Recently, the availability of pornography has exploded, particularly on the Internet. Today, 1,000 U.S.-basedfirms operate more than 100,000 subscription porn Web sites.
Back in November, 60 Minutes aired a piece by Steve Kroft on the mainstreaming of the pornography industry. He attended a porn trade show, talked with porn stars and those who market their work, exposed the companies of surprisingly high stature that now profit from smut, and explored just how pervasive the industry has become.
The venerable CBS news magazine jumped from twenty-first in ratings to second the week Kroft's report appeared. America, it seems, just can't get enough porn.
From the Internet, with its a la carte offerings of porn for every pervert; to the hotel/motel industry, which does a tidy business selling in-room blue movies to guests; to the video industry, with its massive Hollywood-like studios; to the stores trafficking in adult films that are cropping up in almost every community in America, porn-which seemed to be dying a slow death as recently as 15 years ago-has become a booming business.
Consider: Sex is the No. 1 topic searched for on the Internet. Gambling is second.
Americans spend $10 billion per year on porn, as much as they spend on sporting events, movies, or music. Paul Fishbein, founder and president of Adult Video News magazine and promoter of the show Kroft attended, said there are 800 million rentals each year of adult videotapes and DVDs.
The industry has responded by churning out 11,000 movies per year, according to Kroft's report. That's up from 1,000 a decade ago, according to Holman Jenkins, a columnist and editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal, who has written widely on the issue. Bill Lyon, a, lobbyist, told 60 Minutes that the porn industry employs 12,000 people in California and pays the state $36 million in taxes per year.
A rising tide of porn
Literature that could be classified as hard-core porn has existed for centuries, and hardcore porn movies have been around almost as long as film itself. According to Ed Halter, writing for the Village Voice, today's stars with porn in their past are following a trail blazed by Hollywood stars of past generations.
But in recent years, porn availability has exploded, particularly on the Internet. Today, 1,000 U.S.-based firms operate more than 100,000 subscription porn Web sites. Two-thirds do not even warn about their adult content, and only 3 percent require viewers to prove they are adults before entering. Three in five searches conducted on the Net in the United States are to seek out porn, according to a study published in the Washington Times.
Child porn-which is illegal to create worldwide-continues to grow as well. The FBI pursued about 700 cases of child porn in 1998; by 2001, it was pursuing more than 2,800. Demand for pornographic images of babies and toddlers is soaring, according to Professor Max Taylor, who has documented efforts to fight pedophilia information networks in Europe. Approximately 20 new children and 20,000 new images of child porn are posted to the Internet each week, experts have said.
The U.S. Customs Service estimates that 100,000 Web sites offer child pornography worldwide; more than half of them originate in the United States. N2H2 (www.n2h2.com), a Seattle-based firm that sells Internet filters, reports that 403 child porn sites appeared in the five-month period from April to September 2000 and that 231 per month appeared from February to july 2001.
As the numbers have grown, so has the variety of acts depicted in these movies. Virtually every imaginable fetish is addressed. As Dennis Hof, an associate of Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, told the New York Observer, "You've got Larry and [Penthouse publisher Bob] Guccione doing things that 10 years ago you'd go to prison for. Then you've got all this Internet stuff-dogs, horses, 12-year-old girls, all this crazed Third-World s-going on."
How did this happen? How did the number of movies produced each year increase tenfold in a decade? How did such mainstream companies as Hilton and Marriott, General Motors and Time Warner become leading-although not proud (don't, for instance, look for listings of the porn profits in their annual reports)-purveyors of smut? According to Jenkins, this is one case where we legitimately can blame President Clinton-at least to some extent.
When Clinton took office, he fired all the sitting U.S. attorneys, which destroyed a bevy of prosecutions. he told their replacements to focus on child porn and used his bully pulpit to condemn violence in movies, rather than sex. As a result, no federal prosecutor pressed an obscenity case for 10 years.
U.S. Attorney Mary Beth Buchanan of Los Angeles broke the streak only recently when she filed charges against Extreme Associates, whom officials have characterized as one of the most blatant violators of federal obscenity laws. "Federal prosecution of obscenity crimes is like using a dump truck to pick up waste and filth instead of a spoon," said Dan Panetti, vice president for legal and public policy for the National Coalition Against Pornography. "It is the appropriate tool to enforce community standards and, in its absence for the past 10 years, the hard-core pornographers have flooded our culture with a cesspool of prosecutable material."
The industry took its measure of President Clinton and his message-that government was backing away from obscenity enforcement-and took advantage. It adapted to the Internet, learned to find and market stars, and attracted venture capital from Wall Street and long-term investment from some of the nation's leading corporations.
The reason is simple: Despite all the new players in the market, porn remains enormously profitable. Because of the social stigma that continues to accrue to porn-the factor that drove up the ratings for 60 Minutes-demand outstrips supply, customers want their purchases kept secret (American Express has ceased to process transactions for porn services because of the number of customers who claim they didn't purchase the porn items listed on their statements), and markup remains extremely high.
According to the 60 Minutes report, DirecTV, owned by Hughes Electronics, a subsidiary of General Motors, pulled in $500 million from adult entertainment last year. Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, made $50 million. all the nation's top cable operators-from Time Warner to Cablevision-distribute sexually explicit material.
To the nation's top hotel chains-Hilton, Marriott, Hyatt, Sheraton, and Holiday Inn-smut can mean the difference between red and black ink on the ledger. The 60 Minutes report said that half the guests in these hotels order in-room adult movies and that these orders account for nearly 70 percent of their profits.
It's probably not possible to expect things to return to the days of President Reagan, whose attorney general, Edwin Meese, headed a commission that looked into pornography, its effects on Americans, and how it could be slowed. The question today becomes: What can we expect as porn becomes more accepted throughout society?
Calculating the damage
It is now clear that considerable harm can come from long-term porn abuse. In just the last five years, organizations have proliferated to help people who feel a compulsive "addiction" to pornography. Pornography by itself-not as part of an accusation of adultery-has begun to arise with what Jenkins calls "alarming frequency" in divorce and custody proceedings.
That's not to mention the Harvard Divinity School dean, Disney Internet executive, dozens of New York Times employees, countless college professors and school teacher s, and other once-reputable citizens in communities from coast to coast who have been disgraced, arrested, or fired because of the discovery of porn on their home or office computers.
"The more accessible the material, the larger number of people who will be willing to consume it because they can do so discreetly," Jenkins said in a February 2001 article for Policy Review magazine. "The larger and more scalable the market, the more it can supply material to dovetail with every individual quirk or taste. Given the way porn seems to act on those who are most susceptible to it, we may be surprised at the results."
Jenkins pointed to Dr. Mark Laaser, a cofounder of the Christian Alliance for Sexual Recovery and himself a recovering sex addict. Citing recent research, Laaser says just as alcoholics build up tolerance and must then drink more to receive the same effect, sex addicts-because of naturally occurring chemicals in the brain-also build up tolerance and need more input for the same satisfaction. The National Council on Sexual Addiction Compulsivity estimates that 6 to 8 percent of Americans are sex addicts."! have treated [more than] 1,000 male and female sex addicts," Laaser told Congress in 2002. "Almost all of them began with pornography."
They start with pornography and move through four stages to sexual addiction, according to Dr. Victor Cline, an expert on the topic. They begin by using porn as an aphrodisiac. From that, they move to escalation, in which they require more explicit and deviant material to meet their needs. As this progresses, a third stage-desensitization-takes hold, as material that once was perceived as gross, shocking, and disturbing becomes common and acceptable.
Finally, some begin to act out I the behaviors viewed in pornography, which leads, for men, to a dehumanization of the women in their lives. This partially explains why Phoenix police found that neighborhoods where adult businesses were located had a 43 percent higher rate of property crimes and a 4 percent higher rate of violent crimes. It almost fully explains the 506 percent increase in sex crimes.
For these men, sexual gratification begins to overwhelm all other desires. According to the National Coalition Against Pornography (NCAP), they come to view sex solely as a vehicle for their own physical pleasure. They come to see it as an act without consequence with a person who doesn't matter, and they view marriage and sound relationships as barriers to happiness. This leads to breakdowns in relationships and often divorce, according to information from the NCAP.
Pornography's fruits
Porn drives some to engage in behaviors they previously had managed to hold in check. For instance, in a study of convicted child molesters, 77 percent of those who molested boys and 87 percent of those who molested girls admitted to the habitual use of pornography in the commission of their crimes. They use porn to stimulate themselves and break down the inhibitions of children.
Thankfully, nearly all children are reluctant to take part in such activities. They don't understand-as an adult would-why this touching is improper. But they know it is; they recoil when it happens, and they're never again comfortable around that adult. This is why experts on child sex abuse and porn invariably tell parents to pay attention when their children are wary of a particular adult.
The Internet not only brings porn into the home, where people can view it in private; it removes the age restriction. As a result, 9 out of 10 children ages 8 to 16 who have Internet access have viewed porn Web sites, usually while looking up information for homework assignments, according to a study by the London School of Economics.
With the Web, it's not just porn sites that present a problem; it's email as well. Stories of adults who lured children into porn or simple sexual abuse through the Internet are too numerous to mention. A "friend" appears in an otherwise harmless chat room. A relationship forms. A meeting is arranged.
This is where the problem gets huge. A survey for the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 90 percent of teens and young adults have access to email, and half check their in-box at least once a day. Three out of four have access at home, and nearly one in three can access email from their own rooms, unsupervised by parents.
Children on the Web have a one in five chance of being approached via email by a sexual predator, and one in 33 receive aggressive solicitation, such as phone calls, mail, money, or gifts. Some 40 percent of the people charged with child pornography also sexually abuse children, according to a Reuters news service story earlier this year. In nearly 9 in 10 cases, predators went into chat rooms or began an instant messaging conversation with their intended victims.
A recent study by the University of Pennsylvania indicates that 345,000 children 17 or younger are prostitutes or performers in porn movies. Who knows how many may have gotten their start participating in what they thought were innocent chat rooms?
Lyon, the industry lobbyist, likes to talk about the profits involved and the business acumen of the proprietors. "I was rather shocked," he says, "to find that these are pretty bright businesspeople who are in it to make a profit. And that's what it's all about."
Actually, that's not what it's all about. There are lots of profits in the illegal drug trade, too, but we don't condone it because we know that it's not a victimless crime. As the evidence piles up that this open door to pornography also brings about more victims and victimization, will we react similarly? Will we see that these profits-like drug profits-come at an unacceptable cost to society? More important, will we see this before it's too late?
