Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography (9/10)

Watching sex : how men really respond to pornography / David Loftus


The Public Debate: What Did Everyone Get Wrong About Men Who Use Pornography? (Continued)

"Porn Causes Men to be Violent

A more serious charge than the notion that pornography portrays violence is that it causes violence in the real world. Declares Dworkin, 'men believe . . . that they have the right to rape' and 'men really believe they have the right to hit and to hurt.' Not some men, not men who are addicted to pornography—just men, period. And in case you thought Dworkin was being careless, she writes elsewhere: “Pacifist males are only apparent exceptions; repelled by some forms of violence as nearly all men are, they remain impervious to sexual violence as nearly all men do.”...

The argument rests partly upon laboratory studies that suggest a connection between the consumption of pornography and increased callousness toward women, greater propensity to rape or to discount the seriousness of rape, and a taste for increasing violence. Second, opponents of porn list real-life examples in which pornography played an apparent role in a particular man’s violence against women—a serial killer, usually—as well as a few studies that suggest ordinary men have “gotten ideas” from pornographic material and forced their partners to participate.

The primary lab research to which critics of pornography refer has been conducted by Edward Donnerstein, Neil Malamuth, Dolf Zillon, Daniel Linz, and others. This is not the place to discuss the weaknesses of these studies at length, particularly when they have already been extensively critiqued by others. (See, for example, Bill Thompson’s Soft Core and Alison King’s essay, “Mystery and Imagination: the case of pornography effects studies,” in Assiter and Carol’s Bad Girls and Dirty Books.)

Suffice it to say that most studies have used college students, who were handy for researchers but might not accurately represent the pop ulation at large. Young adults in their late teens and early twenties tend to be sexually and romantically inexperienced. They probably have unclear ideas about what they might or might not do, and what is and is not acceptable behavior. Critics of pornography usually fail to note that female college students in these surveys sometimes show as much heightened aggression, arousal, and callousness as males...

To accept the antiporn case, one must presume that the “propaganda” of pornography was somehow more influential in these [male serial killers' lives than the violence and humiliation they suffered at the hands of real people. “Our research has shown that virtually all serial killers inc from dysfunctional backgrounds of sexual or physical abuse, drugs or alcoholism,” says the FBI’s John Douglas. “I’m not going to tell you that pornography fuels the desires of someone who wasn’t already thinking in that direction.”

Plus, as Alison King points out, “the fairly strong consensus among researchers is that sex offenders invariably had less exposure to pornography than the average male—a point accepted even by the Meese Commission.” This seems counter to common sense, but a study by Kant and Goldstein showed that sex offenders tended to grow up in households where there was almost no discussion of sexuality, and the values were traditional and conservative...

Furthermore, focusing on isolated killers ignores the hundreds of thousands—even millions—of men who look at pornography and never abuse their partners and acquaintances—men similar to most of the males in my survey. It is easy to say killers like Bundy and Bernardo were fans of pornography and leave it at that; few acknowledge that men like theologian Paul Tillich, jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong, and symphony conductor Eugene Goossens were, too...

Ann Rule, who knew Bundy personally and wrote a biography of him, is convinced he was merely spinning another tale with his eleventh-hour confession” about pornography:

'I wish that I could believe his motives were altruistic. But all I can see in that Dobson tape is another Ted Bundy manipulation of our minds. The effect of the tape is to place, once again, the onus of his crimes—not on himself—but on us. I don’t think pornography caused Ted Bundy to kill thirty-six or one hundred or three hundred women. . . . The blunt fact is that Ted Bundy was a liar. He lied most of his life, and I think he lied at the end.'...

When MacKinnon writes that “sooner or later, all men want to do what they see in pornography,” if she means they want to try some of the sex acts with a consenting partner, and see ecstasy on a woman’s face, then the men in my survey would agree. But just before that sentence MacKinnon refers to “murdering a young woman. . . raping her, having vaginal and anal intercourse with her corpse, and chewing on several parts of her body”; and I cannot say a single man in my survey mentioned this as a cherished fantasy...

The 1992 University of Chicago Sex in America survey indicated that between 1942 and 1992 the number of men and women who reached the age of twenty and were still virgins had risen steadily, with the proportion of men outpacing that of women. Clearly pornography is not doing the job its opponents claim...

As Jen Durbin has observed:

'It’s too easy to get a skewed impression of porn if you only read about it. Students who read Andrea Dworkin become convinced that pornography equals pictures of dead Asian women hanging from trees, smiling buxom women meeting a gruesome fate in a meat grinder, ecstatic women fellating revolvers, etc. Students who read Nina Hartley become convinced that pornography is a form of self-actualization for uninhibited feminists.'...

To open an essay called “Pornography and Rape: A Causal Model,” for instance,
Russell quotes a man from Shere Rite’s survey on why he wants to rape women and what he fantasizes about when he thinks of doing it. But the man never said that he did rape anyone, he was just describing his thoughts...

Men’s “propensity to rape,” as Russell terms it, may be no more prevalent than women’s propensity to strike their children—that is, often considered, seldom performed.

Russell properly concludes that “having a desire to behave in a certain way is not the same as actually behaving in that way, . . . [but] it is helpful to have this kind of baseline information on the desires and predispositions of males, who are, after all, the chief consumers of pornography.” Unfortunately for her case, nowhere does Russell show that the 46 to 52 percent of the males in Hite’s survey who occasionally “thought of rape” were the males who looked at pornography the most, or that they had a record of mistreating women or a likelihood of actually raping anyone...

Ziliman and Bryant noted that differences in the way males and females responded to the materials were “trivial statistically.” This means that males and females were aroused in much the same way (something Russell and many other antiporn activists rarely bother to report) and that “massive prior exposure [to pornography] reduced aggressiveness sharply” in both sexes. Although the researchers were puzzled that after massive exposure to pornography, the research subjects were more likely to recommend shorter terms of imprisonment in a hypothetical rape trial—”rape is apparently considered a lesser offense” after exposure to porn—they added that in this too, “effects of massive exposure applied to males and females equally. The females’ dispositions toward rape and its punishment were apparently just as much influenced as those of males.”

Senn is one of the few enemies of porn who acknowledges that “studies of sexual arousal using both men and women have shown that sex differences in arousal to sexually explicit materials (no violent content) do not exist.” Several studies, she admits, suggest “women are as aroused as men to pictures and written depictions of sex whether the content is affectional and romantic or not.” In her own research, women’s levels of anger and confusion dropped considerably on successive viewings of a slide show of violent and nonviolent pornography.

Senn calls this “affective desensitization” and worries that “lessened anger might reduce the chance of social responses.” But why presume that the initial response is the more “true” one? A simpler explanation would be that the shock value dissipated, the women got used to the unfamiliar material, and they felt less personally threatened and could evaluate it more objectively. Their initial response could be likened to the fear and anxiety we feel toward the unknown—strangers from the other side of the globe, for instance—and what Senn calls “affective desensitization” could he more accurately termed “increased understanding and comfort” such as we experience once we have met and talked with strangers from China or the Congo. How many of us reacted with puzzlement and unease—even fear—the first time we heard about sex itself?

Rather than read too much into gender roles or pornography’s influence, I would suggest that the ready response of males and females to pornography in these studies is yet another confirmation that college students may be more suggestible—because they are less sexually experienced and mature—than older people.

Despite the holes in their logic, the opponents of pornography often admit that their minds are simply made up. Kathleen Barry writes: “I submit that the causal connections between pornography and sexual violence are perfectly evident. We do not need to follow individual men out of specific pornographic theaters and witness them raping the first woman they see to realize as women what impact pornography has on our lives. We need only appeal to our common sense.” Ray Wyre, who treats child sex abusers, says simply, “I don’t know how many men actually have fantasies and don’t put them into practice. But I don’t care about that [emphasis added]. What I do know is the more they masturbate to pornography, the more likely they will be to put their fantasy into practice.” With that reasoning, one should lobby to have all the fans of murder mysteries and true crime stories locked away before they are inspired to do some harm based on all the fantasy homicides and historic mayhem they read about. The most laughable analogies are fostered by MacKinnon: in at least two of her books, she suggests showing pornography to a man is like “saying ‘kill’ to a trained attack dog.

The theory that “porn causes people to be violent” is pretty suspect, Kathleen Barry’s notion of common sense notwithstanding. If it were true that the more pornography a man sees, the more likely he is to commit violence, then older men would be more violent: Like radiation poisoning, the cumulative effect of repeated exposures to pornography eventually would kick in as their lives continued. But according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, the largest concentration of men arrested for forcible rape is between the ages of 16 and 24. Sixty-one percent of the offenders are under the age of 25."