I’m impressed with the evidence and the citations that FightTheNewDrug.org provides in their exposé of pornography. In this section, called Porn’s Dirty Little Secret, they document the connection between pornography and violence and sex trafficking. It’s an uphill battle because, perversely, a large section of the feminist movement itself sees porn as empowering for women. This is another example of how feminists in America risk taking their own privilege for granted. Porn might be a choice for a woman who is in a position of power because of her race, class, and age but that’s an exceptional case. Not the rule.
I think some of the most persuasive arguments from the site are those that explicitly try to take down the myth that there’s good porn and bad porn by showing how blurry the line between violent aggression and corporate porn can be.
Part of the lie porn producers want customers to buy into is that porn is legitimate entertainment made by glamorous people who are doing it because it’s what they want; it’s OK for the user to enjoy it because the people they’re watching seem to be enjoying it. What they don’t say is that some of those people look like they’re having a good time because behind the scenes they have a gun pointed at their head. And if they stop smiling, it will go off.
Obviously, human trafficking is an underground business, making firm statistics hard to come by. But the facts in cases that come to light are chilling. For example, in 2011, two Miami men were found guilty of spending five years luring women into a human trafficking trap. They would advertise modeling roles, then when women came to try out, they would drug them, kidnap them, rape them, videotape the violence, and sell it to pornography stores and businesses across the country.
That same year a couple in Missouri was charged with forcing a mentally handicapped girl to produce porn for them by beating, whipping, suffocating, electrocuting, drowning, mutilating, and choking her until she agreed. One of the photos they forced her to make ended up on the front cover of a porn publication owned by Hustler Magazine Group.
I haven’t even finished reading everything, but the information is solid, the arguments are good, and even the presentation is really powerful. (You can download sections of the website as nicely formatted .pdf’s, for example.)
I know it’s a ridiculously uphill battle, especially in the geek culture that I’m a part of, and that’s why I’m happy to see such a great new resource.
You mentioned something once about how studies of porn’s effect on people isn’t even allowed in the US anymore because of the detrimental effects. Or something like that. What was it?
I did a lot of research into this several years ago and even dug up the study in question that had (as memory serves) resulted in the ban of controlled experimental testing using porn in the US. I believe that study, and the ban, dated to the late 1970s or early 1980s. I will look again and see what I can find. Now that I use Evernote obsessively, I’m much better at holding on to articles and documents that I find.
In the meantime, however, I did just a brief 5-minutes of Google (all I have time for now) and came up with an article from the BBC that hints at this problem:
“88% contained physical violence … 49% contained verbal aggression”
That rate sounds lower than the rate for R-rated movies, and much lower than the rate for realistic video games. You’d need to show that seeing violence causes violence before you can show that a sub-category does. It’s my understanding that the results are at best mixed on that issue. Many small-scale studies have shown a correlation, but crime rates are down nationwide as violent media has increased. So I’m not convinced.
The fact that rates of sexual violence have decreased as porn consumption has exploded also contradicts that assertion that porn violence causes real violence.
http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvsv9410.pdf
Other studies I’ve seen indicate rates of reporting rape to police have not changed significantly over that interval.
The fact that pornography often uses illegal or forced labor doesn’t mean we should ban porn any more than claiming we should ban tomatoes because most tomatoes are picked by illegal workers held in substandard conditions. The same can be said if diamonds and iPhones. Start enforcing existing labor laws before proposing new, more restrictive ones.
Unfortunately, I can’t visit FightTheNewDrug.org to address anything else because that domain is filtered as pornographic by my workplace. (Ha!)
Ryan-
Sort of like how you’d need to first prove that a drug has some effect on all people before you could then prove that it has an effect on specific people, right? No, of course not. This idea is absurd. There’s no rule of scientific experimentation or logic or any other kind that says you have to prove the general case before you prove a specific case.
It is such an egregiously irrational proposition that it makes me wonder what would posses you to advance it.
No, it doesn’t. There can be a lot of confounding factors when you’re looking for uncontrolled, non-experimental, observational data. Contrast that with an actual controlled experiment (which I cited in the post previous to yours) and tell me honestly: if the topic was anything but porn which would you find more compelling? Observational study? Or controlled experiment?
Who said anything about banning anything?
On the other hand, people do consider their relationship to products very differently when they realize where those products come from.
In any case, there’s a pretty huge ethical difference between food that is picked without the same standards that we’re used to in the United States and commercial publications deriving their works from sexual assault and human trafficking, don’t you think?
I think it’s useful to divide up the violence and labor parts of this discussion:
Violence:
“Sort of like how you’d need to first prove that a drug has some effect on all people before you could then prove that it has an effect on specific people, right?”
I agree I worded my original statement poorly. What I meant was in the opposite direction: You have to show ANY drug can affect people in a given way before you can show a specific drug affects people in a given way. In this case, you have to show any media can cause violence before you can show porn media causes violence. While this has been shown in the petri dish of controlled experiments, there are clearly confounding macro factors when the whole of society is considered, since rape rates and crime rates continue to fall.
“There can be a lot of confounding factors when you’re looking for uncontrolled, non-experimental, observational data.”
Yes, and those factors exist and affect real people. We don’t live in a controlled experiment. The results of a controlled experiment are interesting, but when they don’t match what we see in the real world, the results just leave us with questions.
There are plenty of drugs that work in petri dishes that don’t work in people. We can ask why those drugs don’t work in vivo, but we can’t say “this drug works” and call it that, when the drug doesn’t work where it matters.
So the questions are:
Does porn violence cause real violence in controlled conditions? Probably yes.
Does porn violence increase real violence in macro conditions? Clearly no.
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Labor:
“there’s a pretty huge ethical difference between food that is picked without the same standards that we’re used to in the United States and commercial publications deriving their works from sexual assault and human trafficking”
From a practical perspective, not really. The magnitude of the effect of shoddy labor practices is greater because it affects far more people to a smaller degree. I of course support the enforcement of existing laws in both cases. I’m saying I’d support paying for 100 more farm labor enforcement officers before I’d support 100 more officers looking for the BTK killer. I can see how people could disagree on that question.
And I was talking about food picked in the US. Undocumented labor in tomato picking is pretty normal in the US. It simplifies this discussion to keep it in the US.
“On the other hand, people do consider their relationship to products very differently when they realize where those products come from.”
That’s why the mainstream porn industry has so many self-imposed rules, verifying ages, etc. It appears the horror stories in the article’s site are bad apples. I saw no evidence of systemic problems. Porn industry jobs seem like crummy jobs overall, but that’s hardly unique to that industry.
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It’s not clear to me what you, or the site’s authors’, goal is here. You say you don’t want to ban porn. Do you want to enforce existing labor laws more vigorously? Do you want to convince people not to use porn and eliminate the demand side? All I’m hearing is PORN BAD. Propose real-world solutions.
That’s not actually the right conclusion to draw. The controlled experiment suggests a causal link. (That’s what controls are for.) The confounding factors in an observational study do not mitigate against the causal results of a controlled experiment. They mask them.
If you find that x causes y in the lab, but no evidence that x causes y in the real world, the logical conclusion is not that the causation somehow ceases to exist in the real world. It’s that the causation is swamped by other factors. The effect exists, it’s just not separable from the other factors that also exist.
That may be an argument that the effect is too small to be worth noting–and maybe that’s your angle–but even that is premature. Given that the well-known effects of porn are sexual dysfunction and relationship problems and that the Japanese are notorious porn users, should we be alarmed that apparently young Japanese have basically stopped having sex? Well, look: obviously that’s a media report and it’s sensationalized. “Alarmed” is a strong word. But “concerned” probably is not.
When we’re dealing with something as foundational to the species as procreation, I think it’s worth while to be cautious.
We know there are significant personal effects of porn use (although not everyone who watches porn suffers them, just as not everyone who smokes get lung cancer). We know that some do not appear on the macro level easily, others apparently do. To me: this is something worth taking seriously and studying more.
Even if the effects of porn on violence are too small to matter sociologically, to me they would be concerning on a private, moral level. For the sake of argument let’s say that exposure to porn does make people more violent, but that the incremental effect is too small to move people all the way from “law abiding” to “abusive” in and of itself. So it doesn’t show up at the macro level. But it’s still there, at the micro level, making someone who watches porn more violent. Maybe it manifests itself only in shorter temper. Less kind words. Less empathy. Maybe it’s not detectable at all, but–speaking for myself–if I knew there was something in my life that was making me a more violent person (even if I knew it probably wouldn’t make me physically attack someone), I would be concerned. Woudln’t you?
I’d like adults to watch less porn of their own volition. I’d like to watch less hardcore pron when they do watch porn. I’d like fewer kids to be exposed to it.
Part of this involves informing adults that it can be dangerous. Part of this involves undercutting the extent to which porn is considered socially acceptable. Smoking only stopped being as prevalent when it stopped being cool, which was a consequence of the findings that it was dangerous but also of the perception that the tobacco industry had lied and covered it up.
That’s the demand side of the equation.
On the supply side, there is definitely a lot of work that can be done to fight trafficking and enforce existing laws, but I don’t know as much about that as I do about porn. (And I’m not saying I’m an expert there, but I’ve read a book or two and I keep up on articles, so I have some idea of what is going on.)