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Table of Contents 6 34

The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography Robert W. Peters, Laura J. Lederer, and Shane Kelly

The Internet Pornography Pandemic “The Largest Unregulated Social Experiment in Human History” Donna Rice Hughes

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Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn

Pamela Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Terry Crews: Porn Addiction ‘Messed up my Life’ Brandon Griggs

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Commercial Sex & Human Bondage

Ellyn Arevalo­­

Pornography Addiction– A Supranormal Stimulus Considered In The Context Of Neuroplasticity

Donald L. Hilton Jr., MD

Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research

By Mary Anne Layden

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In the past decade, there has been an explosion of interest in human trafficking. Eliminating human trafficking has become a foreign and domestic policy goal for many countries, including the United States. Following the passage of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000 and the United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons, also in 2000, focus on the issue developed further. Human trafficking is now the topic of numerous articles, conferences, and studies, with many

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different aspects of trafficking being investigated. However, one aspect of human trafficking gets little attention—namely, the connection between pornography1 and trafficking (particularly sex trafficking).

This article argues that there are a number of links between pornography and sex trafficking and that curbing pornography can reduce sex trafficking. The first two sections describe the links between pornography and sex trafficking. The third section makes the case that legislators and prosecutors should give greater consideration to the relationship between pornography and sex trafficking as they determine budgetary and law enforcement priorities and as they make recommendations for how to address this link at the federal level.

Trafficking for the Purpose of Producing Pornography In 2000, the U.S. Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), “to combat trafficking in persons, a contemporary manifestation of slavery whose victims are predominantly women and children, to ensure just and effective punishment of traffickers, and to protect their victims.” The TVPA creates a framework to comprehensively address the problem of human trafficking through a threefold approach of prevention,

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

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obtaining of a person for the purpose of a

x . e t s ac prosecution, and protection. The TVPA does not provide a definition of trafficking in persons as such. Rather, it defines two types of what it calls “severe forms of trafficking in persons.”

The first severe form of trafficking in persons is “sex trafficking in which a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud, or coercion, or in which the person induced to perform such act has not attained 18 years of age.” In turn, sex trafficking is defined as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for the purpose of a commercial sex act.” A commercial sex act is “any sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.” Thus, a streamlined definition of the first severe form of human trafficking is the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person by force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of a sex act on account of which anything of value is given to or received by any person.

The other type of severe trafficking involves trafficking for the purpose of labor, defined as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labor or services, through the use of force, fraud, or coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or

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slavery.� A person who engages in either of the two severe forms of trafficking in persons, which are described generally as sex trafficking and labor trafficking, may face severe criminal penalties.

It is easy to see how participation in the production of pornography could satisfy the definition of either sex trafficking or labor trafficking. If a trafficking victim is forced to engage in a sex act that is filmed or photographed for sale as pornography, then the production of pornography itself becomes a severe form of trafficking in persons that is subject to criminal liability. The production of pornography could also involve labor trafficking in one of two ways. First, a trafficking victim could be coerced into aiding in

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Thus, thought alone indicates that there is more than one way for the production of pornography to involve trafficking in persons, and production of pornography that involves trafficking in persons is not purely theoretical. For example, in 1999, an American living in Cambodia, where he maintained a pornographic website, decided to incorporate into the site what he labeled a “Rape Camp” featuring “Asian sex slaves” used for “bondage, discipline, and humiliation.” Women on the website were “blindfolded, gagged, and/or bound with ropes while being used in sex acts,” and viewers were encouraged to “humiliate these Asian sex slaves to your hearts [sic] content.” Expanded service featured live interactive bondage sex shows from Cambodia with pay-per-view access in which customers could relay requests for torture that would be fulfilled within seconds. The website also “promoted prostitution tourism to men visiting Cambodia.”

The Cambodian Minister of Women’s Affairs called for the American “to be charged with violating a Cambodian law prohibiting sexual exploitation and trafficking of women.” He was arrested but “escaped prosecution through assistance from the U.S. embassy.” If this incident had occurred more recently, the perpetrator might have also been subject to criminal prosecution in the United States. As of 2008, the criminal provisions of the TVPA, including criminal liability for severe forms of trafficking in persons, apply extraterritorially.

The production of this type of pornography is not an isolated phenomenon, and similar businesses operate in the United States.

After joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1975, Special Agent Roger T. Young (now retired) worked on obscenity, child pornography, and prostitution cases for more than 23 years.

Now serving as a consultant to both law enforcement agencies and nonprofit organizations, he recounted the following case:

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography “While working as consultant and private investigator, I learned of a massive operation in the United States that involves Asian-appearing women who engage in sex acts for live streaming from a website over the Internet. Customers all over the world pay with a credit card to watch the sex acts in actual time. They can also communicate with and tell the participants what sex acts they want them to do. This operation also involves Asian-appearing females working as prostitutes in apartments in the United States. I am not sure if the women are transported here from … Asia—but they speak the language of the customers—or [whether] businessmen … fly into the United States for sex with them.”

It will often be difficult to determine conclusively whether businesses like those described by Special Agent Young do, in fact, involve trafficking in persons, but as journalist and author Victor Malarek warned in his book The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It, “[P]orn addicts may want to sit in the director’s chair themselves, but most will never have the opportunity.… What’s their solution? Webcams. A new breed of johns—cyberjohns … seeking out websites that let them create XXX from afar. They sit alone … and order up a woman.… They order the woman to perform sex acts, in real time.…

[A]s for the women in front of the cameras …, [m]any are from impoverished regions of the world.… So what is this phenomenon? …Without a doubt, it is an extension of prostitution. These men are paying to use women for their own sexual pleasure and perversion.

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The women may or may not be willing participants, but the preponderance of Eastern European and Asian women—typical targets of traffickers—should set off alarms.”

In other cases, trafficking in persons clearly has been involved. For example, on December 7, 2011, a federal jury in Miami convicted two defendants, Lavont Flanders Jr. and Emerson Callum, on charges of sex trafficking. A press release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida described that case as follows:

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“The charges spanned from 2006 through July of 2011. During that time, the defendants had perpetrated a cruel fraud to lure aspiring models to South Florida by promising them an opportunity to audition for modeling roles that, it would later turn out, never existed. Once the victims arrived in Miami, Flanders would instruct them to perform an audition for a purported alcoholic beverage commercial. During this purported audition, the victims were asked to promote and drink different brands of alcohol, while Flanders filmed. Unbeknownst to the victims, the alcoholic beverages Flanders provided them were laced with benzodiazepines, a common date rape drug. Once the drugs had taken effect, Flanders would drive the victims to Callum, who had sex with the victims while Flanders filmed. The defendants then edited, produced, and sold the footage of the sex acts over the Internet and to pornography stores and businesses all across the country.”

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography According to United States v. Marcus, the defendant, Marcus, engaged in a consensual sexual relationship involving bondage, dominance–discipline, submission–sadism, and masochism (BDSM) with a woman, Jodi. She acted as Marcus’ “slave” and was subject to various physical and sexual punishments. Jodi lived in an apartment with other women who also acted as Marcus’s slaves, and, at Marcus’s direction, she maintained a membership BDSM website called “Subspace” that chronicled their exploits. When Jodi refused to recruit her younger sister as a slave, Marcus inflicted severe physical punishment on her. She testified that she cried throughout the incident and that the relationship was not consensual after that time. Marcus then directed Jodi to move to New York and required her to create and maintain a new commercial BDSM website called “Slavespace.” Jodi worked on the site approximately eight to nine hours per day, updating site content, including diary entries and photographs, and clicking on banner advertisements to increase revenue. Marcus received all revenues from the website.

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Jodi said she did not want to continue working on the website, but was afraid of the consequences if she refused. Marcus sexually punished Jodi when he decided her work on the website was inadequate, and these punishments were documented and published on the website. Some punishments were quite severe. On one

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Marcus posted photographs from this incident on the Slavespace website and directed Jodi to write a diary entry about it for the website. When Jodi told Marcus she could not continue in this arrangement, he threatened to send pictures of Jodi to her family and the media. On the basis of these and similar occurrences, a jury found Marcus guilty of both sex trafficking and labor trafficking.

In United States v. Bagley et al., a case that is currently pending, the alleged victim was a young woman with a troubled childhood who suffered from mental deficiencies. She is referred to as “FV” in the indictment. The primary defendants, a husband and wife, took FV into their home when she was 16 years old, after she ran away from a foster home. The defendants allegedly began to sexually abuse and physically harm FV and forced her to dance at local strip clubs. They allegedly forced the victim to act as their property, and “Edward Bagley allegedly beat, whipped, flogged, suffocated, choked, electrocuted, caned, skewered, drowned, mutilated, hung and caged FV to coerce her to become a sex slave.” The defendants forced FV to sign a slave contract that she believed bound her to act as their slave, and they had her tattooed with a barcode and the Chinese character for “slave.”

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

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Multiple other defendants communicated with Bagley regarding his activities and allegedly participated in some of his videos and photo shoots. At one point, FV even “appeared on the cover of the July 2007 issue of Taboo, a publication owned by Hustler Magazine Group, and was the subject of a story and multipage photo spread inside.” Federal investigators became aware of these activities after “Bagley allegedly suffocated and electrocuted FV during a torture session to a state of cardiac arrest.… FV, who was 23 years old at that time, received emergency medical treatment and was hospitalized.” Four defendants are being prosecuted for these actions under the forced labor and sex trafficking provisions of the TVPA, along with other serious crimes, in connection with these events.

Another case, even more disturbing, has reportedly occurred elsewhere. In the Netherlands, a court found four people guilty of kidnapping asylum seekers and forcing them to take part in pornography. Three victims from North Africa were kidnapped by a small criminal gang and held in a shed, where they were forced to have sex with men and animals on tape. Luckily, one of the victims escaped and was able to alert police. The prosecutor claimed at trial that the three women would have been disfigured and murdered for a snuff film had they not escaped. The girlfriends of the primary defendants were also jailed for their involvement. This situation bears the classic marks of sex trafficking: an organized crime

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group kidnapped women from a vulnerable population, in this case immigrants from another country, and forced them to participate in sexual behavior. However, in this case, the goal was not the servicing of clients directly; it was the production of pornography.

Less extreme forms of coercion involving the production of pornography may occur with greater regularity. Often, women involved in the production of so-called mainstream hardcore pornography are pressured by their agents, directors, and fellow performers to engage in sexual activity that they do not want to participate in, such as anal sex. This pressure can cross into sexual assault, but in some circumstances it can also be a form of human trafficking.

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Thus, while trafficking for the purpose of the production of pornography is not a widely known or recognized form of trafficking, incidents of coerced participation in pornography are far from trivial. Forced participation as a performer can constitute sex trafficking, and participation in the logistical side may be a form of labor trafficking.

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

Pornography: Fueling the Demand for Women Trafficked into Prostitution Media news reports and commentary on sex trafficking typically include accounts or visual images of young women or girls forced to sexually service johns in a sordid environment, regardless of whether it is a seedy brothel or hotel room or a dangerous street corner or truck stop. It is these accounts and images that understandably provoke widespread public sympathy.

Typically, however, the reports and discussions do not include an inquiry into what is fueling the demand for prostitution and, thus, for women trafficked into prostitution (sex trafficking).

Once this inquiry is undertaken, the multifaceted relationship between pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking becomes clear. It has been said that prostitution and pornography are “symbiotically related” to sex trafficking and that the latter “would not exist without the former.” It has also been said that pornography is “advertising for prostitution,” that pornography “normalize[s] prostitution and commercial sexual

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exploitation,” that “pornography is prostitution for mass consumption,” and that many men “want to enact the fantasies, the transgressions and ultimately the degradation and violence of pornography with live women” and believe “the place to do this is in prostitution.” It has been noted that “pimps and traffickers use pornography to initiate their … victims into their new life of sexual slavery” so that they “get hardened to accept the inevitable and learn what is expected of them.

A growing body of evidence supports the preceding assertions.

New research provides evidence that johns show pornography to prostituted women to illustrated the sexual activity they want to participate in or observe.46 Other research demonstrates that pimps and traffickers use pornography to instruct and desensitize their victims.47 The frequency of pornography use has also been found to correlate with frequency of purchasing sex.

Mental health professionals have also observed a connection between pornography and prostitution. In her testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2004, Dr. Mary Anne Layden stated, “Pornography, by its very nature, is an equal opportunity toxin.…

The damage is both in the area of beliefs and behaviors. The belief damage may include Pornography Distortion [and] Permission-Giving Beliefs.… The behavioral damage includes … illegal behaviors….

Pornography Distortion is a set of beliefs based in pornographic imagery, sent to the viewer while they are aroused and reinforced by the orgasm. An example of Pornography Distortion would include beliefs such as ‘Sex is not about intimacy, procreation, or marriage.

Sex is about predatory self-gratification….’ Permission-Giving Beliefs are a set of beliefs that imply that my behavior is normal, acceptable, common and/or that my behavior doesn’t hurt anyone .… Examples would include ‘All men go to prostitutes,’ …. Those who use pornography have also been shown to be more likely to engage in illegal behavior as well. Research indicates, and my clinical experience supports, that those who use pornography are more likely to go to prostitutes.”

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

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bookstores In his monograph, Pornography’s Effects on Adults and Children, 50 Dr. Victor B. Cline, a clinical psychologist who treated many individuals with pornography addictions, writes, “The first change that happened was an addiction-effect. The pornconsumers got hooked. Once involved in pornographic materials, they kept coming back for more and still more…. The second phase was an escalation-effect. With the passage of time, the addicted person required rougher, more explicit, more deviant, and “kinky” kinds of sexual material to get their “highs” and “sexual turn-ons.” It was reminiscent of individuals afflicted with drug addictions.… The third phase was desensitization. Material … which was originally perceived as shocking, taboo-breaking, illegal, repulsive, or immoral, in time came to be seen as acceptable and commonplace.… The fourth phase was an increasing tendency to act out sexually the behaviors viewed in the pornography, including … frequenting massage parlors.”

In his book Don’t Call It Love, Dr. Patrick J. Carnes, a nationally known expert on sexual addiction and addiction therapy, writes, “A classic trait of addiction is that the addict will require more and more of the substance or activity in order to maintain the same level of emotional relief.… The experience of Steve illustrates this classic pattern: “When I left home and went into the Navy, what was a normal pattern of masturbation with soft-core pornography became escalated into a pattern of sex shops and bookstores where I could see hardcore pornography. I began to also use prostitutes.…” Steve … hoped marriage would be a solution to his problem. Within months, however, it became worse in terms of both pornography and prostitution.”

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Others have also reported that men who view pornography frequent prostitutes. In his book, Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It, journalist Victor Malarek writes, “ Volumes have been written for and against pornography. This is a book about johns. So what’s the connection?… Porn is often what turns the men on, revs up their sex drive, and sends them out into the night.… The Internet is rife with postings by johns admitting to their addiction to or love for porn…. For Bull Rider, “porn and mongering go together like peas and carrots. Many times … I start out watching porn, next thing I know I am in my car looking for the real thing.” A john called The Man says he only watches porn when he’s planning a paid encounter. “I watch the positions, find a girl who looks like one of the performers, and make porn the buildup to the planned party.” … [T]he johns’ interest isn’t lost on those hoping to sell services. Ads placed by “call girls” on Craigslist now tempt prospective johns with promises of the “PSE”—porn star experience. The message is clear: if prostitution is the main act, porn is the dress rehearsal.”

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In their study of 103 men in London, who describe their use of trafficked and non-trafficked women in prostitution and their awareness of coercion and violence, Melissa Farley, Julie Bindel, and Jacqueline M. Golding report,

“One man explained the impact of pornography on his sexual behavior, generally, “The more I’ve watched pornography, the more specific my wants have become. Watching pornography has also shaped my sexual desires. I watch pornography and I discover, ‘hey, that really turns me on’ and I want to recreate what I’ve seen in porn.”

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography In her article, “Pornography as Trafficking,” Catherine MacKinnon writes, “ [Pornography] stimulates the viewer to act out on other live women and girls and boys the specific acts that are sexualized and consumed in the pornography. Social science evidence, converging with testimonial evidence of real people, has long shown the latter. As observed

by T. S. in the hearings on the anti-pornography civil rights ordinance that Andrea Dworkin and I organized for the Minneapolis City Council at its request, “Men witness the abuse of women in pornography constantly, and if they can’t engage in that behavior with their wives, girlfriends, or children, they force a whore to do it.” On the basis of the experiences of a group of women survivors of prostitution and pornography, she told how … men would bring photographs of women in pornography being abused, say, in effect, “I want you to do this,” and demand that the acts being inflicted on the women in the materials be specifically duplicated.”

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Researchers also have found evidence that viewing pornography contributes to violence directed toward prostituted women. A study regarding the sexual abuse of prostituted women discovered that “ Out of … 193 cases of rape, 24% mentioned allusions to pornographic material on the part of the rapist. This is even more significant when it is understood that these comments were made by respondents without any solicitation or reference to the issue of pornography by the Interviewer. The comments followed the same pattern: the assailant referred to pornographic materials he had seen or read and then insisted that the victims not only enjoyed rape but also extreme violence.”

A study by FBI researchers of 36 serial killers “revealed that 29 were attracted to pornography and incorporated it into their sexual activity, which included serial rape-murder.”57 Anecdotal evidence reinforces these FBI findings. A retired lieutenant commander of the Bronx homicide squad in the New York Police Department summarized one case this way:

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“ This case involved a serial killer who was killing prostitutes.… The significance of fantasy in this case was graphically revealed when … detectives went to the killer’s home and retrieved a number of items, which included a pornographic videotape.… This videotape contained a number of scenes that were similar to what the offender was doing to his victims. The breast assault and paddling activities appeared to be based upon this sadomasochistic videotape, which seemingly fueled his increasingly sadistic activities.”

In an article, “Life on the Street: New Wave of Prostitution with More Violence Is Overwhelming Los Angeles Authorities,” Miles Corwin reports, “ In a small banquet room … about 30 madams and call girls gathered to discuss a significant change in their business.… [A] North Hollywood madam told the women that a number of customers had asked her to procure 12- or 13-year-old girls. And more customers, she said, were beating, torturing, and even killing out-call prostitutes.… This new wave of prostitution is overwhelming Los Angeles law enforcement agencies, officials say…. An increasing number of customers are requesting violent or kinky sexual services and seeking younger girls, prostitutes and call girl say.… The sexual revolution has contributed to the change prostitutes have seen, said Dr. Michael Grinberg, a psychiatrist, sex therapist and chairman for the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex…. There are several possible reasons for the change, Grinberg said. Our society is more violent now than in the past. Pornography is more graphic and readily available and some of the behavior displayed “can become incorporated in one’s sexual fantasies.”

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

Implications for Governmental Policy As can be seen in the first two sections, pornography, prostitution, and sex trafficking are not unrelated phenomena. Women are trafficked into the production of hardcore pornography, and hardcore pornography in particular may trigger and exacerbate sexual desires and pathologies that motivate men to seek out the services of prostituted women. This stimulation, in turn, contributes to the demand for women trafficked into prostitution.

As Victor Malarek put it, “Pornography fuels prostitution, and prostitution fuels the sex trade.”

But how, if at all, should the first two sections change our approach to combating human trafficking? Viewed from one perspective, more research into the relationship between addiction to pornography and “acting out” pornographyfueled sexual fantasies with prostituted women should not be needed. A substantial body of evidence already shows that many men act out with prostituted women. This evidence comes from (a) social science research, (b) professionals who treat individuals with sexual addictions, (c) professionals who work with prostituted women, (d) law enforcement personnel who investigate sexual crimes against prostituted women, and (e) johns and prostituted women themselves.

However, just as tobacco companies once denied any relationship between smoking and cancer, so pornography defenders deny any relationship between viewing, consumption of, or addiction to pornography and harm of any kind. More research would therefore be beneficial, not to convince the naysayers, but to inform and motivate public officials and everyday citizens who would take action if they better understood the seriousness and interrelatedness of the hardcore pornography, prostitution, and sex-trafficking problems.

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Conducting research should be easier today than it was in decades past because more effort is being expended to help prostituted women, instead of sending them to jail, and because more effort is being expended to arrest johns and send many of them to “john schools.� Both changes should make it easier to get information. As the book The Johns: Sex for Sale and the Men Who Buy It indicates, there is also a wealth of information about johns on the Internet.

We add here that defenders of pornography have often argued that pornography provides individuals prone to sexual violence or other aberrant sexual behavior with an outlet for their sexual desires. In other words, they argue that it has a cathartic effect on individuals who would otherwise engage in sexual misconduct of one kind or another. If this rationale were true, one would expect men who are regular consumers of pornography to be the least likely to frequent prostitutes. Research done to date indicates that the opposite is true, but more research, especially with statistically greater sample sizes, is important.

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Research could also be done to determine whether the effects of pornography addiction on marriage are contributing to the demand for prostituted women. Addiction to pornography is affecting marriage in a number of ways, including delaying and preventing marriages, decreasing marital intimacy and sexual satisfaction, and contributing to divorce. To the extent that addiction to pornography makes it more difficult for men to have a satisfying and lifelong sexual relationship with one person, men who are addicted to pornography could be more likely to frequent women trafficked into prostitution.

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

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Research could also be done to determine whether men who view, consume, or become addicted to particular types of hardcore pornography are more likely to pay for sex with trafficked women either because the type of prostitute they seek to gratify their pornography-fueled sexual desires is more likely to have been trafficked or because these men seek out trafficked women knowing that they can do whatever they want with or to these women.

For example, men can choose pornography—regardless of whether it is through magazines, videos, or websites—on the basis of the race, nationality, or ethnicity of women depicted in it. When some men develop an interest in a type of pornography featuring a particular race, nationality, or ethnicity, they may act out their fantasy by finding that type of prostitute. In particular, this behavior could be problematic if the desired type of woman is among those immigrant populations at high risk for trafficking, and even more problematic when Asian themes in pornography are added to the mix, because they emphasize a kind of subservience that trafficked women may more easily portray. In all likelihood, some traffickers are also using various promotional techniques to help create demand for women of a certain race, nationality, or ethnic origin because such women are more easily trafficked.

There may also be a relationship between consumption of or addiction to hardcore pornography that depicts the domination and abuse of women and paying to have sex with women trafficked into prostitution. Themes of domination and abuse could create or exacerbate the demand for women to act as sexual slaves who

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“enjoy” (submit to) physical and verbal abuse. It would be logical for sex traffickers to provide women for this purpose. As a consequence, slave images in pornography could increase the demand for actual sexual slaves.

Similarly, there may be a relationship between viewing (being addicted to) hardcore pornography that depicts rape or torture and either (a) paying to watch (via a webcam) a woman being raped or tortured by her traffickers or (b) paying to rape or sexually torture a woman trafficked into prostitution. Furthermore, because there is a tendency for viewers to become desensitized to whatever they view, some may seek even more graphic or abusive materials to create the same level of sexual stimulation. To create this more realistic or sadistic sexual violence, some producers could use trafficked women. It would be a mistake, however, to target only the most extreme forms of hardcore pornography under the assumption that this content is far more likely to generate demand for women trafficked into prostitution. Any type of pornography that contributes to (helps fuel) the demand for a particular type of prostitute is likely over time to attract the attention of traffickers, who can provide that type of prostitute.

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Thankfully, concerted government and private action against the proliferation of hardcore pornography on the Internet and elsewhere need not await the accumulation of additional research data and other evidence of the nexus between this material and

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The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography

prostitution and sex trafficking. Federal obscenity laws already exist, and they can and should be vigorously enforced against the proliferation of hardcore “adult� pornography.

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Such a long-overdue initiative against the proliferation of hardcore pornography could begin by targeting both the producers and distributors of adult pornography that possibly depicts performers who were trafficked into the production in cases where it would be difficult or nearly impossible to prove trafficking in court. Although in United States v. Marcus a jury convicted the defendant on trafficking charges but acquitted him on an obscenity count, there are a number of possible explanations for the acquittal, including a compromise verdict. That acquittal does not prevent a federal jury, even in New York City, from convicting on obscenity charges in a future case.

This initiative against hardcore pornography could also begin by targeting both the producers and distributors of particular types of adult pornography that may be more likely to fuel demand for women trafficked into prostitution. However, to the extent that viewing any type of hardcore pornography creates a demand for more of that type of material or for prostitutes with whom johns can act out what they have viewed in it, there is a risk that women will be trafficked into prostitution to meet the demand. A john does not have to be addicted to hardcore pornography that depicts domination and abuse, rape and torture, or other extreme sexual conduct to pay to have sex with a woman who was trafficked into prostitution.

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Therefore, when it comes to enforcement of federal and state obscenity laws, federal and state prosecutors and law enforcement agencies should vigorously enforce these laws not just against distributors of extreme forms of hardcore pornography but also against distributors of all hardcore pornography. The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly held that obscene material is unprotected by the First Amendment. More recently, constitutional challenges to the application of obscenity laws to the Internet have also been rejected by the federal courts.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Department of Justice (which includes the FBI and the 93 U.S. attorneys) has been unwilling to devote sufficient investigative and prosecutorial resources to the task of combating the proliferation of hardcore adult pornography. Since 1987, the primary responsibility for enforcing federal obscenit laws should have fallen on the shoulders of the department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS). During the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, CEOS did aggressively and successfully prosecute many commercial distributors of hardcore adult pornography.83 During the Clinton administration, however, the resources of CEOS became focused almost entirely on child pornography, and that narrow focus continues to this day. The Department of Justice fails to understand that there is evidence that the proliferation of “adult pornography” is contributing to sexual exploitation of children and to the increase of child pornography.

The administration of George W. Bush decided to increase enforcement of federal obscenity laws by creating the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005 and did successfully prosecute a few commercial obscenity purveyors—but only those purveyors of the most extreme genres of pornography. Thus, the effect on sexual trafficking was minimal.

of the most s r o y urve genres p of extreme pornography.

27

28

The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography Despite major efforts to get the Department of Justice to enforce federal obscenity laws, the Obama administration chose to disband the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, and since the 2008 presidential elections, there have been no new obscenity indictments targeting commercial distributors of hardcore adult pornography.This failure has been criticized by a diverse number of political actors, including U.S. senators who sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on April 4, 2011, to “urge the Department of Justice [to] vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws against major commercial distributors of hardcore adult pornography.” The Senators said, “We know more than ever how illegal adult obscenity contributes to… sex trafficking. This material harms individuals, families, and communities, and the problems are only getting worse.”

tf ake

The U.S. government could other steps

o r e b m u n ato counter the

effect

of pornography on

human trafficking.

Furthermore, as the Supreme Court has recognized, “there are legitimate state interests at stake in stemming the tide of commercialized obscenity.” Among those concerns is the link between pornography and human trafficking. The urgent need to stop sex trafficking requires that we use every available weapon at our disposal, including the enforcement of federal and state obscenity laws.

In addition to enforcing obscenity laws, the U.S. government could take a number of other steps to counter the effect of pornography on human trafficking.

What Love is Not...

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t menalso ecould c r o f n enlist e Law

towseek out o

cconsumers ases where

men are trafficked into

being

pornography.

One option is for the U.S. government to place advertisements in industry trade publications to promulgate warnings about trafficking to performers. Performers who are being trafficked could then become aware of assistance such as the U.S. trafficking hotline. The federal government already pays for advertisements creating awareness of the dangers of trafficking to vulnerable populations, and it would make sense to distribute similar advertisements in the pornography industry. This effort would allow trafficking victims to receive help and, potentially, to aid in prosecution of their traffickers.

Policy makers could also encourage pornography trade organizations to create greater awareness of the potential for people to be trafficked in the pornography industry. Although those organizations have functioned primarily as a source of opposition to government regulation of pornography, they may be open to partnering with the government to create awareness and to combat trafficking within the industry.

Additionally, as seen from the information discussed earlier, pornography can be a key stepping stone for those who are developing a sexual addiction. After becoming acclimated to pornography, addicts may move on to prostitution where women may be victims of trafficking. Greater education regarding this behavior spiral could help both addicts and others to recognize the potential dangers of their behavior in its early stages and to seek help. Such an education campaign could come in a number of forms. It could be incorporated into the

30

The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking & Pornography­­ curriculum of “john’s schools,” put into public service announcements, or even encapsulated in a warning label. Perhaps one day a pornographic movie will be covered in a warning—just like a pack of cigarettes—that cautions about the risk of sex addiction that leads to exploitation of real people.

Law enforcement could also enlist consumers to seek out cases where women are being trafficked into pornography. One of the most exceptional facts regarding the cases referred to earlier is that the criminal acts were recorded and distributed to the public.

A record of a horrific crime was distributed openly, and yet it did not come to the attention of law enforcement quickly. Media campaigns to inform consumers about pornography could tell people to watch out for material that they believe involves genuine coercion and could make detecting sex trafficking easier. The U.S. government created the “if you see something, say something” campaign in connection with possible terrorist threats; a similar campaign with regard to pornography involving trafficked women could similarly extend the reach of law enforcement’s knowledge.

Greater knowledge about incidents of trafficking would greatly enhance the ability of the U.S. government to enforce the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.

Conclusion Human trafficking is universally recognized as an abhorrent practice that cannot be tolerated in the modern world. However, it is not a simple problem, and it is connected to countless other social phenomena, including pornography. As has been shown in this article, trafficking victims may be forced to produce pornography for commercial sale, and the consumption of pornography contributes to the sex trade. With this knowledge in hand, policy makers should act now to remove pornography’s contribution to trafficking. Only by fighting human trafficking on all fronts can this scourge be eliminated.

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Human trafficking lly r

is universa

abhorrent ecognized

as an

cannot tole rate d n r e od practice that

be

in the

m

world.

Internet The Internet The Internet Pornography Pornography nography Pandemic: Pandemic: demic: 32

Commercial Sex & Human Bondage­­

“The Largest Unregulated Social Experiment in Human History”

Largest -Donna Rice -Donna Rice Hughes Hughes

t

What Love is Not...

Technology is revolutionizing our lives and providing access to a wide range of valuable services. The Internet has become a powerful educational and communications tool, placing vast new worlds ofknowledge in the palm of our hand.

Today’s youth have fully integrated the Internet into their daily lives, using technology as a powerful platform for education, communication, interaction, exploration, and self–expression. The Internet opens its users to a world that is reflective of contemporary human life, providing access to what is good, beneficial, and beautiful, but when unrestricted, it opens doors to what is ugly, depraved, dangerous, and criminal.

The continuous invasion of graphic, hard–core online pornography into cultures worldwide has been called the “largest unregulated social experiment in human history” and represents a hidden public health hazard we should not ignore. In 2010, the Witherspoon Institute released “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations,” the first multifaceted, multidisciplinary, scholarly review of contemporary pornography since the advent of the Internet. The report’s findings

conclude that pornography, especially via the Internet, harms children, women, and men and fuels pornography addiction, the breakdown of marriage, and sex trafficking. Other peer–reviewed studies have reached similar conclusions. Although much could be said about each of these conclusions, the focus of this article is to examine the impact of Internet pornography on young people.

The History For almost twenty years, children have been spoon–fed a steady diet of hard–core pornography via the Internet, with few laws or barriers to entry. Any child with open Internet access is just a click away from viewing, either intentionally or accidentally, sexually exploitive material, ranging from adult pornography (the kind of images that appear in Playboy and Penthouse) to prosecutable obscenity depicting graphic sex acts, live sex shows, orgies, excretory functions, bestiality, and violence.

Even material depicting the actual sexual abuse of a child (child pornography)—once only found on the black market—is accessible on the Internet. This toxic material directly impacts our children’s health and mental, emotional, and sexual development. “The impact of Internet pornography on adolescents,

33

34

The Internet Pornography Pandemic including compulsive, addictive, and even criminal behavior, is a global trend not isolated to any particular culture or region.” It has become one of the greatest global threats to children, marriages, families, and nations. No one is immune.

one No one

No one

No one No one

No one No one No one

smart phones and other portable devices, “nearly a third of teens carry portable x–rated theaters in their pockets.”Unfortunately, many government officials and Internet industry executives have turned a blind eye to the problem, passing the buck to parents, who are usually uninformed, overwhelmed, or ill– equipped to protect their children and families from the onslaught.

The Legal Background On June 7, 1995, at the beginning of the Internet age, addressing a group of Congressional and community leaders and media representatives at Enough Is Enough’sLeadership Luncheon, this author said the following:

child por

immune. sis immune. is immune.

According to family therapist Dr. Jill Manning, “With the Internet, the protective barrier between the sex industry and youth dissolved and the home, historically considered a safe haven, has been the very place where the sex industry is grooming our youth.” And now, with mobile Internet access via

It’s my job during the next ten minutes to dispel some popular misconceptions about pornography and expose you to the realty of this issue we face. Unfortunately, the worst and most deviant forms of illegal pornography have invaded our homes, offices and schools via the computer.

Computers have emerged as the leading–edge technology for the distribution of hard– core and child pornography. This is due to the low risk of law enforcement detection, the speed of transmission and the ease of access for

obscene m

What Love is Not... both children and adults. In fact, the Internet has become a central means of distributing child pornography, worldwide.

Children today are increasingly computer literate, in most cases, much more so than their parents.

Any child with a computer and a modem can access pornographic material in seconds, and once they’ve seen it, it can’t be erased from their minds. Just as disturbing is the fact that we cannot protect ourselves or our children from those who derive sexual pleasure from viewing this toxic material.

This event helped to shine a light on this important issue and served as the catalyst for the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA), which received bipartisan support and was signed into law by President Clinton.

The CDA extended to the cyberworld the same legal protections provided to children against pornography and sexual predators in the

35

physical world.The CDA presented an enormous opportunity to get ahead of the curve of the sexual exploitation of children through the Internet. However, as soon as the ink was dry on the bill, the indecency provisions were challenged by the ACLU and other groups in court, and a federal judge entered an injunction preventing those provisions from being implemented.

Perhaps, a little history is in order.

Savvy groups such as the ACLU have successfully framed all pornography as protected speech. This author fully supports the First Amendment as one of the foundational cornerstones of the Constitution. As such, not all written or visual material is protected under the First Amendment. Justice Potter Stewart infamous “I’ll know it when I see it” statement notwithstanding, the United States Supreme Court has ruled that there are four categories of pornography that may not be entitled to full First

rnograph

child pornography, Indecent material, obscene material obscene material material harmfultotominors minors material harmful

Indecent mater Indecent mate

material

36

The Internet Pornography Pandemic

39 prevent minor age children from being able to purchase or view a Playboy or Penthouse magazine or other forms of so–called soft–core pornography. (Note: While it is legal to distribute indecent and HTM materials to adults, it is illegal when knowingly sold or exhibited to minors in the physical world.)

Unfortunately, there is currently no federal indecency or harmful to minors statute that applies to the Internet.

Amendment protection and which can be restricted or proscribed altogether: indecent material, material harmful to minors, obscene material, and child pornography, more fully described below.

innoce 1. Indecent material includes messages or pictures on telephone, radio, or broadcast TV that are patently offensive descriptions or depictions of sexual or excretory organs or activities. Indecency laws are designed to protect minor children (children under the age of 18) from such material without infringing on the First Amendment rights of adults.

3. Obscene material is graphic “hard–core pornography” that focuses on sex and/or sexual violence, including close–ups of sex acts, lewd exhibition of the genitals, and deviant activities such as group sex, bestiality, torture, incest, and excretory functions. While Congress amended the federal obscenity laws in the 1996 CDA to criminalize distribution of obscene content on the Internet, these laws have not been vigorously enforced. As a result,

2. Material harmful to minors (HTM) represents nudity or sex that has prurient appeal for minors, is offensive and unsuitable for minors, and lacks serious value for minors.

Every state has “harmful to minors” laws designed to protect children from exposure to adult pornography in print and video. These laws

lewd exhibition of

al harmfu

the genitals the genitals.

1

What Love is Not... obscene material has become so pervasive on the Internet that most Americans do not know that it is prosecutable.

37

victims of child pornography are prepubescent with a growing trend towards depicting younger children, including, horrifyingly, infants.

ence.

4. Child pornography (child sex abuse images) is material that visually depicts minor children under the age of 18 engaged in actual or simulated sexual activity, including lewd exhibition of the genitals. It is illegal to produce, distribute, or possess child pornography in the United States. Although substantially undermanned and underfunded, the Justice Department and FBI have focused their enforcement efforts almost exclusively on violations of child pornography and child stalking laws. Despite these efforts, child pornography is one of the fastest growing industries on the Internet. There has been a 774% increase in the number of child pornography images and videos reviewed through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s Child Victim Identification Program from 2005 (1.98 million images/ videos) to 2011 (17.3 million images/videos) 14 Most

deserves deserve deserves Every child

a protected age of

innocence. innocen innocen Due to the failure of the Supreme Court to uphold COPA, the failure of the Justice Department, and other law enforcement agencies to pursue violations of obscenity laws and to adequately resource child pornography investigations and prosecutions, young people today have free, easy, and anonymous access to all types of pornography, harmful to minors “adult” pornography, hard–core obscenity, and child pornography.

ul to mino

s.

38

2.8 billion $2.8 billion by 2015. $2.8 bi $2.8 billion The Internet Pornography Pandemic

Mobile porn is expected to reach

The Current State of Internet Pornography and Youth

Every child deserves a protected age of innocence and the opportunity to thrive during childhood. Their hearts and minds are innocent, tender, and trusting and need to be safeguarded from the negative influences of increasingly violent and sexualized media. Unfortunately, online pornography damages children, and the consequences are mostly irreversible. Pornography is “ deforming the sexual development of young viewers and is used to exploit children and adolescents.”

than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple, and Netflix combined.

The Internet has become the leading platform for distributing all types of pornography: • Porn Sites Get More Visitors

nternet porn I The Pornography Pandemic Evil has been allowed to flourish, for the most part unchecked.

In 2006, worldwide revenue from pornography was $97 billion, more

Each Month Than Netflix, Amazon And Twitter Combined.

• 30% of the Internet industry is pornography.

• The online porn industry makes over $3,000 per second

• The United States is the largest producer and exporter of

hardcore pornographic DVDs and web material.

What Love is Not...

• A Google Trends analysis indicates

39

• 37% of 3 and 4 year olds use their

illion n that searches for “Teen Porn”

parent’s tablets and smartphones

have more than tripled between

as do 87% of 5 to 7 year olds.

2005–2013. Total searches for

teen–related porn reached an esti-

mated 500,000 daily in March 2013

— one–third of total daily searches for pornographic web sites.

• Of the 304 scenes analyzed, 88.2% contained physical

aggression, principally spanking, gagging, and slapping, while

48.7% of scenes contained verbal aggression, primarily name–

calling. Perpetrators of aggression were usually male, whereas targets of aggression were overwhelmingly female.

Connected Kids

• 93.2% of boys and 62.1% of girls have seen online pornography before age 18.

• “ Boys aren’t the only ones affected by our porn culture. Girls, who make up a portion of the 12– to–17 year olds that comprise the porn industry’s largest consumer base, have internalized these messages too.”

• 53% of boys and 28% of girls (ages 12–15) use sexually explicit pornography, most often via the Internet.

• A Google search for ‘bestiality’ generated 2.7 million returns

• Among youth 12–years to 14–

The mean age of first exposure to

nography Internet pornography Internet po years, 88% in the United States used the Internet.

is 14.8(girls) and 14.3 (boys).

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The Internet Pornography Pandemic • At least 44,000 primary school children and 473,000 children between ages of 6 and 17 accessed an adult website, mostly offshore, in the month of December 2013 from a computer.

Pornographers Targeting Kids Pornographers understand that the sexually exploitive pornography they produce and distribute is highly addictive. If they can get children hooked at a young age when their hormones are raging and their brains and bodies are underdeveloped, they will likely have a consumer for life unless the addiction cycle is broken.

Zach, a 15 year old who was interviewed in the Internet Safety 101 DVD series, said, “I think about every person in this generation, and probably the one before us, have all looked up pornography once in their life.

Even if you’re not looking for it, you could be innocent on the computer . . . and it’ll find you.”

Online pornographers use a variety of deceptive marketing techniques to attract viewers and • lure kids. Some common marketing tactics used by Internet pornographers include the following: Free Teaser Images Most pornography sites do not request age verification of their visitors and offer a multitude of free samples of pictures and/or streaming videos to entice users, including

• Sexual activity of every form (i.e., sexual intercourse, masturbation, bisexual interactions, group sex, oral sex, fetishes)

• Cybersex and cyberchats with “live” feeds (i.e., user can view and/or interact in real time with a porn star)

Internet p Online ornography nline ographers nographers Online

pornographers use a variety of deceptive marketing techniques.

• Site “tours” (i.e., walks user through a virtual table of contents of pictures, videos, and pornographic experiences available)

• Innocent Word Searches

Pornographers use popular terms or innocent words that may have little or nothing to do with the content they display they display to increase traffic to their sites through search engines.

ve marketing. ptive marketing. ve marketing.

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• Misspelled Words

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• Mousetrapping

Online pornographers purchase domain names with commonly– misspelled words, such as typing “boyz” instead of “boys,” which can direct an Internet surfer who misspells a word on his keyboard to sites containing extreme hard core material.”

• Stealth Sites Online pornographers often purchase “Stealth URLs.” These are sites with web addresses that are close in name to the “legitimate” site.

This crafty “tech–trick” prevents users from escaping a pornographic site once they have entered it.

• Looping A seemingly never-ending stream of pornographic pop–ups that appear on the computer screen that continues until the computer is shut down.

• Porn-Napping Pornographers purchase expired domain names, so what was once a web address for a legitimate company takes users to a pornographic site.

E-mail Sp E-mail Spam E-mail Spam

• Cartoon Characters

and Child Icons Pornographers misuse popular cartoon characters such as those found at disneypornland.com.

• Pop–ups and Ad Banners

Otherwise known as

pornograph y Pornographers often purchase available banner space advertisements on popular websites and social networking spaces hoping to draw young users to their sites.

• Free Flash Games

Many popular websites integrate interactive, easy–to–use games that are designed to be attractive to children, such as puzzle games, word games, card games, and uncomplicated animated games. However, pornographic games such as ‘orgasm girl’ are easily accessible to children.

“junk e-mail” The Public Health Impact on Youth

A recent New York Times article, “ Does Porn Hurt Children,” concluded that the jury is still out with respect to the “hazardous mix of teenagers and pornography.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Exposing minors to pornography is child sex abuse. As Internet pornography has proliferated, clinicians,

42

The Internet Pornography Pandemic

­­

powerful lies psychologists, and law enforcement officials have noted an increase in the number of children seeking clinical help for issues relating to sexual exploitation, the number of children “acting out” sexually, the number of incidences of child– on–child sex attacks, and the number of incidences of child–produced child pornography. There is a growing body of peer–reviewed research supporting the unequivocal harm to youth from exposure to Internet pornography.

Powerful lies

portrayed in exploitive pornography can

take the lead in

educating children.

educating children exploitive pornography can take the lead in educating children on very important life issues. Pornography teaches sex without love, intimacy, tender touch, responsibility, and commitment. Just as 30–second commercials can influence whether we choose one popular soft drink over another, exposure to pornography shapes our attitudes and values and, often, our behavior. When kids watch sexual acts depicted in pornography, it is no surprise they desire to act out sexually.

educating children

Impact on the Emotional and Mental Development of Children Children are especially susceptible to influences affecting their development. Research shows pornography short–circuits and distorts the normal personality development process and supplies misinformation about a child’s sexuality, sense of self, and body that leaves the child confused, changed, and damaged. Pornography often introduces children prematurely to sexual sensations with which they are developmentally unprepared to deal.

e-mail” e-mail” Impact on Attitudes, Values, and Behavior The parents’ role is to instill their own personal values about relationships, sex, intimacy, love, and marriage in their children. Unfortunately, powerful lies portrayed in

Teenagers also express having great difficulty bridging the gap between the porn–experience and their real–world sexual experience. The demand for today’s pre–teen girls to be “porn ready” and provide porn sex when dating is daunting.

According to Courtney, age 18, “ It does make them curious, just like a little girl when she watched Cinderella, you know, she wants to be just like her, and kids that watch porn, they want to be just

a a

What Love is Not... like them. . . .We would watch it together . . . and then the guys did expect me to act out like that. But it destroyed our lives, our respect for ourselves and our relationships.”

Justin, age 16, shared, “I just wanted to do what they did in the porn. I didn’t even care about the relationship anymore.

I just wanted to have sex with as many girls as I could. . . . Girls in real life don’t act like the girls in porno. . . . When you get with them, and they don’t act like [porn stars]. . . . It makes you feel kind of unmanly. . . . It’s disappointing.”

The impact of porn on boys, according to sex therapist Dr.Thaddeus Birchard, is particularly profound. “Boys tend to create their sexual template by images . . . ,” he says. “These pictures become watermarked on to the fabric of each individual’s sexual repertory.”

Couples therapist Val Sampson suspects the new popularity of anal sex is entirely due to its prevalence in pornography. “It’s now something that teenage boys feel they have a right to do,” she says.”

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[A]mong today’s teenage girls, the chaperone has made a surprising and . . . disturbing comeback. Today’s chaperone is called, in teen speak, a “third wheel” . . . re–invented by the girls themselves because they want protection from the sexual demands of their boyfriends.

When I spoke to many teenage girls in researching the subject, they told me these demands are both “disturbing and upsetting,” and they are certain they’re being fuelled by what their boyfriends are watching online: hard–core, explicit porn.

Impact on the Brain According to Dr. W. Dean Belnap, a pediatrician and child psychiatrist, there is a critical period when a child’s brain is being programmed for sexual orientation. It is during this period that the mind appears to be developing a “hardwire” for what the person will be aroused by or attracted to. Exposure to healthy sexual norms and attitudes during this critical period can result in the child developing a healthy sexual orientation.

In contrast, if there is exposure to pornography during this period, thoughts of sexual deviance may become imprinted on the child’s “hard drive” and become a permanent part of his or her sexual orientation.

a ri

“ a right a right It’s now something that teenage boys feel they have

a right to do

Dr. Judith Reisman, a pioneer on the harmful impact of pornography, has done extensive research regarding the underdeveloped brain’s

44

The Internet Pornography Pandemic response to pornographic stimuli.

She emphasizes that a child’s brain becomes psycho–pharmacologically altered and damages the child’s sense of self and reality.

In a recent email exchange between this author and Dr. Donald J. Hilton, a distinguished neurosurgeon and neuroscience researcher, Hilton shared that there is evolving knowledge of the reward systems of the human brain and solid neuroscience research on the brain’s response to pornography. He provided the following overview: 1. Natural reward systems exist which change the brain, and include sexuality and pornography.

• their frontal executive control centers are not fully myelinated nor are they neuronally ‘pruned’; this process is completed in the mid to late 20s.

• in the context of (a), they must process new powerful sexual drives with puberty.

The pleasure ‘accelerator’ is being revved at the same time their ‘brain brake’ is incompletely formed.

4. Because of #3, they process rewards differently, includin-

sexual rewards.

Addiction/Compulsive Habituation In her report before Congress, Dr. Jill Manning, who specializes in research and clinical work related to pornography and problematic sexual behavior, noted that studies show when a child or adolescent encounters Internet pornography,

child’s sen

2. Pornography addiction is a powerful mediator of neuroplastic change in the brain.

3. Adolescents are particularly prone to addiction because:

g negative ting negative child’s sens negative sense of negative nse of and sexualit lasting negative it can have lasting negative

or even traumatic effects on the

child’s sense of security and sexuality;

What Love is Not... it can have lasting negative or even traumatic effects on the child’s sense of security and sexuality; that it promotes the belief that superior sexual satisfaction is attainable without having affection for one’s partner, thereby reinforcing the commoditization of sex and the objectification of humans; and that children who have been exposed to online pornography have an increased risk for developing sexual compulsions and addictive behavior.

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potentially develop a neurological attachment to it. They can, in essence, date porn.”

This is no doubt why God warns against sexual immorality. He wired humans to bond to a marriage partner, emotionally, sexually, physically, and mentally, and “two shall become one flesh.”

the the drug the dru drug the drug of the

new newmillennium millennium new millenn

Internet pornography is commonly referred to as ‘the drug of the new millennium’ and the ‘crack cocaine’ of sexual addictions. A New York Magazine article reported,

new millennium Porn Induced Erectile Dysfunction (PIED) According to the ANSA (Agenzia Nazionale Stampa Associata) news agency,

nse of Scientists speculate that a dopamine–oxytocin combo is released in the brain during orgasm, acting as “biochemical love potion,” as behavioral therapist Andrea Kuszewski calls it. It’s the reason after having sex with someone, you’re probably more inclined to form an emotional attachment. . . . You don’t have to actually have sex in order to get those neurotransmitters firing. When you watch porn, “you’re bonding with it,” Kuszewski says. “And those chemicals make you want to keep coming back to have that feeling,” which allows men to not only get off on porn, but to

ese of efty;

Young men who indulge in “excessive consumption” of Internet porn gradually become immune to explicit images. . . . Over time, this can lead to a loss of libido, impotence and a notion of sex that is totally divorced from real–life relations.

“It starts with lower reactions to porn sites, then there is a general drop in libido and in the end it becomes impossible to get an erection,” said Carlo Foresta, head of the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine (SIAM). There was some good

46

The Internet Pornography Pandemic

millennium news, however, as the condition was not necessarily permanent.

“With proper assistance recovery is possible within a few months,” Foresta said.

The Real World Consequences

Acting Out: Sexting In a hyper–sexualized world, it should come as no surprise that kids feel pressured to send provocative pictures and videos (“sext”messages), and to engage in sexual acts that they are not ready to handle emotionally, physically, or psychologically. In a 2008 national survey, 39% of all teens ages 13–19 reported that they have electronically sent or posted online, nude or semi–nude pictures or videos of themselves.

you think this girl is a whore, then text this to all your friends.”

Then she clicked open the long list of contacts on her phone and pressed ‘send’ . . . .

“You can’t expect teenagers not to do something they see happening all around them,’ said Susannah Stern, an associate professor at the University of San Diego who writes about adolescence and technology.

‘They’re practicing to be a part of adult culture,’ Dr. Stern said.

‘And in 2011, that is a culture of sexualization and of putting yourself out there to validate who you are. . . .’”

lying naked lying naked camera flashes. lying naked Lying naked on the bed as the

The following media excerpts depict this growing trend:

amera flashes One day last winter Margarite posed naked before her bathroom mirror, held up her cell phone and took a picture.

Then she sent the full–length frontal photo to Isaiah, her new boyfriend. . . . Both were in eighth grade. They broke up soon after. A few weeks later, Isaiah forwarded the photo to anothereighth–grade girl. . . . [T] hat girl slapped a text message on it.“Ho Alert!” she typed. “If

Like a real porn star, Becky is heavily made up and lying naked on the bed as the camera flashes. She could be just another glamorous model as she poses provocatively with practiced moves. But she isn’t. . . . Becky is just 17. . . . She’s filming herself in a friend’s bedroom. . . . Becky has not been coerced into this degrading behavior. She is posing on her own, taking photographs of herself not for profit—but

5

dd

What Love is Not... for attention. Welcome to the deeply alarming new world of privileged British teenagers who have a growing obsession with pornography. . . .

Kids Acting Out Sexually Against Other Youth Current research suggest that exposure to pornography can prompt kids to act out sexually against younger, smaller, and more vulnerable children.

Kids themselves are engaging in risky behaviors and perpetuating the cycle of child sexual abuse. To make matters worse, a new genre of extreme pornography, termed ‘gonzo’ depicts beating and other forms of violence as part of the sex act.

Children as young as 5 are imitating sex acts at school because they are being allowed to stay up late and watch pornography, a senior MP has warned. . . .

5 55

Courts have seen the number of sex offense cases involving juvenile offenders rise dramatically in recent years…and treatment professionals say the offenders are getting younger and the crimes more violent. . . . Experts

47

say certain trends emerge among the cases of children charged with sex crimes against other children. Many estimates range from 40% to 80% were molested themselves. And 42% have been exposed to hardcore pornography, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, said in a 2001 report.

Sex Trafficking Many people are under the false assumption that trafficking only happens in other parts of the world, but the United Nations estimates that out of the more than 1.8 million children who are exploited as part of the illicit commercial sex market each year.

According to Ernie Allen, President of the International Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Today, Internet sites market and advertise children and adults for sex, and consumers shop from the privacy of their homes or hotel rooms. And these sites are largely granted immunity by our laws. For the traffickers this is easy, low risk, and enormously profitable because of huge consumer demand. And the customers do not match society’s stereotype. They don’t look like

are imitating se

Children as young as

are imitating se are imitating s

are imitating sex acts

48

The Internet Pornography Pandemic ­­ criminals. They are doctors, lawyers, business executives, teachers, coaches. And they are rarely treated like criminals by prosecutors. We have to hold them accountable and attack the demand for sex with children.

And we have to address the fact that the infrastructure for this insidious business is the Internet.

2. Some men are trafficking and/or exploiting women and children and recording the acts they perform. . . . In a study by the Poppy Project in U.K., women had photographs taken of them by traffickers/pimps . . . while a gang–rape was taking place.

Women also reported that in the places where they were trafficked pornography was constantly available to men buying sex.

Force, fraud or coercion are used to prompt the performance

atured featured atured pornography pornography pornograp of those featured in pornography.

Dr. Laura Lederer, a sex trafficking expert, concluded from her research “Sex Trafficking and Illegal Pornography—Is there a Link?” that there are four clear links between pornography and the growing sex trafficking industry: 1. Some types of pornography actually are sex trafficking. . . .

Pornography industry insiders note that the production of pornography often matches the very definition of “severe forms of trafficking,”—force, fraud or coercion are used to prompt the performance of those featured in pornography. . . .

3. Pornography is used in sex trafficking and the sex industry to train women and children what to do. . . . In another survey in the U.K., 35% of trafficked women were exposed to pornography, including being shown pornography to ‘groom’ them into prostitution.

4. Pornography creates and provides rationalizations for exploiters as to how and why their sexually exploitive behaviors are acceptable. . . . Norma Hotaling . . .believed that pornography . . . normalize[s] prostitution and commercial

What Love is Not... sexual exploitation . . . , allowing men to more freely engage in these criminal activities.”

The sad reality is that Internet pornography, particularly that of an extreme, deviant and violent nature, fuels the demand for sex slaves.

Dr. Richard Land, President of Southern Evangelical Seminary and former President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told this author that unquestionably, “I believe that Satan has discovered that the most powerful weapon he has to destroy individuals, families, and American society is hard core internet pornography. Hard core pornography is the propaganda and advertising campaign that generates epidemics of sexual exploitation of women and children and creates an ever increasing demand that is fulfilled through sex traffic.”

Internet pornography, it is time we collectively say “enough is enough!”

We must educate parents, families, therapeutic practitioners, educators, clergy, corporate leaders, government leaders, and law enforcement about the devastating social consequences of pornography’s ubiquity in the Internet age.

A spectrum of prevention starts with one person, one family, one community, and one nation at a time

enough

phy

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enough enough enough enou

The Routes to Resolution No matter how hard we tvcannot completely protect ourselves and our loved ones in a culture that permits sexually exploitive pornography to flourish. We must all take responsibility for what has happened and join together to stop this pandemic. After having sacrificed almost two generations of children to the destructive harms of

“enough is enough! “ to bring about widespread cultural change. Much of the groundwork has already been laid over the past twenty years. A preventative approach to create and sustain a safe, entertaining, and informative Internet environment in which children are protected from sexual predators and intrusive pornography should engage: 1. Responsible Adults—Raise public awareness of the threat of Internet pornography, sexual predation, and the sexual

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The Internet Pornography Pandemic exploitation of children in order to educate, empower, and equip the public, especially parents, educators, and caring adults to proactively protect children under their care.

2. Public sector—Promote legal solutions by calling for aggressive enforcement of existing laws and enactment of new laws to prevent the exposure of children to pornography and sexual 4. predators via the Internet.

3. Private sector—Encourage the Internet industry to comply with federal laws, implement viable technological solutions, best practices and family–friendly corporate policy to reduce and prevent these threats.

4. Church and Faith–Based Communities—Elevate the call and commitment to bring biblical truth, light, healing, hope, and help to individuals, marriages, families, communities, and nations.

This strategy of a shared responsibility has been adopted by many national leaders worldwide; however, the strategy only works if

each sector is actively performing its role. Protecting our children online and offline from sexual exploitation should be at the top of our list of national priorities. However, in America, significant gaps exist between the Internet’s dangers to children and the level of enforcement and industry–driven action dedicated to protecting children. As a result, Internet-initiated crimes and dangers directed at young people have continued to grow exponentially, threatening the safety, security, and quality of life for children and families globally.

Role of Responsible Adults— Parents, Educators, and Child Caregivers In this ever–changing cyberworld, parents, educators, community, and youth leaders have, by necessity, shouldered the entire responsibility to protect children under their care against lurking Internet dangers and criminal activity. Parents are the first line of defense to safeguard their children’s innocence against such wickedness. Unfortunately parents are often overwhelmed, ill–informed, or ill–equipped about the nature of the threat and the resources available to help them. Sadly, even parents who are committed to being good cyber parents to ensure their

young ugh

ough young people Internet-initiated crimes and

dangers directed at

exponentially. onentially. have continued to grow

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Lackadai Lackad Lackadai Lackadaisical enforcement of obscenity laws

children’s safety in the digital world have a hard time keeping up with emerging technologies such as snap chat, smart phone apps, Instagram, and social media.

No parent or caring adult, much less an innocent child, is a match for the unscrupulous criminal behavior of a pornographer, sexual predator, or trafficker. In 2012, 44% of teens surveyed admitted they have looked at something online of which their parents would not approve. Of these, 81% said this has happened at home, and 48% said it has happened at home when their parents were home. While parents must proactively protect their children online when using any Internet–enabled device, parental controls tools are sadly underutilized. 28% of parents have installed software on computers to prohibit certain website visitation, only 17% have the same software on mobile devices, only 15% have the same software on gaming consoles, 18% according to parents and 11% to tweens.

Internet safety educational resources and programs are readily available online for both youth and

adults alike. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s NetSmartz program and iSafe’s K–12 safety curriculums are both excellent programs for youth of all ages. Additionally, Enough Is Enough created the Internet Safety 101 Programin partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, designed to educate, equip, and empower parents, educators, and caregivers to protect children from online pornography, sexual predators, and cyberbullies, as well as cyber–security risks and dangers related to social networking, online gaming, and mobile devices. The comprehensive program motivates and equips responsible adults to implement safety measures, including parental control tools on all Internet–enabled devices used by children.

Role of Public Sector As previously mentioned, the government has failed to live up to its responsibility of protecting America’s children due to its lackadaisical enforcement of obscenity laws, and the Supreme Court’s failure to uphold the Child Online Protection Act. In 2000, the Child Online Protection Commission, on which

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The Internet Pornography Pandemic

daisica this author had the honor to serve, made several recommendations to Congress including that Government at all levels fund aggressive programs to investigate and prosecute violations of obscenity laws [. . . in order to] supplement the Government’s existing effort to investigate and prosecute child sexual exploitation, sexual abuse, and child pornography . . . . Such a program should be of sufficient magnitude to deter effectively illegal activity on the Internet.

The implementation of this recommendation is as necessary today as it was in 2000. In order to “deter illegal activity on the Internet,” the government must prioritize and adequately fund at both the state and federal levels the aggressive enforcement of obscenity laws.

This will not be easy. Some online purveyors of prosecutable obscene material may follow the path of child pornographers, sex traffickers, and other criminal enterprises by using sophisticated anonymizing tools to try to cover their tracks.

Child pornographers often gravitate to “Deep Web” sites that cater to their perversion, such as Lolita City, Hard Candy, Jailbait, PedoEmpire, and others, which accept payment in unregulated virtual currencies such

as Bitcoin. Nonetheless, law enforcement officials must receive the training and manpower to take on this task. This is a moral imperative.

Role of the Private Sector The World Wide Web has transformed from a collection of websites to a full–fledged communicative platform, changing where and how users interact, share, and seek information. “Web 2.0” represents a paradigm shift in the way the Internet is used, facilitating creativity, information sharing, online communities, and collaboration among users. Children can upload and download content, videos, and

“Deep“Deep Web” Web “Deep Web” Child pornographers often gravitate to

“Deep Web Web “Deep photos through the use of any Internet–enabled devices and can communicate with an unlimited number of friends and strangers, challenging the ability of parents to monitor their Internet activities and access.

In United States, the Internet is completely open and free, which is essential. The U.S. based Internet industry has historically

What Love is Not...

al

maintained the position that it is up to parents to manage Internet access for their children based on their family’s values. Best practices and corporate family friendly policies have evolved over the past twenty years to deal with the growing challenges and dangers to children on the Internet.

Great advancements continue to improve the array of safety features and tools available, such as filtering, monitoring, and time limiting software to help parents, schools, and others responsible for safeguarding youth online. It is important to note that there is no silver bullet to protect children online. That said, current filtering technology is highly effective at blocking pornographic material. However, it does not work if it is not turned on. As previously mentioned, parental control tools for laptops, smartphones, tablets, gaming, and music devices are under–utilized by consumers.

”b”

b” b”

Some countries, such as Russia, have already implemented measures to stop the free flow of pornography via the Internet’s public airways.

These efforts would not work in the U.S. since they are a form of censorship. However, a model adopted in the United Kingdom could indeed work in the U.S. In the summer of 2013, Great Britain’s Prime Minister,

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“no porn via

Wi-Fi”

Wi-F Wi-F policy in the UK

David Cameron, who proclaimed that pornography was ‘corroding childhood’, proposed a voluntary national filtering program in the UK, that would not deny access to pornographic content but would require subscribers to take an affirmative step to get it. Key aspects of the UK proposal include the following: Internet enabled device or internet–based service sold or supplied into the consumer market and likely to be owned or used by children or young people should, by default, come with filtering and blocking software preinstalled and operational to provide protection against exposure to adult content. An age– verified adult ought to be able to modify the preinstalled protective program settings or abandon them altogether, otherwise the defaults should remain; . . . UK– based web hosting companies should ensure publishers making pornography available within the UK have an effective age verification process in place.

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The Internet Pornography Pandemic All four major ISPs in the UK, which account for approximately 95 percent of the market, have implemented the new sign–up procedure for new customers. Existing customers can also ask for the new filters/arrangements to be applied to their account immediately. By the end of 2014, every existing customer will have been asked by their ISP whether or not they want to use the filters—and they will have to make a decision. All this is at zero cost to the customer. Additionally, Starbucks and McDonalds, both U.S.–based corporations, voluntarilycomply with a “no porn via

Wi–Fi” policy in the U.K., but they have not yet done so in America, despite having been formally requested to do so by this author.

These recent events in other nations have given rise to efforts to compel the private sector to become more pro–active about the pornographypandemic. This is about corporate choice, not censorship. Despite the progress being made in the UK and Australia, many U.S. Internet industry leaders in this country have made it clear that they would fight any efforts to implement a model similar to the voluntary UK model.

porno porno ograp public p public Stop the free flow of

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rways airw airways public airways.

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e h t e k a T : e g Pled e r o No M g n i g l Indu Porn

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If anyone still had doubts about the addictive dangers of pornography, Anthony Weiner should have put paid to them with his repeated, self-sabotaging sexting.

And if anyone still doubted the devastation that porn addiction wreaks on those closest to the addict, behold the now-shattered marriage of Mr. Weiner and Huma Abedin, a breakup that she initiated, reportedly, in shock at the disgraced ex-congressman’s inclusion of their 4-year-old son in one lewd photo that he sent to a near-stranger.

derson Pamela An Boteach y le u m h S i Rabb

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Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn From our respective positions of rabbi-counselor and former Playboy model and actress, we have often warned about pornography’s corrosive effects on a man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband and, by extension, as father. This is a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness given how freely available, anonymously accessible and easily disseminated pornography is nowadays.

Put another way, we are a guinea-pig generation for an experiment in mass debasement that few of us would have ever consented to, and whose full nefarious impact may not be known for years. How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill? How many children will propel, warp-speed, into the dark side of adult sexuality by forced exposure to their fathers’ profanations?

The statistics already available are terrifying. According to data provided by the American Psychological Association, porn consumption rates are between 50% and 99% among men and 30% to 86% among women, with the former group often reporting less satisfactory intimate lives with their wives or girlfriends as a result of the consumption. By contrast, many female fans of pornography tend to prefer a less explicit variety, and report that it improves their sexual relationships.

Nine percent of porn users said they had tried unsuccessfully to stop—an indication of addiction that is all the more startling when you consider that the dependency rate among people who try marijuana is the same—9%—and not much higher among those who try cocaine (15%), according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

But it is a fair guess that whereas drug-dependency data are mostly stable, the incidence of porn addiction will only spiral as the children now being raised in an environment of wall-to-wall, digitized sexual images become adults inured to intimacy and in need of even greater graphic stimulation. They are the crack babies of porn.

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They are the s e i b a b k crac

of porn.

All people are unique individuals and we can be sure that Mr. Weiner’s problems are at least in part a matter of his personal psycho-pathologies. Yet his behavior squares with what we have observed with all too many men, especially in the U.S. or other Western countries that enjoy liberal values and material prosperity.

These are men who, by any objective measure, have succeeded yet regard themselves as failures. These are men who feel marooned in lassitude because they enjoy physical security, who feel bereft and bored even if they are blessed to have the committed love of a wife or girlfriend. These are men who believe that cruising the internet for explicit footage of other women or sharing such images of themselves over the remote communication offered by smartphones are risqué but risk-free distractions from the tedium.

The march of technology is irreversible and we aren’t so naive as to believe that any kind of imposed regulation could ever reseal the Pandora’s box of pornography. What is required is an honest dialogue about what we are witnessing—the true nature and danger of porn—and an honor code to tamp it down in the collective interests of our well-being as individuals, as families and as communities.

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Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn The ubiquity of porn is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution that began a half-century ago and which, with gender rights and freedoms now having been established, has arguably run its course. Now is the time for an epochal shift in our private and public lives. Call it a “sensual revolution.”

The sensual revolution would replace pornography with eroticism—the alloying of sex with love, of physicality with personality, of the body’s mechanics with imagination, of orgasmic release with binding relationships. In an age where public disapproval is no longer an obstacle to personal disgrace, we must turn instead to the appeal of self-interest.

Simply put, we must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers—a boring, wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality.

r o f s i Porn — ­ s r e s o l

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Terry Crews: Porn Addiction

'Messed up my Life'

What Love is Not...

(CNN)”Brooklyn Nine-Nine” actor Terry Crews is opening up about his addiction to pornography, which he says “really, really messed up my life.”

In a new series of videos posted to Facebook, the former NFL player says he had to go to rehab for his addiction, which consumed him and threatened his marriage.

“Some people say, ‘Hey, man ... you can’t really be addicted to pornography.’ But I’m gonna tell you something: If day turns into night and you are still watching, you probably have got a problem.

And that was me,” he said.

“It changes the way you think about people. People become objects. People become body parts; they become things to be used rather than people to be loved.”

Crews said he kept his porn habit secret from everyone, including his wife. He and singer Rebecca King Crews have been married since 1990 and have five children.

Brandon Griggs

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Terry Crews: Porn Addiction ‘Messed up my Life’ “It affected everything. My wife was literally like, ‘I don’t know you anymore. I’m out of here.’ I had to change,” said the muscled actor, who added that he quit viewing porn six or seven years ago.

“I literally had to go to rehab for it.”

Crews revealed his porn addiction publicly in 2014, but his new confessional videos have brought heightened attention to his struggles. His first Facebook video, posted two weeks ago, has attracted almost 3 million views and more than 10,000 comments.

“Thank you so much for this message, Terry. Your honesty humbles me,” said one man on Facebook. “I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t do drugs. But I have wrestled for years - YEARS - with pornography. I am grateful today to say that I have a very specific sobriety date and I have stayed clean for some time now. I work at it every day and I do everything I can to remove its power and hold.”

“Thanks for putting this out there and congratulations on finding recovery,” said a female commenter. “This horrible plague killed my marriage. Glad you decided to fight. We need more voices bringing awareness. There is a silent war being fought and the casualties are families and relationships.”

Crews posted two more videos thanking fans for their support and trying to answer their questions.

“Women, you need to be fearless. You need to confront your man about this problem,” he said in the second clip, recorded while he drove around Los Angeles in a convertible.

In the third video, posted Tuesday, Crews described porn as “an intimacy killer.”

“Every time I watched it, I was walled off. It was like another brick that came between me and my wife. And the truth is, everything you need for intimacy is in your (partner).”

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“It affected everything. My wife was literally like, ‘I don’t know you anymore. I’m out of here.’

I had to change.”

Rebecca King Crews has not referenced her husband’s addiction in any of her recent social media posts. She posted a photo of her and Crews on Instagram last week with the caption “Love my boo!”

Crews, 47, played for six years in the NFL in the 1990s before launching a career as an actor. He has appeared in dozen of movies, including “White Chicks,” “Bridesmaids” and “The Expendables” and its sequels. He also had a recurring role on the TV series “Everybody Hates Chris” and has been featured in several Old Spice commercials.

Last year, Crews made headlines when he said he and his wife had completed a 90-day “sex fast” that left them “more in love.”

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Commercial Sex & Human Bondage­­

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&&& && && &&& Human

Bondage

by Ellyn Arevalo

What Love is Not...

Most Americans don’t take slavery in America seriously, except as a matter of history. It’s something to recall, not something to witness with our own eyes. But if it ever really disappeared at all, slavery has certainly made a comeback. In fact, today more people are sold into slavery each year than at the height of the transatlantic slave trade, as New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof stated in his book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide(Vintage, 2010). It’s not chattel slavery, wherein legally one human being could own another. But it functions similarly.

Thankfully there is growing awareness of modern slavery, as witnessed by the increased presence it has played in political discourse and policy over the past ten years. In 2000, Congress enacted the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA), the first “comprehensive Federal law…to protect victims of trafficking [and] to prosecute their traffickers.” The next year the State Department commenced publishing an annual Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP), which is a summary of the status of trafficking in persons worldwide, and “serves as the primary diplomatic tool through which the U.S. Government encourages other countries to help fight all forms of modern slavery.” In it, countries are assigned a tier ranking from 1 to 3, based on the extent of their efforts to combat and address human trafficking. This year, for the first time, the United States appeared in the TIP rankings. And even though they were given a Tier 1 ranking (the best, indicating full compliance with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking), the TIP itself stresses that such a ranking “does not mean that a country has no human trafficking problem.”

So what exactly is human trafficking? It occurs when persons are compelled into commercial sex acts or forced labor through fraud, coercion, or physical force. The TVPA details human trafficking as having three parts: actions, purposes, and means. The actions are the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring, receiving, or obtaining of persons for the purposes of sexual exploitation, involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery, accomplished through the means of force, fraud, or coercion.

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Commercial Sex & Human Bondage­­ Just how bad is the problem? While precise figures remain difficult to obtain given human trafficking’s underworld existence, in 2002 USAID estimated that between 700,000 and 4 million persons are trafficked each year into slavery. That number does not include cases of trafficking within a country’s borders, only across them.

Furthermore, not only is human trafficking the fastest-growing criminal industry, it is tied with the illegal arms industry as being the second-largest global criminal industry.

Finally, the American government seems to be paying attention.

At Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearing as Secretary of State, she stated, “I take very seriously the function of the State Department to lead the U.S. government through the Office on Human Trafficking to do all that we can to end this modern form of slavery.”

And in the 2010 TIP report’s introduction she reiterates, “Ending this global scourge is an important policy priority for the United States.” But if the U.S. is serious about this, it must recognize that the biggest impediments are a failure to link sex trafficking to the larger commercial sex industry, and the underreporting and limited prosecution of sex trafficking stemming from a deficient legal definition of that term.

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legalizing prostitution

fosters it.

One of the most significant and persistent barriers to combating human trafficking is widespread insistence on distinguishing between sexual trafficking and prostitution. While linking the two is about as easy as connecting smoking to lung cancer, we continue to decouple trafficking from branches of the commercial sex industry like prostitution and pornography. Of course most of us want to end sexual slavery, but the commercial sex industry—which is the very lifeblood of trafficking—is increasingly tolerated. Prostitution is seen by plenty as a legitimate, if suboptimal, form of “work,” and pornography is taken to be harmless. And yet the commercial sex market and sex trafficking are symbiotically related; the latter simply would not exist without the former. Women and girls are trafficked into brothels, strip clubs, and massage parlors. They’re photographed and filmed servicing men. Customers—including men who simply click on free porn on the web—do not and cannot distinguish between trafficked women, prostitutes, and porn stars.

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Commercial Sex & Human Bondage­­ Those who draw a bright line between sex trafficking and prostitution often argue for legalizing prostitution. After all, they say, if prostitution were legalized, then the government would be poised to regulate it and curb harms experienced by prostitutes. In fact, the State Department’s 2010 TIP Report even claimed that countries that had legalized prostitution were making efforts to eliminate sexual trafficking.

But rather than eliminate sexual trafficking, the evidence has consistently revealed that legalizing prostitution fosters it. Dorchen Leidholdt, Co-Executive Director of the international NGO Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, stated: Jurisdictions that have legalized prostitution have demonstrated just what happens when prostitution is legitimized and protected by law: the number of sex businesses grows, as does the demand for prostitution. Legalized prostitution brings sex tourists and heightens the demand among local men. Local women constitute

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“89% …wante d to esc ape but did n ot have other options for survi val.

prostit ution

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an inadequate supply so foreign girls and women are trafficked in to meet the demand. The trafficked women are cheaper, younger, more exciting to customers, and easier to control. More trafficked women means more local demand and more sex tourism.

In other words, sexual demand is not as stable as you might think; it can be stimulated. Just consider what happened in Australia when its government decriminalized prostitution and took control of the industry: “in New South Wales where brothels were decriminalized in 1995, the number of brothels in Sydney had tripled to 400-500 by 1999, with the vast majority having no license.” In other words the illegal sector of the sex industry flourished once prostitution was legalized. The Netherlands are another excellent case study. Their brothels were legalized in 2000, but the number of reported human trafficking cases increased from 341 in 2000 to 909 in 2009. When the sex industry enjoys government protection, it thrives and demand increases. It also becomes much more difficult to identify instances of abuse and to prosecute trafficking.

What if a woman wants to become a prostitute? In her book Prostitution, Power and Freedom, Nottingham University Sociology Professor Julia O’Connell explained that this phenomenon, known as “casual prostitution,” accounts for a mere one percent of women in the sex industry (University of Michigan Press, 1999). And in a recent study of trafficking and prostitution across nine countries, researchers found that out of 785 sex workers, “89 percent…wanted to escape prostitution but did not have other options for survival.”

Free choice here is largely a myth. Catherine MacKinnon, pioneer of the legal battle against sexual harassment in the workforce, argued that “If being a sex worker were truly a free choice, why is it that women with the fewest options are the ones most apt to “choose” it?” Closely related to the issue of choice is that of consent, or the idea that prostitution is innocuous if the prostituted woman gives her consent. But the condition of consent is an unfounded criterion. Melissa Farley, director of the or-

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Commercial Sex & Human Bondage­­

ganization Prostitution Research and Education, explains that “it is a clinical, as well as a statistical error, to assume that most women in prostitution consent to it. In prostitution, the conditions which make genuine consent possible are absent: physical safety, equal power with customers, and real alternatives.” While no doubt some women choose this line of work freely, they remain a very small minority.

When you operate within the framework of consent and choicebased rhetoric, there will still be women who meet the requirements for victim status but remain overlooked. This is one reason why the prevalence of sexual trafficking is underreported in the US. The TVPA law currently stipulates that in order to prosecute traffickers and receive aid themselves, victims must be either under 18 years of age, or prove that their entry into the commercial sex industry was the result of force, fraud, or coercion. But what happens to women who initially agreed to come to the United States to work in the commercial sex industry (migrant sex “workers”), but would never have given their consent had they known what slavelike and abusive conditions awaited them? These women technically qualify for benefits under the TVPA, but will have a very difficult time securing them since they can’t easily prove that coercion occurred as defined by the law.

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If the United States wishes to combat modern slavery, it should make exploitation, rather than force, fraud, or coercion the main consideration in possible trafficking cases. The United Nations already does this, and considers “consent” to be irrelevant in determining trafficking victim status. If the United States were to shift

What Love is Not... its emphasis away from proving force, fraud, or coercion toward establishing whether persons were being exploited for commercial sexual services, then far fewer victims would fall through our legislative cracks and it would be easier for law enforcement to prosecute sexual trafficking.

The fight for abolition is far from over. But it has at least begun.

For instance, in September Craigslist shuttered its adult services section after charges that it was being used to facilitate sexual trafficking. (Unfortunately, we have no doubt that others will fill the gap.) Also, in 2010 alone more than 40 human trafficking bills

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were enacted with over 350 introduced, in comparison to a mere eight human trafficking bills passed into law in 2006. And over 850 people were arrested in a three-day November 2010 sweep aimed at suppressing child prostitution. Clearly our government is taking steps to combat human trafficking, but it remains hampered by underreporting, underdefining, and a continued disinterest in linking sex trafficking to the larger commercial sex industry.

PORNOGRAPHY

ADDICTION

&

A SUPRANORMAL STIMULUS CONSIDERED IN THE CONTEXT OF NEUROPLASTICITY

By Donald L. Hilton Jr., MD

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Much of the consternation regarding whether compulsive sexual behavior (CSB) is an addiction or some milder malady likely relates to how we define the term itself. It is evident that the word ‘addiction’ has been reluctantly utilized in mental health nomenclature; one need look no further than the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for evidence of this. In past versions, addictive behavior was more diffusely described in various sections; the DSM-5 has changed this and has added a classification using the word addiction.

The DSM manuals have historically been atheoretical, that is, based on behavioral observation and interview rather than focusing on biological etiology. The practical significance is that the DSM can thus function as a manual for clinicians in the field; they can diagnose and treat mental illness, including addictive behavior, based on observation and interview, rather than by relying on diagnostic scans and laboratory results.

To understand why the word addiction has met resistance in this context, it is useful to consider its historical meaning in the lexicon.

An early, and possibly the first,

recorded use of the word addiction in a medical context was a statement in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1906: ‘It matters little whether one speaks of the opium habit, the opium disease, or the opium addiction’ (Jelliffe, 1906). While few now dispute using the word in relation to exogenously consumed substances of abuse, there has hitherto been a reticence regarding its application to what are now referred to as endogenous, process, or natural addictions.

In 1983, Patrick Carnes introduced the term ‘sexual addiction’ based on behavioral parameters (Carnes, 1983). Others have supported a behavioral model for sexual addiction; consider, for instance, the recent paper by Garcia and Thibaut, which stated, ‘The phenomenology of excessive nonparaphilic sexual disorder favors its conceptualization as an addictive behavior, rather than an obsessive-compulsive, or an impulse control disorder’ (Garcia & Thibaut, 2010).

Angres and Bettanardi-Angres (2008) defined addiction as ‘the continued use of mood-altering addicting substances or behaviors (e.g. gambling, CSBs) despite adverse consequences’, and Bostwick and

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Pornography Addiction

Human consumptive behavior regarding food and sex is more

complex than a

simple stimulus–response reflex.

Bucci (2008) have used the addition label in the context of Internet pornography. There is a growing tendency to apply the term sexual addiction to CSBs, with a realization that sexual motivation is complex, with affective, motivational, and cognitive factors affecting expression of the biologic drive to reproduce. For instance, Estellon and Mouras (2012) described a progressive convergence of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific perspectives as applied to sexual addiction.

Addiction neurobiologists increasingly support the concept of the existence of natural addictions, as functional and cellular evidence continues to accumulate. This model is based on a motivational platform emanating from a robustly conserved mesolimbic reward system, with a dopamine-mediated salience drive projecting from the midbrain to other systems essential to survival.

This process enables and enhances

neuronal learning through microand macro-neuroplastic change.

Addiction is no longer defined simply by behavioral criteria.

Human consumptive behavior regarding food and sex is more complex than a simple stimulus–response reflex. Georgiadis (2012) stated that human sexuality demonstrates ‘clear involvement of high end cerebral cortical areas, possibly hinting at high level “human functions,” like perspective taking’. Executive input from frontal regions can modulate the mesencephalic dopaminergic reward impetus projecting to the nucleus accumbens–ventral striatal reward region. Nevertheless, the powerful drives to eat and to procreate are successfully expressed in species that survive, and lines that do not reproduce with net-positive fertility rates, for whatever reason, become extinct. Regardless of how

What Love is Not... higher cortical function colors sex with other recreational nuances, evolutionary procreative pressures eventually trump purely recreational motives in biologically successful species, including humans.

The evidence supporting the concept of natural addiction is multithreaded, with the behavioral thread being only one component of the growing tapestry of supporting research. Functional imaging studies, correlated with behavior, are of obvious interest, but metabolic and genetic factors are becoming more relevant. It was over a decade ago that realization began to increase regarding the existence of process addictions (Holden, 2001). This awareness has engendered a maturation in understanding the role of the mesolimbic dopaminergic reward pathways in both drug and natural addictions (Nestler, 2005, 2008), a process that culminated in the American Society of Addiction Medicine’s (ASAM) definition in August 2011 (known as the ASAM long definition). The new ASAM definition describes addiction as

The new ASAM definition describes addiction as a chronic disease of the brain.

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a chronic disease of the brain that affects the reward, motivation, and memory systems, and combines both substance and behavioral addiction under a common umbrella.

The addition of a sub-section on behavioral addiction in the DSM-5 is also recognition of this change

cultural and political biases tend to minimize addictive sexual behavior. of perspective on natural addiction. However, this sub-section includes only one process addiction, pathological gambling (PG) (Reuter et al., 2005), while relegating Internet gaming disorder, overconsumtion of food and sex, and other process addictions to a section titled ‘Conditions for Further Study,’ or ignoring them completely. While it is consistent with recent behavioral and functional data that PG is now recognized as more closely modeling substance abuse rather than obsessive–compulsive disorders (El-Guebaly, Mudry, Zohar, Tavares, & Potenza, 2011), thus meriting the addiction label, it is inconsistent to deny the same label to Internet por-

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Pornography Addiction nography addiction. It is precisely this inconsistency that supports the premise that cultural and political biases tend to minimize addictive sexual behavior.

It is surprising that food addiction would not be included as a behavioral addiction, despite studies demonstrating dopaminergic receptor downregulation in obesity (Wang et al., 2001), with reversibility seen with dieting and normalization of body mass index (BMI) (Steele et al.,2010). The concept of a ‘supranormal stimulus’, invoking Nikolaas Tinbergen’s term (Tinbergen,1951),

‘Where is the

knowledge we have lost in information?’

has recently been described in the context of intense sweetness surpassing cocaine reward, which also supports the premise of food addiction (Lenoir, Serre, Laurine, & Ahmed,2007). Tinbergen originally found that birds, butterflies, and other animals could be duped into preferring artificial substitutes designed specifically to appear more

attractive than the animal’s normal eggs and mates. There is, of course, a lack of comparable functional and behavioral work in the study of human sexual addiction, as compared to gambling and food addictions, but it can be argued that each of these behaviors can involve supranormal stimuli. Deirdre Barrett (2010) has included pornography as an example of a supranormal stimulus.

Support for the existence of process addictions, though, has increased with our understanding of synaptic and dendritic plasticity. Is there evidence supporting the existence of pornography addiction? It depends on what one accepts, or can understand, as evidence, and this is a function of perspective and education. Perspective can introduce bias, and our perspectives are influenced by factors such as our personal educational and life experiences. What may be meaningless to one may be definitive proof to another depending on differences in knowledge that is esoteric to the field in question.

As T. S. Eliot said, ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ (T. S. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, opening stanza, 1934).

Information, or data, becomes knowledge as it is organized into theory and as theory is coalesced

What Love is Not... into belief systems, or paradigms.

Kuhn (1962/2012) noted that when established paradigms are challenged by anomalies, scientists tend to defend the status quo until it becomes apparent that emerging evidence and theory have rendered the status quo obsolete, thus precipitating a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are not painless, as Galileo, Ignaz Semmelweis, and others who challenged prevailing dogma learned.

Addiction’s initial paradigm was defined solely based on behavioral criteria. What Kuhn would term a paradigmatic ‘crisis’ has emerged with neuroscience developing what is essentially a parallel – and, obviously to the strict behavioralists, a competing – paradigm with the introduction of the concept of behavioral (process) addictions. From the neuroscience vantage point, these are indeed parallel, and even contiguous, paradigms, as former diagnostic criteria defining substance addiction appear to some (Garcia & Thibaut, 2010) to dovetail with those defining behavioral addictions.

The crisis exists in the strictly behavioral paradigm, particularly with regard to labeling CSBs as addictive.

For instance, a paper supporting the concept of natural addiction, specifically focusing on pornography

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The crisis exists in the

strictly

behavioral paradigm.

(Hilton & Watts, 2011), argued that both micro- and macro-neuroplasticity substantiate the existence of such addictions. A response (Reid, Carpenter, & Fong, 2011) countered that the studies cited supporting macroscopic neuroplasticity in addictive behaviors, being correlative, have no bearing on causation with regard to addiction. Focusing on any changes likely relating more to metabolic effects (high blood sugar, high lipid levels, and so on), this response is dismissive of a neuroplastic effect relating to learning. Skeptical of any natural addiction causing morphologic changes, they discount evidence corroborating the existence of food or exercise addiction, and specifically the inference that these behaviors could affect morphological changes in the brain. Interestingly, they admit that they are more accepting ‘of a causal mechanism …

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Pornography Addiction when substances are involved’, thus demonstrating the resistance that Kuhn predicted to changes in the old paradigm that substances alone can cause true addictions. This gap between the behavioral and biologic paradigms is further demonstrated in their assessment of the importance of molecular biology in the addiction debate. Strict behavioralists minimize the relevance of DeltaFosB, for instance, to addiction, and opine that DeltaFosB cannot inform the pornography debate because there

are no studies in humans specifically investigating DeltaFosB in the context of pornography.

In discussing their perspective, Reid et al. cite their own work and avoid identifying sexuality as potentially addictive. They see problematic consumptive behaviors, whether to cocaine, food, alcohol, or sex, as separate disorders (as per the DSM) and therefore resist any generalization as being ‘speculative not scientific’ (Reid et al., 2011). This stance is not surprising when considered

sex complex behaviors such as

promise to be a riddle for many long years to come’

What Love is Not... in the context of the paradigm in which they were trained, which has focused more on behavior rather than on integrating emerging biological evidence as well. The reader is encouraged to study the commentary on the Reid response by Hilton and Watts immediately following and contiguous with the response.

That a separate neuroscience addiction paradigm has emerged has provoked a Kuhnian crisis, as these views merge into a new and cohesive biological–behavioral paradigm defining addictions both to substances and to behaviors.

Another summary of the arguments against the concept of addictive sexuality is found in The Myth of Sex Addiction by David Ley. The book also describes CSBs from a behavioral vantage point, with neurobiological evidence informing debate on the existence of natural addiction being dismissed with the previously referenced quote from the Reid response to the Hilton-Watts editorial: ‘speculative not scientific’.

Interestingly, the brain is seen by Ley as a ‘complex, multidetermined “black box” that we are just barely beginning to understand … complex behaviors such as sex promise to be a riddle for many long years to come’ (Ley, 2012). Again, this

paradigmatic gap is seen in the veiling of neuroscience with a veneer of mystery and ‘riddle’, and a promise that we will not be able to understand sexual neuroscience for many years; certainly not now!

Rather than focusing on whether the addictive behavior involves injecting drugs or viewing highly

Addiction involves and alters

biology

at the

synaptic level. arousing sexual images, an increased knowledge of cellular mechanisms allows us to understand that addiction involves and alters biology at the synaptic level, which then affects subsequent behavior. Addiction neuroscience is now as much about neuronal receptor reactivity, modulation, and subsequent plasticity as it is about destructive and repetitive behavior.

Some demand a higher standard of proof for sex than for other behaviors and substances when it comes to defining addiction. For instance, a strictly behavioralist perspective was illustrated in declaring that for

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Pornography Addiction pornography to be labeled addictive, we would have to prospectively addict one cohort of children, protect another, functionally scan both cohorts before and after, and compare behavioral outcomes (Clark-Flory, 2012). Obviously, this study cannot be conducted, given the ethical issues involved. Yet, we presume that even those supporting this behavioral perspective would accept the premise that tobacco is addictive without demanding the same prospective, child-based study. In other words, where is the comparative prospective study with tobacco in children? The one that divides the children, gives half cigarettes, protects the others, and follows them longitudinally? It does not exist, of course, and never will, and therefore some will still say that smoking is not addictive. So said the seven tobacco executives in front of Henry Waxman’s subcommittee on Health and the Environment in 1994: in succession, each said ‘No’ when asked if smoking was addictive, included supporting expert testimony (UCSF Tobacco Control Archives, 1994). Yet based on an extensive body of research, virtually everyone – excluding these tobacco executives and their experts – believes that evidence exists for tobacco’s addictive properties. For

Where are the prospective

child-based cocaine, heroin, and alcohol studies?

that matter, where are the prospective child-based cocaine, heroin, and alcohol studies?

The main difference is that we now understand learning-mediated neuroplasticity and neuronal receptor reactivity, including nicotinic acetylcholine, opioid, glutamate, and dopamine receptors, much better than we did in the past. We can now see addiction, whether to smoking, cocaine, or sex, through the lens of the neural receptor and subsequent neuroplastic change, and not solely from a behavioral perspective.

To accept the evidence supporting the concept of sexual addiction, it is necessary to have an understanding of the current concepts of cellular learning and plasticity. Dendritic arborization and other cellular changes precede gyral sculpting (Zatorre, Field, & Johansen-Berg, 2012) with learning, and reward-based learning is no different. Addiction thus becomes a powerful form of learning, with the associated neuro-

What Love is Not... plasticity being detrimental (Kauer & Malenka, 2007). Addiction-related learning is merely an extension of reward-based learning in this model, and it therefore involves similar transcription factors and neurotransmitters. For instance, DeltaFosB was found over a decade ago to be chronically elevated specifically in the medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens in the brains of drug-addicted laboratory animals (Kelz et al., 1999). Subsequent studies have shown it to be elevated in these same cells in animals manifesting pathologic overconsumption of natural rewards, including food and sex (Nestler,2005).

Supraphysiologic levels of DeltaFosB appear to portend hyperconsumptive states of natural addiction (Nestler, 2008). That DeltaFosB is not only a marker but also a facilitator of hyperconsumptive behavior (as a neuroplasticity enabler) has

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been well demonstrated. Two closely related mechanisms have been used to genetically manipulate DeltaFosB independent of behavioral variables.

One involves producing lines of bitransgenic mice that selectively overexpress DeltaFosB specifically in the striatal reward areas, and the second involves the transfer of genes through adeno-associated viral vectors into adult animals, which then induce over- or underexpression of DeltaFosB. These genetically altered animals exhibit addictive hyperconsumptive behavior involving food (Olausson et al., 2006), wheel running (Werme et al.,2002), and sex (Wallace et al., 2008). For instance, when overexpression of DeltaFosB was imposed through these viral vectors in laboratory animals, they exhibited a supraphysiologic enhancement of sexual performance (Hedges, Chakravarty, Nestler, Meisel, 2009; Wallace et al., 2008).

Conversely, repression of DeltaFosB

Addictionrelated learning is merely an extension of reward-based learning in this model.

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Pornography Addiction decreases performance (Pitchers et al., 2010), thus confirming that it has a role in normal physiologic homeostasis.

It now appears that DeltaFosB is a molecular transcription switch that turns on other gene sets, which then mediate neuroplastic change in these neurons; in other words, they promote neuronal learning.

DeltaFosB increases dendritic spine density in medium spiny neurons in the nucleus accumbens in addicted animals during extended periods of abstinence through stimulation of the protein Cdk5, thus becoming a bridge to more extended neuroplasticity (Bibb et al., 2001; Norrholm et al., 2003). DeltaFosB has been shown to function in a positive feedback loop with Calcium/ Calmodulin-Dependent Protein Kinase II to effect neuroplastic cellular responses in cocaine addiction. Significantly, this association was also demonstrated, for the first time, in human cocaine addiction (Robison et al., 2013).

They exhibited a supraphysiologic enhancement of

Recent evidence has demonstrated that DeltaFosB is critical to this dendritic plasticity through its effect on the mesolimbic reward system in both sexual and drug rewards, an effect that is mediated by the D1 dopamine receptor in the nucleus accumbens (Pitchers et al., 2013).

Dopamine is critical in assigning salience to sexual cues (Berridge & Robinson, 1998), and recent studies support a physiologic role in sexual function as well through its effect on and interaction with the hypothalamic oxytocinergic systems (Baskerville, Allard, Wayman, & Douglas., 2009; Succu et al., 2007).

This influence has been broadly conserved across phyla (Kleitz-Nelson, Dominguez, & Ball, 2010; KleitzNelson, Dominguez, Cornil, & Ball, 2010, Pfaus,2010), ensuring that sex, which is essential to species survival, remains salient. Hypersexuality as a consequence of dopaminergic pharmacologic intervention is a known morbidity of such treatment, and it is related to ‘exaggerated cuetriggered incentive salience-based motivation’ (Politis et al., 2013). Addiction, of course, can be described as disordered salience. Instead of wanting that which will enhance survival, the addicted are motivated to

sexual performance.

What Love is Not...

In this,

sex is unique

among natural rewards, in that food reward did not cause this same persistent change in

synaptic plasticity. want even when it is clearly harmful, a neuroplastic process that recalibrates the hedonic set point.

that drug addiction usurps ancient incentive pathways that are essential to survival (Liedtke et al., 2011).

We see this neuroplasticity at the cellular level through dendritic arborization and other cellular changes that provide a neuroplastic ‘scaffolding’ of sorts for new synapses to form. Severe craving states associated with subsequent satiation have produced these micromorphologic changes, as demonstrated by such diverse depletion–repletion models as cocaine (Robinson & Kolb, 1999), amphetamine (Li, Kolb, & Robinson, 2003), salt (Roitman, Na, Anderson, Jones, & Berstein, 2002), and sex (Pitchers, Balfour et al., 2012). Salt depletion–repletion craving models have been shown to robustly mobilize the same gene sets activated by cocaine models, and this mobilization is attenuated by dopamine antagonists, suggesting

Glutamate receptor trafficking is indicative of synaptic plasticity. Sex, as a powerful brain reward, has shown evidence of increasing silent synapses, which manifest as an increase in the NMDA–AMPA receptor ratio, a harbinger of subsequent synaptic plasticity and learning as these synapses are subsequently unsilenced, similar to what occurs with cocaine use (Pitchers, Schmid et al., 2012).

Specifically, this ratio change was immediate and long-lasting, and it was found in nucleus accumbens neurons afferent to the prefrontal cortex, an area that is important in mediating CSBs (Pitchers, Schmid et al., 2012).

In this, sex is unique among natural rewards, in that food reward did not cause this same persistent change in synaptic plasticity (Chen et al.,2008).

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Pornography Addiction Critically, neuroplastic changes in both dendritic morphology and glutamate receptor trafficking were correlated with increased sexual experience and increased amphetamine sensitivity, another hallmark of addiction. Even after 28 days, when these changes receded, the sex-induced hypersensitivity to amphetamine persisted (Pitchers et al., 2013), further strengthening the evidence for natural addiction.

Neuroplasticity as a result of learning is seen not only with microcellular changes, such as with

‘Hypersexual syndrome’, while descriptive behaviorally, falls short of the term

‘sexual addiction’ in describing the current state of understanding of CSBs. arborization, but also macroscopically with gyral sculpting (Zatorre et al., 2012). Numerous studies over the last two decades have established the fact that learning physically changes the brain. Such diverse learning templates as music (Elbert, Pantev, Wien-

bruch, Rockstroh, & Taub, 1995; Schwenkreis et al., 2007), juggling (Draganski et al., 2004), taxi driving (Maguire, Woollett, & Spiers, 2006), and intense studying (Draganski et al., 2006) have all been shown to affect morphologic alterations in gyri, and negative neuroplasticity has been seen with disuse (Coq & Xerri, 1999).

This is consistent with Kauer and Malenka’s statement, in their paper on synaptic plasticity and addiction, that ‘addiction represents a pathologic but powerful form of learning and memory’ (Kauer & Malenka, 2007). It is therefore not surprising to learn that addiction studies correlate with cortical atresia macroscopically. Virtually every study on addiction has demonstrated atrophy of multiple areas of the brain, particularly those associated with frontal volitional control and the reward– salience centers. This is true for drug addictions such as to cocaine (Franklin et al., 2002), methamphetamine (Thompson et al., 2004), and opioids (Lyoo et al., 2005), and also for behavioral conditions associated with pathologic overconsumption of natural rewards and behaviors such as food (Pannacciulli et al., 2006), sex (Schiffer et al., 2007), and Internet addiction (Yuan, Quin, Lui, & Tian, 2011; Zhou et al., 2011).

What Love is Not...

Recovery from addiction has been correlated with positive neuroplastic changes as well, such as a return to more normal gyral volumes with recovery from methamphetamine addiction (Kim et al., 2006), and enlargement of gray matter after mindfulness therapy (Hölzel et al., 2011). This reversibility is supportive of causation despite the correlative intent of the study designs of these papers, as has been demonstrated in the learning plasticity studies previously cited.

Our brains naturally seek novelty, and sexuality can condition a powerful reward with novelty. Primitive organisms exhibit trophic behavior conducive to survival, and evidence exists of dopamine-related survival incentive in chordate ancestors.

Dopamine-powered motivation projected in early amniotes from the primitive mesencephalon to the progressively complex telencephalon throughout the course of phylogeny (Yamamoto & Vernier, 2011). Obviously, human sexual drive and subsequent volitional motivation and reward procurement are much more complex (Georgiadis, 2012) than unicellular trophism, but the more primitive mesolimbic dopaminergic salience centers share these basic drives.

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‘Hypersexual syndrome’, while descriptive behaviorally, falls short of the term ‘sexual addiction’ in describing the current state of understanding of CSBs. It ignores two decades of research about how

Pornography is a

perfect laboratory for this kind of novel learning fused with a powerful pleasure

incentive drive. learning changes the brain both micro- and macroscopically, and it does a disservice to both professionals and the public in inconsistently exempting the most powerful natural dopaminergic reward in the nervous system, sexual orgasm (Georgiadis, 2006), from neuroplastic learning.

Pornography is a perfect laboratory for this kind of novel learning fused with a powerful pleasure incentive drive. The focused searching and clicking, looking for the perfect masturbatory subject, is an exercise in neuroplastic learning.

Indeed, it is illustrative of Tinbergen’s concept of the ‘supranormal stimulus’ (Tinbergen, 1951), with plastic surgery–enhanced breasts

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Pornography Addiction

Today

real

naked women are just

bad porn.

presented in limitless novelty in humans serving the same purpose as Tinbergen’s and Magnus’s artificially enhanced female butterfly models; the males of each species prefer the artificial to the naturally evolved (Magnus, 1958; Tinbergen, 1951).

In this sense, the enhanced novelty provides, metaphorically speaking, a pheromone-like effect in human males, like moths, which is ‘inhibiting orientation’ and ‘disrupting premating communication between the sexes by permeating the atmosphere’ (Gaston, Shorey, & Saario,1967).

Consider hypothetically two individuals, frantically fixated to their computers, both trying to win an intermittently reinforced reward.

Both spend hours a night at their task, and have for some period, to the point of exhaustion. Work and personal relationships are affected negatively, yet they cannot stop. One is looking at pornography, searching for just the right clip for sexual consummation; the other is engrossed in

an online poker game. One reward is masturbatory, and the monetary, yet the DSM-5 classifies only the poker as an addiction. This is both behaviorally and biologically inconsistent.

Even public opinion seems to be trying to describe this biologic phenomenon, as in this statement from Naomi Wolf; ‘For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today real naked women are just bad porn’ (Wolf,2003). Just as Tinbergen’s and Magnus’s ‘butterfly porn’ successfully competed for male attention at the expense of real females (Magnus, 1958; Tinbergen, 1951), we see this same process occurring in humans.

Even if pornography can become addictive, the question remains for some, can it be harmful? The content of the most popular pornography currently consumed does appear to overwhelmingly portray aggression toward women (Bridges, Wosnitzer, Scharrer, Chyng, & Liberman, 2010), and, in homosexual pornography, men (Kendall, 2007). The Hald meta-analysis supports the premise that pornography does indeed increase attitudes of aggression toward women (Hald, Malamuth, & Yuen, 2010), as does the paper from Foubert and col-

What Love is Not... leagues (Foubert, Brosi, & Bannon, 2011). The Hald report concludes, ‘In contrast to the earlier meta-analysis, the current results showed an overall significant positive association between pornography use and attitudes supporting violence against women in nonexperimental studies’ (Hald et al., 2010). Consistent with this pattern of aggression in pornography, the Bridges et al.’s (2010) study found that a

...with many universities now hosting and sponsoring

‘sex weeks’. representative sample of scenes from the top 250 selling and renting pornographic films from 2004 to 2005 revealed that 41% of the scenes depicted rectal followed by oral penetration, thus exposing the woman not only to a misogynistic and demeaning role, but to potentially pathogenic coliform bacteria as well (Bridges et al., 2010).

This information has negative implications, in that the vast majority of college-aged males, and a growing

number of females, use pornography regularly (Carroll et al., 2008). Indeed, pornography has passed from toleration and acceptance to preference, with many universities now hosting and sponsoring ‘sex weeks’.

Having dismissed any reticence to pornography as a Victorian moralistic, value-laden infringement on First Amendment rights, any objections to pornography are not taken seriously. Thus, potential harms to an individual’s mental and emotional well-being are never discussed.

Since these young people, through the brain’s mirror systems, ‘resonate with the motivational state of individuals depicted’ in these films (Mouras et al., 2008), the aggression increasingly inherent in pornography may portend negative emotional, cultural, and demographic effects.

These issues warrant greater respect for the power of natural addictions, which can, as their substance counterparts do, ‘change the stamp of nature’ (William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4). Sex, like drug rewards, places its stamp on neuronal receptors, dendrites, and gyri as it facilitates neuroplastic change, thus meriting the addiction label when compulsively and destructively expressed.

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Pornography Addiction

Paradigm shifts are usually best viewed historically, after those who cling to outdated paradigms have become irrelevant. During the shifts, crisis and tension predominate, clouding the significance of the shift in the present. Nevertheless, the new combined paradigm that amalgamates addictions to both substances and behaviors is beginning to assert itself, as seen in the new ASAM definition. The DSM’s monopoly on defining all the parameters of mental illness, including whether or not biological considerations may contribute, is dissolving as a result of inconsistencies in the latest edition.

It is not surprising that Thomas Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, has lamented this continued deficiency in the DSM in stating,” A diagnostic approach based on the biology as well as the symptoms must not be constrained by the current DSM categories…”

(April 29, 2013,http://www.nimh. nih.gov/about/director/2013/ transforming-diagnosis.shtml). The dismissal of a biological contribution to mental illness through the

‘We understand

so much more about the

brain DSM’s silence and continued atheoretical stance is actually accentuating and accelerating the realization that a new combined paradigm is emerging. This is illustrated in the recent Scientific American article decrying the DSM’s ‘fundamental flaw: it says nothing about the biological underpinnings of mental disorders’ (Jabr,2013). As Bruce Cuthbert stated, ‘We understand so much more about the brain than we used to. We are really in the middle of a big shift’ (Jabr, 2013). Indeed, it is a paradigm shift, and as understanding of the power of the supranormal stimulus in the context of neuroplastic change continues to emerge, the contrast will be ever clearer.

What Love is Not...

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than we used to. We are really in the

middle of a

big shift’

Pornography and

Violence: at Research k o o L w e N A

By Mary Anne Layden , PhD Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopa thology Program Center for Cognitive Th erapy Department of Psychi atry, University of Pe nnsylvania . Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research Mary Anne Layden, PhD Director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program Center for Cognitive Therapy Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania 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.

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

What Love is Not...

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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.

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, joy, fear, disgust, or sexual tension. 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 it and add it to our sexual template and repertoire.

Learning is also better if we see role models perform a behavior.

Seeing them rewarded or punished will have some of the same effects on us as if we were rewarded or punished. We don’t have to directly experience those rewards and consequences. We learn to repeat or avoid those behaviors by seeing their effect on others.

images, ar

ousal

ers, h t o f o e xampl

the e

reinforcement, and reward

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research Finally, we learn better when the learning is rewarded. Imagery which contains role models who are demonstrating sexual behavior, who are rewarded for it, which 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, and reward—so it is a potent teacher of both beliefs and behaviors. It provides the ideal conditions for learning.

that it doesn’t

haunyrotne,

and th at ever ybody

is

doing it.

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

What Love is Not...

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, and thus give 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 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 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, 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. 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, even if the pornography is not illegal or pathological.

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, domestic violence, prostitution, sexual deviance, drinking, and physically risky behavior.

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research Pornography and Attitudes to

Sexual Violen ce The rape myth is a set of beliefs that women are responsible for rape, like to be raped, want to be raped, and suffer few negative outcomes because of it. A number of studies have looked at the acceptance of the rape myth after exposing the subjects to sexual imagery, both violent and non-violent, and after one also asked subjects about their typical pornography use.

Males shown imagery of a woman aroused by sexual violence and then shown pornography that involved rape were more likely than those who hadn’t, to say that the rape victim suffered less and that she enjoyed it, and that women in general enjoy rape. Japanese males exposed to a depiction of rape in which the woman enjoyed the rape were more likely to believe that women in general enjoy rape, and that they make false accusations of rape when compared to males exposed to a depiction in which the women showed pain.

Males who viewed sexual violence obtained higher scores both on scales measuring acceptance of interpersonal violence and the rape myth, when compared to males who viewed either a physically violent or a neutral film.5 The increase in attitudes supporting sexual violence following exposure to pornography is greater if the pornography is violent than if it is non-violent.

A similar effect is seen even when the pornography is not violent.

Males who are shown non-violent scenes that sexually objectified and degraded women and were then exposed to material that depicted rape indicated that the rape victim experienced pleasure and “got what she wanted.”7 Even women who were exposed to pornography as a child have a greater acceptance of the rape myth than those who were not.8 Those exposed to pornography recommend a sentence for a rapist that was half of that recommended

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by those who had been shown non-pornographic imagery. These subjects appear to have trivialized the crime of rape.

One study not only exposed subjects to pornographic imagery but also asked them about their typical pornography use.10 These studies indicate that the use of pornography, even that which does not include sexual violence, changes beliefs about rape and sexual violence. If women like to be High pornography users were higher than low pornography users in acceptance of the rape myth, acceptance of violence against women, adversarial sex beliefs, reported likelihood of committing rape and forced sex acts, and sex callousness.

High pornography users who were shown non-violent dehumanizing pornography show higher scores in reported likelihood of rape, sex callousness, and sexually aggressive behaviors than high pornography users who weren’t shown pornography raped and deserve to be raped, there is no need for sexual restraint or frustration of sexual desire.

Pornography and Sexual Violence

s r o i v a h e B Rape pornography teaches men that when a woman says no, the man does not need to stop. So a man may learn that there is no need to pay attention to a woman who is resisting, crying, screaming, struggling, or saying no, because ultimately she wants it and will enjoy it. He can conclude that her resistance is a sham and is part of a sex dance that leads to orgasm. He may assume that even her resistance is sexy and sexually arousing because it is part of the sexual template. In other words, pornography makes violence sexy.

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research Sexual violence attitudes lead to an increased likelihood of violent sexual behavior. Some studies have looked at likelihood measures while other studies have looked at actual (self-reported) behaviors.

Pornography can start to cross the line between thought and behavior in the kinds of fantasies that can produce an erection. One study exposed males to an arousing rape or non-rape presentation and then asked them to try to reach as high a level of sexual arousal as they could without any direct stimulation of the penis.

In doing so, those who had been exposed to the rape presentation created more sexually violent fantasies than those exposed to the non-rape presentation. For these males, rape fantasies were now part of their sexual template.

Adult se x offend ers show a high r ed ate of u sing

HARD-

CORE pornog raphy incest

offend

%), rapists (83

ers (53 %),

:

7%), 6 ( ters s e l mo d l i h c cantly fi i n g i were s e than s u n i ) higher s(29% r e d n ffe non-o

What Love is Not...

For these males,

99

s e i s a t n a f e rap

part were now of their

sexual template.

Another study examined measures of the likelihood of future sexually violent behavior as well as past actual sexually violent behaviors. It found that all types of pornography (soft core, hard core, violent, and rape) are correlated with using verbal coercion, drugs, and alcohol to sexually coerce women. The likelihood of forcing a woman sexually was correlated with the use of hard core, violent, and rape pornography. The likelihood of raping a woman was correlated with the use of all types of pornography, including soft-core pornography. All types of pornography other than soft core were correlated with actual rape. Those reporting higher exposure to violent pornography are six times more likely to report having raped than those reporting low exposure.

Similarly, men who engaged in date rape reported that they “very frequently� read Playboy, Penthouse, Chic, Club, Forum, Gallery, Genesis, Oui, or Hustler.

The correlation between rape rates and circulation rates for eight pornographic magazines (the same magazines minus Hustler) indicated that states with higher circulation rates had higher rape rates. Adolescent boys who read pornographic material were more likely to be involved in active sexual violence.

Juvenile sex offenders (juvenile rapists and child molesters) were more likely to have been exposed to pornography (42% had been exposed) than juveniles who were not sex offenders (29%) and also to have been exposed at an early age (five to eight years old),

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research­­ while juvenile child molesters had been more frequently exposed to pornography than those who did not molest children.

Another study reported that 29 of the 30 juveniles studied had been exposed to X-rated magazines or videos, and the average age of first exposure was about 7.5 years.18 Only 11% of juvenile sex offenders said they did not use sexually explicit material. Ironically, given these figures, exposing adults to pornography decreases the number who believe that pornography needs to be restricted from children.20 Similarly, adult sex offenders showed a high rate of using hard-core pornography: child molesters (67%), incest offenders (53%), rapists (83%) were significantly higher in use than non-offenders (29%). Child molesters (37%) and rapists (35%) were more likely to use pornography as an instigator to offending than were incest offenders (13%).

12%

er e abus h t d i a s d the imitate

y h p a r rnog

po

d to meone had trie and 14% said so

g em to do n i h t e force th som he had

seen

in it.

Pornography’s effect depends not just what you are exposed to but also how often. The more frequently men used pornography and the more violent the pornography they It is an interesting finding that while these offenders used rape and child pornography to instigate their offenses, they did not exclusively do so, they often used adult and consensual pornography. Even adult consensual

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Pornography’s

effect

s epend als’ also d u individ upon

s

ic t s i r e t c a r a ch

pornography can be used to instigate these offenses. used, the more likely they were to coercive others into sex, including to use of physical coercion (i.e., rape).

Pornography’s effect also depends upon individuals’ characteristics as well as their use of pornography. Males who were high in hostile masculinity and sexual promiscuity and who used pornography frequently were significantly more likely to have physically and sexually aggressed than males who were low in these factors. (This study was unable to determine if those individual characteristics, hostile masculinity and promiscuity, might have been produced by pornography use at an earlier point in life.)

Much of the research has focused on the males who perpetrate the behaviors. However, there are studies that have focused on the female victims. One questioned 100 women who presented to a rape crisis center. 28% said that their abuser used pornography; 58% did not know if he used pornography or not. Of those whose abuser used pornography, 40% said the pornography was part of the abuse, being used either during the abuse or just prior to it, and 43% said that it affected the nature of the abuse. None of them thought it decreased the frequency of the abuse, but 21% thought it increased the frequency, and 14% believed it increased the level of violence. In fact, 18% thought their abuser became more sadistic with the use of pornography. Of the total, 12% said the abuser imitated the pornography and 14% said someone had tried to force them to do something he had seen in pornography.

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research Another study found that 24% of women surveyed indicated that they had been upset by someone trying to get them to do something they had seen in pornography. Those who said this were more likely to have been victims of threatened or actual sexual assault.

A meta-analysis of thirty-three studies (meta-analyses examine findings across a large number of studies) revealed that exposure to either violent or nonviolent pornography increase behavioral aggression having the strongest negative effect. These patterns are seen in adults and in minors, and are found in studies focused on perpetrators and victims.

The use of child pornography is a good predictor of who might get the diagnosis of pedophilia. It appears to be a better predictor than having raped a child. Individuals who use child pornography, whether or not they have offended against children, are more likely to be pedophiles than individuals who have offended against children but do not use child pornography. Fantasy can be a more accurate predictor than behavior, possibly because individuals have more options and more control of their options in fantasies than in behaviors that depend upon the availability of others.

Pedophilia, Sexual Harassment, and

ce n e l o i c i V omest

D

Rape is not the only form of sexual violence perpetrated against women affected by the use of pornography. Many women will be sexually harassed on their jobs and elsewhere. The likelihood of sexually harassing another is significantly correlated with the volume of past exposure to sexually explicit materials.

Domestic violence is another form of violence against women, and like the others it is increased by the use of pornography. The violence may typically be physical and emotional, but these are

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often combined with sexual violence. Battered women experienced significantly more sexual violence than women who were not battered. For example, 39% of the battered women said that their partners had tried to get them to act out pornographic scenes they’d been shown, as compared to 3% of other women.

40%

of abuse d women

indicated

that their partner u sed

t n e l o i v pornography.

The batterer’s use of pornography and alcohol significantly increases a battered woman’s odds of being sexually abused. Pornography alone increases the odds by a factor of almost two, and the combination of pornography and alcohol increases the odds by a factor of three.

Forty percent of abused women indicated that their partner used violent pornography. Of those whose partners used pornography, 53% said that they had been asked or forced to enact scenes that they had been shown and 26 percent had been 27 Seto, Cantor & Blanchard (2006) 28 Barak, Fisher, Belfry & Lashambe (1999) 29 Sommers & Check (1987) 30 Sommers & Check (1987) 31 Shope (2004) reminded of pornography by abuser during the abuse. Of the forty percent of the abused women had been raped, 73 percent stated that their partners had used pornography.

These studies may not indicate that pornography causes battering but they do suggest that battering may be expanded to include sexual violence when pornography is involved.

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research­­

Prostitution, partners, and deviance Men who go to prostitutes are twice as likely to have watched a pornographic movie over the last year (66%) than a national sample (33%). Men who go to prostitutes frequently are more likely to have seen a pornographic movie (74%) than those who have gone to a prostitute only once (53%). The same pattern is seen with the use of pornographic magazines; men who go to prostitutes frequently are more likely to have seen a pornographic magazine in the last year (75%) than men who have gone to a prostitute only once (56%).

Exposure to pornography leads men to rate their female partners as less attractive than they would have had they not been exposed and to be less satisfied with their partners’ attractiveness, sexual performance, and level of affection, and expressed a greater desire for sex without emotional involvement. Undergraduate men who regularly viewed pornography spontaneously generated more sexual terms to describe the construct “women” than did those who viewed pornography less regularly.

Paraphilias are psychiatric disorders of sexuality as defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Paraphilia used to be called sexual perversion or sexual deviance. These are behaviors in which the object of the sexual desire is abnormal (e.g., an animal), or the behavior itself is sexually abnormal (e.g., sadomasochism). Some paraphilias can be engaged in alone (e.g., fetishism), and some involve people who do not consent (e.g., exhibitionism).

Sexual deviance can be learned. Some men may initially look at deviant pornography out of curiosity. Some may move up to harder kinds because softer material no longer arouses them. Either way they may learn deviant beliefs and behavior from it. Things that used to lead to disgust now seem less unusual and more common

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and even normal, and over time, come to seem sexy. Through pornography males who would never have considered sex that involves feces (coprophilia), urine (urophilia), and animals (bestiality) may now learn about, get aroused by, and engage in these very things.

Individuals who already suffer from these deviances significantly prefer pornography that portrays their own deviance, but they also like other deviant pornography, especially sadomasochistic pornography, though to a lesser extent. Those who were exposed to pornography were more likely to believe that unusual and pathological sexual behaviors were more common and more normal. These beliefs are permission-giving beliefs and become releasers of behavior. The frequency of sex with animals, sex in groups, and sex with violence was double in those exposed to deviant pornography when compared to those who were not.

Relationships, W omen’s

Liberation, and Risky Behavior The use of pornography has several other negative effects. One is a changed understanding of relationships. For males, more pornography use was associated with greater acceptance of sex outside of marriage for married individuals, greater acceptance of sex before marriage, and less child-centeredness during marriage.

The reduced desire for children is especially pronounced in a reduced desire for female children.

Those who were shown pornography reduced their support for the women’s liberation movement. This is true for both men and women.

For males, more pornography use is correlated with more alcohol use and more binge drinking.

Pornography also encourages physically risky behavior. In pornography no one is shown contracting and dying from AIDS, and no negative consequences are ever shown for having deviant kinds of sex.

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Pornography and Violence: A New Look at Research Yet deviant kinds of sexual behavior carry a number of physical risks. The most obvious one is acquiring sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV. These can lead to other diseases and disorders (e.g. cervical cancer and infertility). Sexual behavior involving feces and urine can lead to influenza, pneumonia, hepatitis A, hepatitis C, and intestinal parasites. Anal sex can cause ripping of the anal tissue, anal fissures, and puncturing of internal organs.

The tearing of anal tissue makes it easier for the HIV virus to enter the body.

For example, pornography portrays sex with as many strangers as possible as normal, desirable, and without consequences, and those who use pornography do have more sex partners than other people. The factor most associated with HIV transmission is increased number of partners.

Portra ys sex with as man y

strangers p as

s s o

. e l b i

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Summary The large body of research on pornography reveals that it functions as a teacher of, a permission-giver for, and a trigger of many negative behaviors and attitudes that can severely damage not only the users but many others, including strangers. The damage is seen in men, women, and children, and in both married and single adults. It involves pathological behaviors, illegal behaviors, and some behaviors that are both illegal and pathological. Pornography is an equal opportunity and very lethal toxin.

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All content found in these pages is the original property of its creators and owners. Articles and other texts were collected and organized for the compilation of this book, which was created as a student design project.

Some texts have been condensed, reformated, and edited to increase readability.

A special thanks to the following companies and individuals who’s content has been included: Robert W. Peters, Laura J. Lederer, Shane Kelly, Donna Rice Hughes, Pamela Anderson, Rabbi Shmuley

Univers

This book was printed, bound, and distributed by Blurb Inc. It was produced in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

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