Pornography

File:Porn hurts.jpg

A sign outside an Adult store.

Pornography, often shortened to porn or porno, and sometimes referred to in official matters as x-rated material, is the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity used for the intents of stimulating sexual arousal.

Though mass-distributed pornography is as old as the printing press itself, it wasn't until the mid-twentieth century that it became a part of our mainstream culture after the introduction of Kinsey's sexology in the late 1940's, the growing popularity of such popular pornographic magazines as Playboy (first published in 1953), and the evolution of the 1960's sexual revolution. Over the past couple of decades especially, an immense industry for the production and consumption of pornography has grown, due to the advent of VHS, DVD and the internet. Indeed, the demand on pornography has contributed to the development of technologies from early inventions to modern day devices such as satellite TV, DVD, and the internet.

Pornography may use any of a variety of media — printed literature, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, or video game. However, when sexual acts are performed for a live audience, by definition it is not pornography, as the term applies to the depiction or reproduction of the act, rather than the act itself. Porn is similar to, but distinct from, erotica, which is the use of sexually arousing imagery used strictly for artistic purposes.

Definition

Pornography, often shortened to porn or porno, or sometimes referred to in official matters as x-rated material, is the explicit representation of the human body or sexual activity used for the intents of stimulating sexual arousal. The word derives from the Greek pornographia, which derives from the Greek words porne ("prostitute"), grapho ("to write"), and the suffix ia (meaning "state of," "property of," or "place of").

Child pornography

"Child pornography" refers to pornographic material depicting children. The production of child pornography is widely regarded as a form of child sexual abuse and as such these images and videos are illegal in most countries. Some outlaw only production, while others also prohibit distribution and possession of child pornography. Prohibition generally covers visual representations of sexual behavior by children under a given age but may also include all images of nude children, unless an artistic or medical justification can be provided.

History

Enthusiasts often point to the sacred Indian tradition of Tantra and the ancient Indian text, the Kama Sutra, as justification for their pro-porn favor. However, it should be clarified that Tantra is a type of Hinduism that treats sexuality as a path to spiritual enlightenment, not as a casual device through which to achieve a temporary arrousal and mere physical satisfaction. As well, the Kama Sutra was regarded as a holy text and was used to aid devotees in their appreciation of sex as a sacred act of love. Thus, it is not appropriate to regard ancient Hinduism as a proponent of pornography as it is known today.

Starting with the rise of Christianity in the early C.E., the world's more open view of sex changed dramatically—at least in parts where Christianity and its influence prevailed. Christians were educated to deny all "pleasures of flesh," which resulted in an unbalanced outlook on sex, confusing its divine value with its fallen degradation. Traditions such as Tantricism and materials such as the Kama Sutra certainly had no place in such societies, and so the negative stigma attached to the naked form of man and woman as well as the act of their sexual intercourse increased over the course of the following centuries with the growing prevalence of Christian culture.

Oil lamp artifact depicting coitus more ferarum

Our society's official stance toward pornography, as understood today, did not exist until the Victorian era in terms of its state-ordained censorship. Previous to this age, though some sex acts were regulated or stipulated in laws, looking at objects or images depicting them was not. In some cases, certain books, engravings or image collections were outlawed, but the trend to compose laws that restricted viewing of sexually explicit things in general was a Victorian construct. When largescale excavations of Pompeii were undertaken in the 1860s, much of the erotic art of the Romans came to light, shocking the Victorians who saw themselves as the intellectual heirs of the Roman Empire. They did not know how to react to the frank depictions of sexuality, and endeavored to abscond them from everyone except upperclass scholars. The artifacts were locked away in the Secret Museum in Naples, Italy and what couldn't be removed was covered and cordoned off as to not corrupt the sensibilities of women, children and the working class. Soon after, the world's first law criminalizing pornography was enacted in the Obscene Publications Act of 1857.

Christian views of sex and the naked form remained highly looked down upon until a dramatic shift occurred in the late 1950's inspired by the American biologist Alfred Charles Kinsey, who is regarded by many as the father of sexology. Kinsey, passionate about human sexual behavior and the different forms of sexual practices, began attacking the "widespread ignorance of sexual structure and physiology" and by the fifties had risen to celebrity status with his several published works on the topic. Kinsey's reports, which led to a storm of controversy, are regarded by many as a trigger for the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

This shift in the cultural outlook on sex opened the way for magazines, such as Playboy, to find their place in society and for individuals to dissolve their inhibitions in enjoying them. Since this early crack in the dam and the subsequent era of free love, the porn industry has made itself quite at home in Western societies, and of course Eastern societies for the most part have amply followed trend.

Industry

Since its boom in the 1950's with the iconic presence of Playboy magazine, the porn industry has only grown in even greater magnitude as it becomes more and more accessible through advanced forms of media. It is difficult to determine the size of the industry today in terms of dollar value, as sources are often widely varied in statistics. Roughly, though, somewhere between $40 and $60 billion is currently estimated, a revenue that is larger than all combined revenues of professional baseball, football, and basketball franchises, as well as the combined revenues of American television networks ABC, CBS, and NBC.

According to the Internet Filter Review, the worldwide pornography revenues totaled in at $97.06 billion in 2006, though this includes the categories of novelty items and exotic dance clubs, which technically are not pornography. The Internet Filter also listed China, South Korea, Japan, the U.S., and Australia as accruing the highest numbers in porn revenue respectively, with $27.40 billion accredited to China and $2 billion accredited to Australia. The U.S. figure for 2006 was $13.33 billion. The same source listed, for the U.S., video sales and rentals as the biggest contributor to the total figure, cashing in at $3.62 billion, followed by the internet at $2.84 billion.

Internet Distribution

It is estimated that some 4.2 million pornographic websites (consisting of 420 million pornographic pages) currently exist, which is 12% of the total number of websites online. These websites, the vast majority of which come from the United States, are visited each month by 72 million people worldwide. They range in everything from "softcore" porn to "hardcore," to straight, gay, and bisexual content, and even those dedicated to images of beastiality, necrophilia, and a interminable selection of different fetishes. Perhaps the most atrocious form of pornography currently is child porn, which is illegal almost everywhere. Currently there are about 100,000 websites offering illegal child porn and 116,000 daily [[Gnutella} child porn requests.

Here is a short list of additional statistics taken from the Internet Filter website.

• Daily pornographic search engine requests: 68 million (25% of total search engine requests)
• Daily pornographic emails: 2.5 billion (8% of total emails)
• Internet users who view porn: 42.7%
• Average age of first Internet exposure to pornography: 11 years old
• Largest consumer of Internet pornography: 35-49 age group
• 8-16 year olds having viewed porn online: 90% (most while doing homework)
• Breakdown of male/female visitors to pornography sites: 72% male - 28% female
• Adults admitting to Internet sexual addiction: 10%
• Women struggling with pornography addiction: 17%

Due to the character of the internet, it provides an easy means whereby consumers residing in countries where pornography is either taboo or entirely illegal can easily acquire such material from sources in another country where it is legal or remains unprosecuted. Also, the internet renders these types of material very accessible to any child old enough to use a computer and perform simple online navigation.

Furthermore, the low cost of copying and delivering digital data boosted the formation of private circles of people swapping pornography. With the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing applications such as Kazaa, pornography swapping has reached new heights. Prior to this, the Usenet news service was a popular place for pornography swapping. Free pornography became available en masse from other users and is no longer restricted to private groups. Large amounts of free pornography on the Internet are also distributed for marketing purposes to encourage subscriptions to paid content.

Additionally, since the late 1990s, "porn from the masses for the masses" seems to have become another new trend. Inexpensive digital cameras, increasingly powerful and user-friendly software, and easy access to pornographic source material have made it possible for individuals to produce and share home-made or home-altered porn for next to no cost.

Despite the filters and settings on most Internet search engines, porn sites are easily found on the Internet with Adult industry webmasters being the first and most active to optimize their pages for search engine queries. As a result, many porn-related search returns are overwhelming and often somewhat irrelevant. For those looking for more advanced protection, there are a wide stock of special filters which can be purchased online.

Legal status

The legal status of pornography varies widely from country to country, with the wide majority of nations deeming at least some forms of pornography acceptable. In some countries, softcore pornography is considered tame enough to be sold in general stores or shown on TV. Hardcore pornography, on the other hand, is usually regulated everywhere. The production and sale—and to a lesser degree, the possession—of child pornography is illegal in almost every country, and most nations have restrictions on pornography involving violence or animals.

The use of 3D-rendering to create highly realistic computer-generated images creates new legal dilemmas. If illusionistic images of torture or rape become widely distributed, law enforcement faces additional difficulties prosecuting authentic images of criminal acts, due to the possibility that they are synthetic. For a period there existed the discrepency that it may be possible to film things that were imagined but never done, as the synthetic manifestation of the imagined acts did not justify as evidence of a crime. However, child pornography laws were recently amended to include computerized images or altered (morphed) pictures of children, and counterfeit or synthetic images generated by computer that appear to be of real minors or that were marketed or represented to be real child pornography.

Most countries attempt to restrict minors' access to hardcore materials, limiting availability to adult bookstores, mail-order, via pay-per-view television channels, among other means. There is usually an age minimum for entrance to pornographic stores, or the materials are displayed partly covered or not displayed at all. More generally, disseminating pornography to a minor is often illegal. However, many of these efforts have been rendered irrelevant by widely available and easily accessible internet pornography.

The Internet has also caused problems with the enforcement of age limits regarding the models or actors appearing in the images. In most countries, males and females under the age of 18 are not allowed to appear in porn films, but in several European countries the age limit is 16, and in the UK (excluding Northern Ireland) and in Denmark it is legal for women as young as 16 to appear topless in mainstream newspapers and magazines. This material often ends up on the Internet and can be viewed by people in countries where it constitutes as child pornography, creating challenges for lawmakers wishing to restrict access to such materials.

Child pornography as child abuse

Where child pornography involves depictions of children engaging in sexual conduct, the production of this material will in itself be legally prohibited as sexual abuse in most countries. Children are generally seen as below the age where they are effectively able to consent to images of them being used for sexual purposes. The profit that can be made from selling such images is seen as a factor in encouraging the original abuse that is photographed or filmed.

Children's charity NCH have claimed that demand for child pornography on the internet has led to an increase in sex abuse cases.

Anti-pornography movement

A protest against an adult bookstore in Uniontown, Indiana, USA

Opposition to pornography comes generally, though not exclusively, from several sources: law, religion and feminism. Some critics from the latter two camps have expressed belief in the existence of "pornography addiction."

Legal objections

Distribution of obscene materials is a Federal crime in the United States, and also under most laws of the 50 states. The determination of what is obscene is up to a jury in a trial, which must apply the Miller test.

In explaining its decision to reject claims that obscenity should be treated as speech protected by the First Amendment, in Miller v. California, the US Supreme Court found that

The dissenting Justices sound the alarm of repression. But, in our view, to equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom. It is a "misuse of the great guarantees of free speech and free press . . . ." Breard v. Alexandria, 341 U.S., at 645 .

and in Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton that

In particular, we hold that there are legitimate state interests at stake in stemming the tide of commercialized obscenity, even assuming it is feasible to enforce effective safeguards against exposure to juveniles and to passersby. 7 [413 U.S. 49, 58] Rights and interests "other than those of the advocates are involved." Breard v. Alexandria, 341 U.S. 622, 642 (1951). These include the interest of the public in the quality of life and the total community environment, the tone of commerce in the great city centers, and, possibly, the public safety itself... As Mr. Chief Justice Warren stated, there is a "right of the Nation and of the States to maintain a decent society . . .," [413 U.S. 49, 60] Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184, 199 (1964) (dissenting opinion)... The sum of experience, including that of the past two decades, affords an ample basis for legislatures to conclude that a sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare, and the development of human personality, can be debased and distorted by crass commercial exploitation of sex.

Attorney General for Ronald Reagan, Edwin Meese, also courted controversy when he appointed the "Meese Commission" to investigate pornography in the United States; their report, released in July 1986, was highly critical of pornography and itself became a target of widespread criticism. That year, Meese Commission officials contacted convenience store chains and succeeded in demanding that widespread men's magazines such as Playboy and Penthouse be removed from shelves,a ban which spread nationally until being quashed with a First Amendment admonishment against prior restraint by the D.C. Federal Court in Meese v. Playboy (639 F.Supp. 581).

In the United States in 2005, Attorney General Gonzales made obscenity and pornography a top prosecutorial priority of the Department of Justice.

Religious objections

Many religious groups often discourage their members from viewing or reading pornography, and support legislation restricting its publication. These positions derive from broader religious views about sexuality. In some religious traditions, for example, sexual intercourse is limited to the express function of procreation. Thus, sexual pleasure or sex-oriented entertainment, as well as lack of modesty, are considered immoral. Other religions do not find sexual pleasure immoral, but see sex as a sacred, godly, highly-pleasurable activity that is only to be enjoyed with one's spouse. These traditions do not condemn sexual pleasure in and of itself, but they impose limitations on the circumstances under which sexual pleasure may be properly experienced. Pornography in this view is seen as the secularization of something sacred, and a violation of spouses' intimate relationship.

In addition to expressing concerns about violating sexual morality, some religions take an anti-pornography stance claiming that viewing pornography is addictive, leading to self-destructive behavior. Proponents of this view compare pornography addiction to alcoholism, both in asserting the seriousness of the problem and in developing treatment methods.

Feminist objections

Feminist critics of pornography, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, generally consider it demeaning to women. They believe that most pornography eroticizes the domination, humiliation, and coercion of women, reinforces sexual and cultural attitudes that are complicit in rape and sexual harassment, and contributes to the male-centered objectification of women. Some feminists distinguish between pornography and erotica, which they say does not have the same negative effects of pornography. However, many Third-wave feminists and postmodern feminists disagree with this critique of porn, claiming that appearing in or using pornography can be explained as each individual woman's choice, and is not guided by socialization in a capitalist patriarchy.

Effect on sex crimes

A lower per capita crime rate and historically high availability of pornography in many developed European countries (e.g. Netherlands, Sweden) has led a growing majority to conclude that there is an inverse relationship between the two, such that an increased availability of pornography in a society equates to a decrease in sexual crime. Moreover, there is some evidence that states within the U.S. that have lower rates of internet access have a greater incidence of rape.

Effect on sexual aggression

In the 70's and 80's, feminists such as Dr. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin criticized pornography as essentially dehumanizing women and as likely to encourage violence against them. It has been suggested that there was an alliance, tacit or explicit, between anti-porn feminists and fundamentalist Christians to help censor the use of or production of pornography.

Some researchers have found that "high pornography use is not necessarily indicative of high risk for sexual aggression," but go on to say, "if a person has relatively aggressive sexual inclinations resulting from various personal and/or cultural factors, some pornography exposure may activate and reinforce associated coercive tendencies and behaviors".

Pornography production and violence against women

According to Diana Russell, "When addressing the question of whether or not pornography causes rape, as well as other forms of sexual assault and violence, many people fail to acknowledge that the actual making of pornography sometimes involves, or even requires, violence and sexual assault."

In 1979, Andrea Dworkin published Pornography: Men Possessing Women, which analyzes (and extensively cites examples drawn from) contemporary and historical pornography as an industry of woman-hating dehumanization. Dworkin argues that it is implicated in violence against women, both in its production (through the abuse of the women used to star in it), and in the social consequences of its consumption (by encouraging men to eroticize the domination, humiliation, and abuse of women).

Other studies, such as the US government commission noted below, have asserted that this is not the case.

U.S. Government Commissions

The then available evidence as to the influence of pornography was assessed by two major Commissions established in 1970 and 1986, respectively.

In 1970, the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography concluded that "there was insufficient evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials played a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior."

In general, with regard to adults, the Commission recommended that legislation "should not seek to interfere with the right of adults who wish to do so to read, obtain, or view explicit sexual materials." Regarding the view that these materials should be restricted for adults in order to protect young people from exposure to them, the Commission found that it is "inappropriate to adjust the level of adult communication to that considered suitable for children." The Supreme Court supported this view.

A large portion of the Commission's budget was applied to funding original research on the effects of sexually explicit materials. One experiment is described in which repeated exposure of male college students to pornography "caused decreased interest in it, less response to it and no lasting effect," although it appears that the satiation effect does wear off eventually ("Once more"). William B. Lockhart, Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School and chairman of the commission, said that before his work with the commission he had favored control of obscenity for both children and adults, but had changed his mind as a result of scientific studies done by commission researchers. In reference to dissenting commission members Keating and Rev. Morton Hill, Lockhart said, "When these men have been forgotten, the research developed by the commission will provide a factual basis for informed, intelligent policymaking by the legislators of tomorrow."

President Reagan announced his intention to set up a commission to study pornography. The result was the appointment by Attorney General Edwin Meese in the spring of 1985 of a panel comprised of 11 members, the majority of whom had established records as anti-pornography crusaders.

In 1986, the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, reached the opposite conclusion, advising that pornography was in varying degrees harmful. A workshop headed by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop provided essentially the only original research done by the Meese Commission. Given very little time and money to "develop something of substance" to include in the Meese Commission's report, it was decided to conduct a closed, weekend workshop of "recognized authorities" in the field. All but one of the invited participants attended. At the end of the workshop, the participants expressed consensus in five areas:

1. "Children and adolescents who participate in the production of pornography experience adverse, enduring effects,"
2. "Prolonged use of pornography increases beliefs that less common sexual practices are more common,"
3. "Pornography that portrays sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim increases the acceptance of the use of coercion in sexual relations,"
4. "Acceptance of coercive sexuality appears to be related to sexual aggression,"
5. "In laboratory studies measuring short-term effects, exposure to violent pornography increases punitive behavior toward women" According to Surgeon General Koop, "Although the evidence may be slim, we nevertheless know enough to conclude that pornography does present a clear and present danger to American public health"

Japan, which is noted for its large output of rape fantasy pornography, has the lowest reported sex crime rate in the industrialized world, which has led some researchers to speculate that an opposite relationship may in fact exist—that wide availability of pornography may reduce crimes by giving potential offenders a socially accepted way of regulating their own sexuality. Conversely, some argue that reported sex crime rates are low in Japan because the culture (a culture that greatly emphasizes a woman's "honor") is such that victims of sex crime are less likely to report it (e.g. chikan).

A case study: Japan

Milton Diamond and Ayako Uchiyama write in "Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan" (International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22(1): 1-22. 1999):

Our findings regarding sex crimes, murder and assault are in keeping with what is also known about general crime rates in Japan regarding burglary, theft and such. Japan has the lowest number of reported rape cases and the highest percentage of arrests and convictions in reported cases of any developed nation. Indeed, Japan is known as one of the safest developed countries for women in the world (Clifford, 1980). (...)

Despite the absence of evidence, the myth persists that an abundance of sexually explicit material invariably leads to an abundance of sexual activity and eventually rape (e.g., Liebert, Neale, & Davison, 1973). Indeed, the data we report and review suggest the opposite. Christensen (1990) argues that to prove that available pornography leads to sex crimes one must at least find a positive temporal correlation between the two. The absence of any positive correlation in our findings, and from results elsewhere, between an increase in available pornography and the incidence of rape or other sex crime, is prima facie evidence that no link exists. But objectivity requires that an additional question be asked: "Does pornography use and availability prevent or reduce sex crime?" Both questions lead to hypotheses that have, over prolonged periods, been tested in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and now in Japan. Indeed, it appears from our data from Japan, as it was evident to Kutchinsky (1994), from research in Europe, that a large increase in available sexually explicit materials, over many years, has not been correlated with an increase in rape or other sexual crimes. Instead, in Japan a marked decrease in sexual crimes has occurred.

Economics

United States: In 1970, a Federal study estimated that the total retail value of all the hard-core porn in the United States was no more than $10 million Although the revenues of the adult industry are difficult to determine, by 2003, Americans were estimated to spend as much as $8 to $10 billion on pornography. Many pornographic videos are shot in the San Fernando Valley, which acts as a center for various models, actors/actresses, production companies, and other assorted businesses involved in the production and distribution of porn.

The porn industry has been considered to be capable of deciding format wars in media; including being a factor in VHS v. Betamax (the videotape format war) and a major factor in the Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD format war.

In 1998, Forrester Research published a report on the online 'adult content' industry, which estimated at $750 million to $1 billion in annual revenue. A $10 billion aggregate figure had been estimated, and repeated in many news stories, but this was unsourced and not accurate.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Brownmiller, Susan 1999. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (ISBN 0-385-31486-8).
• Susan Griffin. Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge Against Nature. New York: Harper, 1981.
• Michael Kimmel. "Men Confront Pornography." New York: Meridian—Random House, 1990. A variety of essays that try to assess ways that pornography may take advantage of men.
• "Nadine Strossen: Pornography Must Be Tolerated"[3]
• Carole Vance, Editor. "Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality." Boston: Routledge, 1984. Collection of papers from 1982 conference; visible and divisive split between anti-pornography activists and lesbian S&M theorists.

External links

Commentary

• "The Impact of Pornography on Men" by Antonella Gambotto-Burke
• "How Big is Porn?" Forbes, May 25, 2001
• American Porn Interactive web site companion to a Frontline documentary exploring the pornography industry within the United States.
• Rushdie Turns India's Air Blue Discussion of the debate over pornography within Indian society.
• "Who wants to live in a Porn Nation?" Discussion of pornography on college campuses

Government

• Kutchinsky, Berl, Professor of Criminology: The first law that legalized pornography (Denmark)

History

• xyclopedia: the history of pornography and sexual expression
• Perkins, Michael. (1992) The Secret Record: A History of Erotic Literature

Sociology

• Beck, Marianna Ph.D., "The Roots of Western Pornography," part 2, history of pornography in the West.
• Diamond, M. and Uchiyama, A. (1999), Pornography, Rape and Sex Crimes in Japan, International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 22(1): 1-22.
• Pornography and Censorship in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Retrieved July 13, 2007.

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