For adults only; Effects of pornography not easily covered up

If you’ve ever watched a Victoria’s Secret commercial, you’ve seen it. If you’ve ever been to Las Vegas, you’ve been surrounded by it. The pornography industry brings in more revenue than all professional football, baseball and basketball franchises in the world. In the United States alone, revenue from pornography exceeds the combined revenue of ABC, CBS and NBC ($6.2 billion) times nine.

Daren, a junior in political science who agreed to speak only if his name was changed, said pornography is a huge industry that never ceases to provide what you need and they make good money doing it.

“Here’s the thing with porn,” Daren said, “there is no cut-off point. The first time you see it, it’s on a late-night TV show and you get all worked up over the deal and you see that a few times and you go and try and see some real porn, showing a little more, then you graduate from that to full-on hard-core porn, then you have exhausted your options and you become a freak.”

Technology is driven by porn. The Internet is not the only venue for the adult entertainment industry. One big attraction for digital cameras was the ability to take bedroom photos without having to take film to a lab where someone else would view it during the developing process. An incentive for buying VCR and DVD players may be the ability to watch whatever movies you’d like in the privacy of your own home. The new Apple iPod with video playback capabilities is attracting a stampede of adult entertainment companies to announce the creation of mobile porn.

According to Family Safe Media, 90 percent of 8- to 16-year-olds have viewed porn online – most while doing homework. Daren said he first saw porn when he was about 11 years old.

“One time we sluffed some class in middle school and watched a friend’s porn video that belonged to his dad. That was the first hard-core porn I’d ever seen,” Daren said, “That was an eye-opener.”

Daren said being addicted to porn is just like being addicted to anything else.

“People don’t get addicted to porn by choice. What happens is you don’t score any chicks, so you start looking at naked chicks and scoring yourself,” Daren said. “The next thing you know, you can’t stop.”

Carl, a junior in business whose name has also been changed, said theoretically, this addiction would go away once you were married, but for some people, that’s not the case.

The “Today Show” on MSNBC ran a special on March 1, 2006 regarding married men who are addicted to porn. Lance Tracy said at the peak of his addiction, he was watching four to five hours a night, six nights a week.

Tracy’s wife Amy said she confronted Lance about his problems and helped him into a recovery group.

“My wife absolutely, and admirably, did not stand for this,” said Lance on the program. “The way she looked at it, it’s really a form of cheating on someone, not physically, but emotionally.”

Robert Weiss, the clinical director of the Sexual Recovery Institute in Los Angeles, also spoke on the “Today Show.”

“It’s kind of like eating,” Weiss said, “Eating is a healthy thing, but eating a whole lot is not such a healthy thing, and it’s the same thing for a sex addict. They do what other people do, only they do way too much of it.”

Daren said he slightly disagrees with Weiss.

“I want to meet this person who can watch hot steamy porn for four hours,” Daren said. “Once it’s served it’s purpose, you don’t want to look at it anymore.”

Daren said that pornography is not a form of what normal people do, it is much different.

“[Porn] poisons your mind because porn stars do freaky stuff; they do weird stuff that people don’t normally do and they look amazing while they are doing it.”

Butters said this is one reason why porn is sometimes more appealing than sexual intercourse.

“When you go for it yourself, it doesn’t quite add up to what you had in your mind, so you’d rather go back to the porn,” he said.

Daren said some students may use porn as a replacement for the sexual intercourse they desire.

“Sometimes looking at the porn and handling things yourself can save you a lot of heartache,” Daren said. “After I got done [having sex], I wished I would have just watched porn and taken care of it myself so I wouldn’t have to tell myself that I’m no longer a virgin and I had sex with a chick I didn’t want to have sex with.”

Pornography does not target specific kinds of people. According to Family Safe Media, 40 million adults in the United States visit Internet pornography Web sites. More than half of the Christian men surveyed by Family Safe said pornography is a major problem in the home.

“Some people [on campus] don’t use the porn at all and some people love it. But I don’t think there’s a man on this campus who hasn’t seen pornography, except for the blind ones,” Daren said.

Women are no exception. Family Safe Media also reported one of three visitors to adult Web sites are women – the difference is 70 percent of women keep their cyber activities secret.

“I know girls who look at porn more than me,” Daren said. “There’s a lot of girls who watch porn, they just aren’t up front about it.”

Mason agreed, saying pornography is everywhere you go,

“I walked into [a local fitness facility] once at two in the morning and saw a guy watching girl-on-girl porn,” Carl said. “Everyone has seen porn inadvertently. Even the people who don’t enjoy it have seen it.”

“Some stuff you can’t even type into Google and not get porn,” Daren said pointing out several examples of pornographic Web sites that use harmelss sounding words for names.

One of the major arguments surrounding the pornography industry is the third-person effect pornography may have on the number of sex crimes that come as a result.

On Sept. 20, 2005, the Washington Post ran a story that revealed the FBI was recruiting agents for a special anti-obscenity squad, to head up the “War on Porn.”

Not one month later, Brian Alexander of MSNBC News said that in a yet-to-be-published study on the usage of porn in Denmark, 98 percent of men and 80 percent of women had viewed porn. Surprisingly, these numbers had no effect on the number of sex crimes in the country.

However, although pornography may not have a direct effect on sex crimes, it does have a direct and lasting effect on the individuals involved.

“It doesn’t do anyone any favors to watch porn,” Mason said. “Nothing good comes from it, but people have inborn desires to participate in that kind of stuff, and when they can’t get the real thing, they move to the next best thing in line.”

-etippetts@cc.usu.edu