One practical example of just how dangerous the “protection-from-objectification” argument is:
In Canada, the Butler Decision effectively outlawed pornograsphy that was “degrading.” This decision was made on the grounds that had been sufficiently proven that pornography leads to the objectification of women, and from there to violence against women, and so it was necessary to stop the flow of porn depicting people in “degrading acts” into the country.
This gave Canada Customs a powerful new tool. It could choose what books and magazines depicted “degrading acts,” and keep them from getting in.
One of the forms of “degrading sexual acts” chosen by Canada Customs was “anal sex.” Pretty soon, whole shipments headed for gay bookstores – not just of porn, but of literature – stopped crossing the border.
It took a protracted court battle by Little Sister’s Bookstore just to proove that Canada Customs was singling out the bookstores, but they were never able to overturn the agency’s new power.
One concrete example of just how slippery a slope this kind of censorship.
Our civilization seems to have developed a censorship impulse – if it offends, is bad publicity, or could, in some unspecified and unprovable away become a danger to society, it is banned. We should use this power, if it all, with the greatest of care, but instead it seems to be the default decision.
If it is definitively and demonstrably harmful to whom? Developing children, or adults? The latter would require a much higher standard of evidence than the former, since as a society we generally give adults to right to harm themselves as much as they like. This is not a right extended to children. Children are forbidden from doing all sorts of things, including things that are not definitively and demonstrably harmful. This is because society places greater weight on protecting children from potential harm than it does on giving children the freedom to do whatever they want. Perhaps you disagree with this, but if so that is really another debate.
Oh, and if you are looking for a controlled experiment that proves the harmful effects of pornography, you’re going to be disappointed. Such an experiment would be unethical (if not practically impossible) to perform. That is why there is no hard data available on the subject. There are, however, plenty of studies that indicate a correlation between pornography and sexual dissatisfaction, inability to maintain a stable romantic relationship, poor body image, etc.
Rape is not “sex in a less-than-ideal situation”, it is a violent crime. While some survivors of rape or other sexual assault may hesitate to report the crime simply because they are ashamed of sex, this has never been the case with anyone I have ever met or even heard of. As best as I can tell, the most common reason survivors have for not reporting the crime is fear of retaliation.
And yeah, there have been some porn where the woman looks desperate or scared. But that’s like saying all cinema should be banned because Adam Sandler got to make Big Daddy. There are already laws in place preventing people from doing things against their will, and just about every working adult has a story of being required to do a job they don’t want to, for whatever reason – what does pornography have to do with any of it?
:rolleyes:
And finally, the whole “protect children from harmful influences” thing is so much bullstuff. I think religion is much more harmful to children than pornography is, especially in this day of radical religious fundamentalism and terrorist attacks based on radical interpretations of theology. Yet, I don’t see anyone on Capitol Hill pushing for a bill to ban religion from the internet. Do you?
Hey, burgers and chips (french fries?) are just as good as gourmet food. I think it all depends on opinion. Personally, the place i work at makes killer burgers.
Hmmm, they all have precisely the same look in their eyes that every woman who has had sex with me had.
Seriously, Enuma, as it appears you have considerably more experience with pornography than I have, I will take your word that the women don’t look happy. AndI gotta tell ya, your ability to read the expressions of others is amazing. Me, I could probably get “sad” or “pissed off,” but you are able to read “small, powerless, worthless, and at the mercy of others” from a two-dimensional photo on your computer screen. Eerie, I tells ya. I mean, you couldn’t possibly being projecting, could ya?
And, of course, we do have llamasex’s point that you have to determine whether or not the feelings you read in these women’s eyes is caused by conditions unique to the pornography industry, or more widely spread in the workforce.
You may be right, you may be wrong. What you do need is more evidence.
I don’t want to offend anyone, but why should we be considering the woman’s feelings? It was her choice to do it, no one is forcing her too. That’s why child pornography is harmful, because they force people into it. Adult porn is all voluntary.
It comes from something called experience; I am a parent of two young children and I believe that I can judge fairly accurately the kind of things that they might find disturbing. I think that explicit footage of penetration and fellatio could well be upsetting to a young child who isn’t even ready to understand the full details of even the biological aspects of sex and reproduction.
There’s nothing wrong with nakedness.
Whoah there! I’m trying to impose my ideas on you? and you deduced this after knowing me for how long?
“Limiting children’s access to porn” is simply a red herring thrown out by legislators following their own agendas. No one - even pornographers - could possibly take up the public position that children should have access to porn. What follows is precisely what CriticalCat has already explained - it’s much easier to shut down internet sites than it is to implement the necessary controls to bar minor access.
Those who favor this type of legislation - and who are backed by the fundamentalist/religious lobby in the US, are hoping to get their foot in the door by appealing to the public’s concern for child welfare. Once in the door, the measures required by whatever law is crafted will result in the shutdown of sites which are frequented by adults.
This is what seperates the restrictions placed on minors in terms of driving, voting, alcohol consumption, etc. These restrictions do not affect the rights of adults; censorship of any kind, for any reason, does.
As Hamish has alluded, the Butler decision in Canada almost destroyed at a stroke the right of adults to make their own decisions, and it was done in the broadest possible terms. By rating adult materials by the vague standard of “degradation”, a legal analysis with no clearly defined parameters was created. Morality, no matter how broadly supported, does not lend itself well to legislative clarity.
Ironically, it took a case concerning a similar publically-hated evil - child pornography - to help rebalance the right of adults to make their own choices, no matter how offensive these choices may be to “community standards” or whatever other measure you care to use.
The type of harm done to children who view porn is no different than the harm done to children by playing endless violent video games or watching banal TV/consumer programs: the harm results from the absence of effective parental supervision in explaining, limiting and/or restricting access to such meida.
I would thank the government for letting me parent my children without their assistance.
I believe you but cite please. I’m a little curious if the pornography is the cause of this or if it’s the other way around. For example if a person suffers from sexual dissatisfaction, crappy relationships and poor body image it would seem conceivable that they seek out pornography as an escape fantasy, in which case the viewing of pornography becomes the dependent variable and not the cause.
They may be considered sufficient reason to censor what children are allowed to see.
I honestly do not see why you all seem so convinced that legislation that prevents children from accessing porn will inevitably lead to the complete censorship of all pornographic materials. This is not exactly the first law designed to prevent minors from obtaining porn. The kiddies aren’t allowed to buy Playboy at the newsstand. They aren’t allowed to go into sex shops or Big Bob’s All-Nite Nudie Movie House. This has never prevented adults from doing so. Why should it surprise anyone that people wish to make laws that will keep kids away from porn websites? Why should it make anyone worry that adults won’t be able to have all the porn they want? The whole thing seems ridiculously paranoid to me.
I’m afraid I can’t give you a cite proving causation. I very much doubt that such a cite could ever exist, as the sort of experiment required to prove causation rather than correlation could not be ethically conducted.
Why not? All you would have to do is set up interviews or give anonymous surveys to a group of people who frequent pornographic stores and ask them about
A) Their sexual and relationship histories.
B) When they started perusing pornography.
I realize the questions would be more complicated than that and one research project wouldn’t solve the question beyond a doubt, but as long as you (the researcher) are upfront with the respondents about the goal of the research, and you keep the respondents’ identities anonymous than there’s nothing unethical about it.
I don’t even need a cite for causation, I’d just like to see a few of the “plenty of studies” that purport to establish such correlations.
No one is surprised that there are those who wish to pass laws ostensibly to ‘keep children away from porn.’ What I do find worrying is that such legislated morality is being sold under the guise of being solely for the benefit of children, while carrying no implications for the rest of adult society.
When a minor walks into an X-rated video store, or requests a magazine from behind the counter of the local Kwiki-Mart, the clerk has the means at his disposal to forbid this, either by the obvious youth of the child, or via ID. Thus, adults still have reasonably unfettered access.
In order to create such safeguards online, sites may be forced to require “adult verification.” This is usually done by credit card authorization. As any astute and unsupervised teen can tell you, swiping this info from the folks, or borrowing or hacking someone else’s password is (pardon the pun) child’s play.
And this is only sites which choose to go to the expense of implementing such safeguards. Many will simply choose to shut down - not because what they do is illegal, but because they may be dragged into the prosecutorial sphere by the access of children. Thus, these people have been forced by operation of statute to curtail their economic or free-speech pursuits for fear that someone else may cast the net of illegality over them. Not only are these adults unduly interfered with by misguided legislation, but the would-be patrons of the sites lose their access when the site shuts down.
I am not saying that not being able to get “all the porn you want” is in itself a bad thing, but having your right of access barred in this way is an express violation of the right of adults to make their own choices.
This is from the International Journal of Law and Psychiatry. Click here to read the entire study, which is fascinating, but here is an interesting part concerning a study done on porn in Japan.
Personally, my friends and I had numerous exposures to pornography of all levels as kids, as young as maybe 10 years old. Nobody became a rapist or sexual deviant. I’ve never been promiscuous or had what I would consider to be meaningless sex. I think that is probably the case with 99% of people. The problem is that we are so puritanical in the U.S. when it comes to sex. Europe and the rest of the world learned a long time ago that sex is not bad, violence is. However, we can be a little slow to learn here.
Studies of this nature have already been conducted. The problem is, the retrospective study is the least reliable of all forms of scientific data collection. This is due primarily to the lack of a control group and the effect of recall bias on the data.
Studies like this can tell us a lot about correlation, but not much about causation. Even if it turned out that everyone who was exposed to porn from a young age ended up having serious relationship problems in adulthood, we could not be certain that the porn caused the problems. Perhaps seeking out porn at a young age was simply an early sign of social deviancy. Perhaps the kind of parents who don’t keep their children away from porn do a shoddy job of raising their kids in other ways, so the kids end up unable to maintain stable relationships later in life.
In order to produce the sort of solid evidence of causality that some people seem to want, it would be necessary to conduct a controlled experiment. That is, a group of children would have to be reared on a steady diet of porn, and then compared with an otherwise identical control group that never saw porn at all. I am sure you can see why such an experiment will never take place.
I believe the best known studies on this subject are those conducted by Drs. Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant. Their most relevant article here would probably be their “Pornography’s Impact on Sexual Satisfaction”, which suggests that pornography may decrease satisfaction with real-life sexual relationships partners, but Zillman and Bryant have conducted many other studies on pornography.
Unfortunately I could not find a good link for their work (although Google turned up hundreds of sites that reference them), so I’m afraid that if you want to read their research for yourself you’ll have to dig up the relevant articles on your own. The University of Wisconsin has a helpful-looking pornography research guide.
I have also had Gary R. Brooks’s The Centerfold Syndrome recommended to me, but have not yet read it. It deals with the negative affects of pornography on men’s relationships with women.
All this is, of course, about the potential harm pornography may do to adults. Some people feel that there is sufficient evidence to warrant restricting adult access to porn, but the vast majorty do not. That pornography is potentially harmful to children and should be kept away from them is, however, almost universally accepted by all sides of the pornography issue.
Any astute and unsupervised teen could also tell you that it’s pretty easy to obtain a fake ID, or steal real ID belonging to an older person. Plenty of teens use this method to obtain porn, booze, and cigarettes. Shops where this sort of thing is a particular problem may be shut down – I remember this happening to the tobacco shop near my high school. And yet such problems have not caused all tobacco shops to be shut down, nor have they seriously impaired the ability of adults to purchase cigarettes. I am not going to believe that things would be any different for the online porn industry just because you say so.
It has suddenly occured to me that requiring all porn sites to implement child-protection safeguards would have an affect on adult Web surfers. It would mean no more porn pop-ups and no more porn spam. It would mean that I could run an innocent web search looking for information on women in feudal Japan, click on a link with a likely-looking title, and not suddenly end up having my screen fill with images of naked Asian women being tortured. It would mean, in short, that no one would be exposed to pornography unless they were an adult who specifically wanted to see pornography! Sounds pretty good to me.
An important point from the article linked to in the OP:
Some would argue medically accurate information about AIDS is harmful to minors. Should no adult, anywhere, be able to to get information from a web site without having to provide verifiable personal information, because some people in some communities believe that information is “harmful to minors”?
Unless the full text of the bill has a much more careful definition of what constitutes material which is “harmful to minors”, the act strikes me as clearly presenting an unacceptable burden on freedom of speech and the press.
Other way around, Lamia. A person is responsible for his or her own actions (subject to certain limitations you and I would both agree on, I’m sure) – but the point as I read it was that effective parenting will more nearly equip the person to more effectively deal with the possibly-negative events in his/her life in a healthy manner.
No excusal; simply a counsel to parents to do better, for their kids’ sake.
(I could be wrong, but that’s how I took it.)
BTW, has anyone raised the First Amendment question here yet? The idea that perhaps we have the freedom to make choices in what we view and don’t view, do and don’t do, and that imposing community standards as regards what constitutes bannable material is a violation of those rights – regardless of the content?
It’s amazing that some of the strongest sponsors of banning porn are also those who are strongest on the subject of individual responsibility for one’s acts.