - it's much easier to access, there's no smoke as a telltale sign to give adults the heads up, and the body has a natural initial repulsion to the smoke (coughing).
Do you know how many people in this country don't even have a clue what sexual intimacy is? The porn industry has become the first line of "education", and children are not developmentally able to understand all the complexities of those physical sensations. Easily accessible porn steals opportunities from our children, teens, and even adults who have never experienced intimacy before getting hooked on porn.
And since when is a little pro-active regulation by government something to be feared across the board? Deregulation of the lending industry flattened this country's economy and guess what? Those who haven't been crushed by it seem to be those who practice all those nasty, boring, uncool habits like delayed gratification and moderation. Go figure, huh?
Porn is the depiction of, in most states, legal acts. Violence is often the depiction of illegal acts. Why is one accepted and the other not?
Yep.
Very well put,... I have often wondered exactly this thought,... without the extreme brevity and wit of your post.
Porn is education. A lot of religionists hate the idea of life, preferring to concentrate on afterlives variously pleasant, painful, or airy. The Roman Catholics among us advocate abstinance only education--birth control is sinful, sex is sinful, sex is unthinkable! We've seen how that works with priests, with pregnant teenagers, and with all the falling away Catholics.
Porn is not tobacco. It may become addictive, but it's so widely available now that it's underground cache is lost and most people limit their encounters with it quite nicely. Yes, porn can be nice. Youngsters who are not given adequate sex education can receive valuable images to guide their enjoyment. Oldsters learn a thing or two as well that may be applied in the privacy of their bedrooms.
Just because beer, porn, tobacco, or other substances can be misused does not mean they can't be used responsibly. Tobacco is perhaps the exception. It's more addictive than heroin, and less satisfying. No, these old tired ethics that confident but naive people trot out against porn are useless except to set up an arbitrary entity like that board that tells us which movies are clean and which aren't.
There are healthy uses for porn, unlike tobacco. Well, I guess you can use tobacco as a pesticide, but for humans, no.
The 'harm' that seeing porn does anyone, adult or minor, is entirely speculative. It's been widely asserted but never demonstrated. This week the chinese government claimed that watching porn makes people lose their memory. These days in the west the claims of anti-porn crusades differ in sophistication from this, but not in kind.
I was exposed to porn at a young age and while I'm not sure it was harmful, per se, I can certainly say it wasn't healthy. I didn't have the critical thinking skills yet to be able to separate what I saw from "real life" and I made the assumption that people were all involved in this behavior, some of which was pretty raunchy. I knew where babies came from, and I was afraid that my parents had done this stuff too and was grossed out.
I also don't think that "big porn" can be likened to big tobacco since there's TONS of amateur porn all over the net--it would be like if everyone were producing and distributing cigarettes. I do agree though that we need to be very careful about what children see and that parents should teach their children about responsible sexual behavior at an appropriate age.
All of this said, I think that non-exploitive porn should indeed be allowed and that I probably learned a few useful techniques from watching it. Let's let our children be children though and let them watch it when they're older.
the softcore porn mixed with hardcore violence genre peddlers are the ones that should be looked at first. See friday the 13th, my bloody valentine, BTK, the list goes on and on.
Shouldnt we be more concerned about kids getting hardons while watching naked women being brutally slaughtered?
What about violent rap music?
there's many more areas to explore that directly affect our childrens mind than the porn movie.
"Shouldnt we be more concerned about kids getting hardons while watching naked women being brutally slaughtered?"
We should be concerned about kids watching ANYONE getting brutally slaughtered. We have one of the most violent societies in the world, and the rampant violence in most all types of "entertainment" is a far greater threat, IMO, than seeing naked people having consensual sex (i.e., "normal" porn).
This is scary. People say conservatives are paranoid when we question nationalizing health care, and worry about restrictions on tobacco, and the coming regulation of salty or fatty foods, under the idea that it is about controlling health care costs. Now, here is somebody comparing porn to tobacco, implying that just as tobacco was something that needed to be regulated for kids health, so does porn.
Very scary stuff. This kind of argument is why so many of us do NOT trust the government.
Consider how porn prohibition would just make it that much more lucrative and tempting...but let's not do that We can't advertise porn on tv or on the radio or in movie previews or in print--unless the publication is already "adult oriented." And porn is big business. So obviously there is a market for it that transcends advertising, and obviously many many people enjoy it. These "recreational documentaries" are relatively harmless in many ways. Certainly more so than showing our children the Saw movies. And maybe there wouldn't be so much porn if we could be honest about sexuality in the mainstream.
Greg, you're embarrassing yourself.
Not all of us have your same puritanical hang ups about having sex or watching video recordings of other people having sex. Most of us understand that sex is normal and natural, and that pornography is entertainment. We don't confuse pornography for normal sex any more than we would consider Fox News to be an unbiased information source.
If you don't like pornography, don't watch it. If you have kids, talk openly and honestly to them about your feelings on pornography, then let them make their own decisions when they reach the appropriate age. But don't try to force your sexually repressed views on the rest of us through lobbying and legislation. That's an attitude we should have left behind after the Reagan era.
See Greg Barrett's Profile
After twenty years of critics saying I'm either a "bleeding heart liberal" or a "damn liberal" I'm now sexually repressed and/or a conservative and/or a Repubbie.
Finally. Without yin we don't see the yang. I'm glad the criticismhas belatedly found balance.
However, a closer reading will reveal I've no interest in taking away anyone's toys. It's not about you. The point is that even if we are diligent in talking to kids and in applying web filters to laptops, Xboxs, PSPs, it's pointless; 10, 12, 14 year old kids will discover sex as defined by the internet. That's not a judgment. Just a fact. Searched lately for Hummer or Golden or Shower? In other words, sex as viewed by pubescent kids will predominantly be a thing of cheap recreation, void of the sacred, intimate. But this fact doesn't mean we have to make it easy for them to find (y)our smut again and again.
I've partaken on both sides (e.g., pp. 128-129 of my book) and understand the pull of recreational sex and intimacy. But where one feeds the ego (self) by focusing only on the physical, the other fosters something deeper. Lampoon that all you want, but some great philosophers/teachers/texts agree, e.g., Tolle, Siddhartha, Dalai Lama, Gandhi, Jesus, the Torah, Book of Proverbs, A Course in Miracles, etc.
If that makes me a sexually repressed conservative Repubbie Whatever, I'm cool with it. I'm in good company. Thanks for the comments.
"Searched lately for Hummer or Golden or Shower? In other words, sex as viewed by pubescent kids will predominantly be a thing of cheap recreation, void of the sacred, intimate."
Easy enough to solve. Just show them some wholesome uplifting porn of married couples deeply in love who have personal relationships with Jesus Christ.
"However, a closer reading will reveal I've no interest in taking away anyone's toys."
So, when I see the word "legislation" over and over again, I'm to take away what from that exactly?
"The point is that even if we are diligent in talking to kids and in applying web filters to laptops, Xboxs, PSPs, it's pointless; 10, 12, 14 year old kids will discover sex as defined by the internet."
So, even though it won't work, you want legislation allowing the govt. the right to regulate information on the internet?
That sounds like a horrific precedent to set for something that is "pointless."
There are three problems with your statement, though:
One, parents, even now, are often hesitant to discuss sex with their kids, who then go and find out about it in the old fashioned way, from their friends, with all the misinformation that carries with it.
Or the religious community teaches kids that basically anything to do with the human body is sinful and dirty. Yeah, that's healthy, right? That is often times buttressed by wacko parents who resort to insane scare tactics in hoping to get their kids to refrain from adolescent intercourse.
Two, there is nothing sacred about sex. It can be both an intimate communication tool and a recreational sharing of mutual pleasure. You don't have to overthink everything and make it a kind of neo-religious rite. Just relax and live in the moment, okay?
Three, people are generally smart enough to know that what porn represents is a cartoon version of sex and use it merely for a tool for a quick shoot and go or to relax. Folks also generally don't view images that go against their sensibilities. So we don't need third parties sitting next to us tut tutting what is just stupid fun. We can run our own lives and you should stick to running yours.
Greg, I thank you for your polite reply but I must reiterate my point: leave legislation out of this.
You may see children discovering sex via the internet or other technologies as a foregone conclusion. I agree. But I part ways with you when you immediately view that as a Bad Thing. Even in your characterization of "the pull of recreational sex" you make an implicit judgment that sex for recreation is somehow inherently inferior or less fulfilling than intimacy. That may be the case for you, but that is still your subjective opinion. Even if you think the majority agrees with you, it is still not a universal truth. There are plenty who do not take that view and should not be subjected to legal restrictions that will, in all reality, not even work. If anything we need better sexual education, not electronic censorship, so that more people will develop healthy attitudes about their own sexuality. Having access to more information also leads to greater versatility in the bedroom, increasing the chances that you'll physically satisfy your partner. (All other facets of compatibility in a relationship aside.)
And for the record, citing religious and spiritual leaders/texts is an appeal to authority that holds no water for life-long atheists like me. :)
Great chatting with you. Be well.
What has Jesus - let alone Gandhi or the Buddha - ever had to say about porn?
Ah, but Tolle teaches that the ego and the self are not the same, and it is identity with the ego that in turn more/less tortures our true "self." You're right though that kids don't have the ability to separate them and that such images will certainly strengthen the ego which in turn hurts the self. I think the argument about porn should also be looked at through a deeper lens: Why do we want to watch it in the first place? It's due to the absurd attitude toward sexuality perpetrated primarily by the world's major religions, especially the Big 3 from the west. We're not all consumed with watching images of people walking or doing other physical activities that are natural to humans. The scope of damage is so great that I believe it cannot be undone, at least for many many generations.
This article should be posted at RedState. Repubbies LOVE passing laws controlling other people's sexual behavior.
When was Fanny Hill written again? Although I'd recommend the Pearl and My Secret Life, both good examples of Victorian Age po.rn.
First time with po.rn was in a college class? Definite blue.nose improvement from the days of my youth when all we had were 16 mm stag films. Either that or you led an extremely sheltered life.
Yo! Mr. Barrett. Repress your own sexuality. Leave me out of it.
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