Pornography, now deeply embedded in American culture, is considered in some quarters a harmless private pleasure, but there is new evidence that porn causes psychological damage to those who consume it.
Citing numerous academic studies and her own clinical practice, Dr. Mary Anne Layden, a psychotherapist and director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program, says that porn meets all the clinical definitions for addiction except that obscene images can never be detoxed from the addict’s brain.
“There is no credible evidence to suggest that porn does not in some way damage everybody who looks at it,” she told The Washington Examiner at a recent press conference on Capitol Hill sponsored by the Coalition for the War Against Illegal Pornography.
“There’s always an escalation process. We don’t know what the threshold is, and those with addictive personalities will start it earlier. But I see a lot of people who didn’t show any psychological problems before [viewing porn],” she said.
Viewers are not porn’s only victims. To feed this $7 billion industry, teenage girls and women can be held in sexual bondage right under the noses of local authorities.
Attorney Laura Lederer, a former State Department advisor on human trafficking who has studied the adult industry for two decades, warns that “we are now midway into a mass social experiment. Porn has become the major form of sex education for boys and increasingly for girls as well.”
If so, we’re in big trouble. One study found that 29 of 30 juvenile sex offenders had been exposed to X-rated material. The average age of exposure was seven-and-a-half.
Lederer notes that 90 percent of adult porn scenes now depict either physical violence or verbal aggression that meet the common definition of assault, but thanks to the industry’s well-financed marketing machine, few porn makers are ever charged.
Former porn star Shelley Lubben says it took her eight years to recover from the physical and emotional trauma she suffered while making porn films.
“I was hit, spit on and penetrated in every imaginable way in every orifice and totally humiliated,” she told reporters.
Now married to a pastor’s son and the mother of three daughters, Lubben has made it her life’s mission to reach out to those still trapped in the sex industry. Her Pink Cross Foundation offers help to porn workers whose lives are threatened if they try to leave.
She has particular disdain for government officials and corrupt physicians in California’s San Fernando Valley, where 85 percent of the world’s adult pornography is produced.
“Porn is not glamorous,” Lubben says. “It destroys human lives and is destroying our nation.”
And, you may be surprised to learn, it’s illegal.
Patrick Trueman, former chief of the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section who now runs PornHarms.com, says the government’s failure to enforce existing obscenity laws is making things worse.
“I’ve read virtually everything the U.S. Supreme Court has said about pornography, and the court has never said that it is protected speech. It is not,” Trueman says. “Much of the hard-core porn readily available via the Internet, cable TV and adult bookstores would not be produced if federal prosecutors cracked down on producers under existing statutes.”
On the rare occasions that big-time porn producers and major distributors are prosecuted, he added, “DOJ wins virtually every case because community standards come into play. When prosecutors bring cases, they help establish community standards. When they refuse to prosecute, they help establish the community standard as ‘anything goes.'”
There’s ample evidence that porn harms men, women and children. As coalition member Donna Rice Hughes puts it, “Enough is enough.”
Barbara F. Hollingsworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
