The Negative Effects of Pornography on Women and Society.

One person’s pornography is another person’s “Great picture”.

Someone once said “pornography is difficult to define, but you know it if you see it and that is the premise on which this article will be based.

Pornography is a world wide, multi billion pound industry, and is generated in many media, mainly visual. It is clear therefore that there is a public demand for pornography, but we need to ask ourselves why.

Pornography based on sexually stimulating pictures of women – in this paper I will not deal with the issue of ‘male’ pornography – exists only because the primary sexual stimulus of the male is visual. Men are, of course, capable of responding to other sexual stimuli, but in the vast, overwhelming majority of cases, the primarily preferred stimulus is visual.

Society has, for its own purposes, developed for the most part along monogamous lines, and men are expected to have one sexual partner more or less for life. Males are not biological programmed to live this way, and are naturally polygamous. The innate urge to procreate demands (on the most basic level) that the available seed should be shared amongst the largest possible number of fertile partners, and for this reason, males are designed to respond quickly to visual sexual stimulus.

Here we have the reason for the existence pornography – it meets a biological need that society would prefer to deny.

To gauge the scale of the industry, there are about 244 million pornographic Internet pages based in the US alone, some 89% of the world total.

The effect pornography has on women caught up in the industry are many.

Women who enter the industry usually do so through economic necessity.
For the most part, the simply have no other way of earning their living, apart from selling their bodies in either an actual or virtual way.

It is a commonplace that people who are economically vulnerable are vulnerable in many other areas too and are easily exploited, especially in an industry which is frowned on by society, and which might also be also illegal.

One of the issues associated with pornography is that it is alleged to affect the male pornography user by decreasing is empathy with women, and engendering a callous attitude to women in general. According to Zillmann and Weaver “Men tend to respond to women witnessed in pornographic portrayals with disrespect. These women are naughty; they are bitches and ****** and deserve what is coming to them” (Zillmann and Weaver)

The word used to describe women in the foregoing paragraph are the common currency of Internet pornography sites, and they encourage a view in a primarily young male audience that women are valueless and can be treated in any way a man may wish.

This attitude shift has had tragic results. Studies have shown that the callousness engendered by pornography progress to physical harm. The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography has concluded that there is a causal relationship between exposure to many forms of pornography and several antisocial effects, including increased levels of violence against women. (Linz, Donnerstein, Penrod, 1987).

The pornography industry also has a more direct effect on its female participants. **** film directors seem to believe that safe *** is boring *** – and therefore there is a strong resistance in the industry to the use of condoms. As a result thousands of actors and actresses are exposed to a variety of Sexually Transmitted Diseases, including HIV/AIDS on a regular basis. One actress says “”As I continued to do ******** porn, I started catching STDs all the time. My lower body hurt so badly and at times my private area felt like it was a blazing fire. I could no longer work because I caught so many STDs and infections. I believe that if condoms had been allowed to be used in my own films, I would not have suffered so many physical ailments and infections.” (Avanti M. quoted on AIDS Healthcare Foundation)

Actors and actresses in the pornography industry anecdotally have a high incidence of drug abuse, and as in other areas of society, this leads to dependency, and an ever greater need for drugs, in a vicious spiral of deeper involvement. There is some evidence to suggest that drug use can become so high that earnings from the pornography industry are insufficient to sustain the purchase of drugs, and that as a result, some women are forced to turn to prostitution.

According to The Task Force on Organized Crime found a tripartite link between prostitution, pornography and substance abuse. “The young actors… often perform for drugs rather than money, then are forced into prostitution to finance drug habits.”
(Flowers, R.B, 1998)

The effect on pornography on its consumers is an issue which is receiving increasing attention. Overwhelmingly, consumers of pornography are male, and most of those are in the younger age groups.

The results of one Danish study of a group of 200 Danish students suggested that “The results suggest that, for the average consumer of popular ******** pornography aged 18-30, commonly-feared adverse effects of pornography are non-existent or, at worst, minimal. However, exposure to different kinds of pornography might yield different results.” ((Hald, GMM, 2006)

It would appear to be dangerous to accept this study, as it directly contradicts the perceived wisdom that **** consumers are negatively affected by their habit.

Paul reports that: “men who were shown pornographic films for 90 minutes a day, five days a week, experienced less sexual arousal and interest in similar materials with the passage of time. What initially thrills eventually titillates, what excites eventually pleases, what pleases eventually satisfies. And satisfaction sooner or later yields to boredom. (Paul 1983)

Porn consumers therefore experience a system of diminishing returns, in which more and more stimulation is required to achieve the desired results. Extrapolating from this, it would seem likely that these men would demand more and more extreme acts from their sexual partners, and be increasingly less empathetic with women.

The use of pornography is generally agreed to be addictive, and it has been demonstrated that long term users of pornography begin to prefer ************ to a sexually appropriate response to a live person.

This is a premier cause of the disruption that pornography can cause to male/female relationships. Men can become effectively sexually dysfunctional, leading to serious – and sometimes terminal relationship problems.

A further common issue is that of men being ‘caught’ using pornographic material by their partners. For some people this may not be a problem, but for many women, it is seen as a very serious betrayal. The difficulty here is that commonly, the woman sees the man’s use of pornography as a rejection of her, and because of the innate differences between male and female response to visual stimulus, can not comprehend the common male belief that looking at pornography is harmless.

In a 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said that internet **** contributed to more than half of the divorce cases they handled. They also said that pornography had an almost non-existent role in divorce just seven or eight years ago. (Kearney J., 2005)

Pornography clearly causes harm to those who work in the industry, to its users, and to their families. However, it is not going to fo away any time soon!

Sources.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation

Flowers, RB., “The Prostitution of Women and Girls”. MacFarland and Company, North Carolina 1998, 119.

Hald GMM. “The Effects of Exposure to Pornography: An Empirical Contribution to the **** Debate”. Journal of *** Research.

Kearney J.

Linz, Daniel; Donnerstein, Edward; Penrod, Steven “The Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography: Do the psychological “facts” fit the political fury?”
American Psychologist. Vol 42(10), Oct 1987, 946-953.

Paul, P., Pornified: “How Pornography is Damaging Our Lives” (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2005), 83.

Zillmann D. and Weaver J, “Pornography and Mens Social Callousness to Women, 110

By: Norman Munro

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