War on porn!

Is this a battle the FBI should be fighting?
By BrIAN Alexander
MSNBC contributor

We have the War on Terror, the War on
Drugs, the War on Crime, and now, the
War on Porn.
In a Sept. 20 story in the Washington Post,
writer Barton Gellman revealed that the FBI
has signed onto the Bush administration’s
War on Porn by recruiting agents for a
special anti-obscenity squad. And they
won’t just be looking for child porn,
either, but pornography for grown-ups,
made by grown-ups, featuring grown-ups.
Critics say the specter of 10 G-Men
hunched over video screens watching
porn princess Raylene diddle the pool
boy may not be the best use of the
FBI’s time. Advocates say it’s long
past time the government cracked down
because pornography can turn people
into sexual predators.
Anti-porn crusades have been tried before,
of course. During the Reagan
administration, for example, attorney
general Edwin Meese III convened a
controversial study panel to examine
the effects of pornography and
suggest ways to prosecute purveyors.
In the end, nothing much came of it.
Certain fundamentalist religious groups
and strains of feminists never gave up,
however, and now Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales, spurred by
congressional legislation, has taken
up the cause.
But if sources for the Post story are
any indication, FBI director Robert
Mueller may have a tough time finding
agents who take the job seriously. Not
only are they more focused on, say,
rooting out terrorists and making sure
CEOs don’t run off with the
shareholders’ dough, but an awful lot of
the FBI no doubt have some personal
experience with porn.
“Honestly,” Gellman quotes one,
“most of the guys would have to recuse
themselves.”
A danger to society?Of course, if porn
really is such a danger to society, the
effort might be worth it. The problem
is, the research doesn’t support the worry.
And if recent studies by Danish
psychologist Gert Martin Hald of the
University of Aarhus stand up, it’s not
likely to.
Hald recently conducted a
yet-to-be-published study on the usage
of porn by men and women in Denmark
that showed porn has become a part
of the sexual lives of most people.
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In a representative sampling of 688
young people aged 18 to 30, he found
that 98 percent of men and 80 percent
of women had viewed porn. About
half of those women used it at least
once per month. Men used it much
more often. About 38 percent of men
used it three times per week or more,
which makes you wonder what these
guys do for a living.
We’re not talking Playboy, either.
Hald didn’t count such images as
pornography. For the purposes of the
study, porn included “any kind of
material which aims to create or enhance
sexual feelings or thoughts in the recipient
and, at the same time, (a) contains
explicit exposure and/or descriptions
of the genitals and (b) clear and explicit
sexual acts such as vaginal intercourse,
anal intercourse, oral sex, masturbation,
bondage, sadomasochism, rape..."
(Interestingly, this is pretty close to the
definition used in many obscenity statutes.)
“Especially we were surprised that so
many women had used pornography and
used it on a regular basis,”
Hald told MSNBC.com. Men don’t have
much room for an increase.
“Ceiling effect,” Hald joked.
Men do use porn differently from women.
Men tend to avoid “chick porn” that depicts
deep relationships. They like porn women
fast and loose and willing to go nasty,
largely because men use porn as
masturbation aids more often than women,
who tend to view it with a partner.
In fact, only 17 percent of female viewers
in Hald’s study used it alone.
No hike in sex crimesSo if all those
people are seeing all that porn, you'd
think Denmark would be a chaos of sex
crime. But it's not. In fact, in an influential
1991 study, Hald's (now deceased)
compatriot Berl Kutchinsky of the
University of Copenhagen concluded that
in the United States, Denmark, Sweden
and West Germany more and more porn
did not equal more and more rape.
"In none of the countries did rape increase
more than nonsexual violent crimes,"
he wrote. "This finding in itself would
seem sufficient to discard the
hypothesis that pornography causes rape."
But it didn't, of course, and some lab
studies did show that exposure to
especially violent or degrading porn
beefed up male aggressiveness toward
women, though a link with actual crime
was tough to prove.
Eight years later, a lengthy 1999 paper by
Milton Diamond of the University of
Hawaii's Pacific Center for Sex and
Society and Ayako Uchiyama of Japan's
National Institute of Police Science
backed up Kutchinsky and found that
more porn in Japan did not make for
more sex crimes.
"In sum," they said, "the concern that
countries allowing pornography would
show increased sex crime rates due to
modeling or that adolescents in particular
would be negatively vulnerable to and
receptive to such models or the society
would be otherwise adversely affected
has not been vindicated. It is certainly
clear from our data and analysis that a
massive increase in available
pornography in Japan has been correlated
with a dramatic decrease in sexual crimes."
An earlier study by Hald on the effects
of porn might explain why. In this study,
he exposed volunteer subjects
— a representative sample larger than many
other such studies — to video clips
from those classics of cinema, Latex and
Gigantic.
Hald's conclusions: “The study failed to
confirm commonly feared adverse effects
of exposure to pornography on nearly
all measures. More specifically, the study
failed to find any immediate main or
stratified effects of exposure to
pornography in regard to the following
dependent variables: Acceptance of
Interpersonal Violence, Gender Stereotypes,
Negative Attitudes Toward Women,
Positive Emotionality,
Rape Myth Acceptance
[belief in the myth that women secretly
want to be raped], and Sexism.”
In other words, looking at porn did not
turn men into rapists. It did not make
them want to become rapists.
There was one potentially important
exception. In a certain subset of people,
those whose personality profiles ranked
low on “agreeableness,” which Hald
defines as “altruistic, modest, trusting,
empathic, compliant, polite,” the porn
did seem to “have a moderating effect
on the relationship between
Agreeableness and Rape Myth
Acceptance (RMAS).”
After performing statistical corrections,
however, “all previous significant
moderating effects of exposure to
pornography turned non-significant i.e.
disappeared.”
So what does that mean, exactly?
I asked Hald if people who are not very
agreeable come to accept the rape myth
after viewing porn and might be more
inclined to commit a sex crime.
“No. It is not a causal connection,"
he says. "Having a high level of rape
supportive attitudes does not in and of
itself lead to sexual aggression such as
rape. Nor can you infer a causal
connection between low agreeableness,
viewing porn and having higher rape
supportive attitudes.” Agreeableness,
he says, is but one of many factors
determining the RMAS score.
A popular pastimeSo it seems adult porn
consumed by adults doesn’t do much
of anything other than get people worked
up and make them wish their partners
looked a lot more like Lexington Steele
or Cinnabunz.
Well, you might say, Hald works in
Denmark. And you know the Danish,
all liberal and Euro and so very different
from us. But Hald is now working at
UCLA as a visiting researcher and, he says,
“I strongly believe social context [and]
norms are factors influencing the effects
of pornography and consumption rates.”
But, he says, in both Denmark and the U.S.
“we see time and again high prevalence
rates of porn consumption, a general lack
of research showing consistent adverse
effects of pornography for the general
consumer, and that individual differences
are important mediators of effects.
Research shows that this holds true for
both the American and the Danish context.”
Maybe that special FBI squad should
plant porn inside terrorist cells.
You know, keep 'em busy.
LINK:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9504659/
I find it hard To believe the people staring
in these movies were not abused as a child
or have been coerced into it.
These movies will cause violence and rape
as it does send the wrong messages.
Sex is not as easily obtained as they may
believe from these fantasy movies.