Slow news day? Let's scapegoat porn!

I'm watching The Big Questions show on the BBC, this week with the title "Is porn damaging to society?" and am relieved to see Jerry Barnett of Sex and Censorship appearing as the sole voice of reason in a room where the consensus seems to be that porn is morally bad, psychologically damaging, and corrodes the potential for healthy relationships. A young pastor who claims to be a recovered porn addict has described the hold porn had over his life, while a porn actress claims that working in the industry has actually made her own sex life better.

These debates are always held in such blunt, polarised terms that it's rare to hear or see anything new in them. Emotive tactics are quickly deployed if a sex worker like the above dares to say that she enjoys her job--the pastor immediately shoots back with tales of trafficked and abused women forced into prostitution, even though this is a totally false equivalence. Barnett dares to point out something that is also regularly lost during these kinds of discussions--that porn addiction has never been proven to exist. 

"B-b-but surely it has," one might protest "God knows I've heard it mentioned enough in hushed, scandalised tones on talk shows and seen it slapped across the front of self-help books, written by proper psychologists and everything!"

Yeaaahhh....not so much. As someone who recently completed a book on how personal predjuces get turned into laws restricting what media adults can see, I discovered the following:

In 2014, Clinical psychologist David Ley carried out an extensive study on the literature surrounding porn addiction, and concluded "less than 1 percent of the 40,000 articles that they looked at were deemed scientifically or empirically useful". He added that this was because most people who write about porn addiction have an agenda to push, be it conservative, feminist or otherwise.

Ley adds that studies on porn addiction are regularly let down by "poor experimental designs, limited methodological rigor, and lack of model specification." US and UK media, including excellent independent outlets like Everyday Feminism, don’t help the matter when they write as if porn addiction is a proven illness. This explains why "the overwhelming majority of articles published on porn addiction include no empirical research. . . Less than one in four actually have data. In less than one in 10 is that data analyzed or organized in a scientifically valid way."

from Catherine Scott, To Deprave & Corrupt: Britain's Battles with Obscenity, out later in 2018!

Research like Ley's indicates to me that what is really at work is a hierarchy sketched out by the excellent sexuality writer Gayle Rubin, one in which the most socially approved sexual behaviours get a pass, while the most suspect are punished and pathologised. 

As Andrew Card puts it in an excellent essay on Medium,  

No matter how benign or inconsequential, sex which falls outside of the charmed circle, beyond the line, is prohibited to some extent or another.

Hence religious and conservative people scramble to distance themselves from a practice that is a harmless part of many adults' lives, treat it as a sickness or a moral failing, and treat those who indulge in it at best as damaged victims, and at worst as wilfully self-destructive sinners. And of course the rules on the "right" way to do sex or consume explicit material always ends up magically set by someone who claims neutrality for themselves. As Barnett put it in this morning's show "What I like is erotica, what you like is pornography." The stunning arrogance implicit in any human being telling another that their sexual tastes or practices are "wrong" demonstrates a worrying desire for social control; shame is a powerful tool. Yes, teaching the importance of consent, the skills to critically analyse pornography, and the strength to reject sexual practices or representations thereof that you find unpleasant or unoffensive are all valid priorities, but blunt and blanket statements about porn help no one. More than one of my interviewees for my book pointed out that children didn't report feeling guilty or anxious about accidentally glimpsing adult material until they got the firm message from adults that this is how they should have been feeling. Feedback loops are easy to create when you have an interviewee group that are eager to please. And also, on a more cynical note, what adolescent is going to be brave enough to tell their parent, who is probably the last person on earth with whom a teenager wants to discuss sexual pleasure, that they liked the content they stumbled upon and would like to see more of it and probably have a good old masturbate to it?!

I'll leave the last words to an 11 year-old boy, who one of my interviewees spoke to during an online
safety session in a UK school:
"They could bury all the porn in the world on a desert island, and I'd still find it."