Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Porn in the USA


          Years ago, when I was in church work, a parishioner, a local police chief, was a guest speaker one Sunday. He was a handsome, mustachioed fellow with a G. Gordon Liddy look, and, I think, a G. Gordon Liddy will, though he was an exceptionally gentle man. He was a Vietnam vet, an officer; the kind of guy, if you knew him, you'd likely be inclined to swear fealty to. He was asked to talk about how his faith impacted his job. He began unexpectedly.
          "How many of you like pornography?" His question silenced the room. A few heads bobbed around to see if any hands had been raised, an unlikely prospect in church, and, as you'd expect, not one hand showed itself in the congregation. But two hands did rise. An older priest on staff, either because he was uncommonly honest or hard of hearing, raised his hand immediately and high, even before the speaker raised his own hand, which he did. This honest man said, "I do . . .and that's the problem." It surprised me, and then impressed me as one of the more honest things I'd ever heard said in church. He instantly had my attention and my admiration. I was keen to hear what he had to say next; and I was mildly ashamed that I hadn't raised my own hand. If truth had owned the morning, nearly every man's hand would have been raised, and certainly at least a few women's.
          We now live in a culture that has been thoroughly pornographized, and if you haven't noticed this, you haven't been paying attention. Sex is perhaps the only thing that Christianity has not been able to formulate an understanding of that works, hence its historical fear of and confusion regarding sexuality. I could write at length on this, but it is not my topic. But neither has our culture come up with any answers; being just as double minded about sex as the Church, regarding it with every bit as much fascination and confusion, if not fear.
        Recently, someone I care about was sentenced to ten years to life on probation, and had to register as a sex offender. He didn't touch a soul, harmed no one; indeed, he never would. He had images of some twenty girls under eighteen years of age saved on the hard drive of a computer, along with some other, legal porn. The illegal images were not young children, but sexually mature girls under eighteen. Every inclination and perversity imaginable is readily available with a few clicks of the mouse on the Internet. Youth is valued highly. The demarcation between legal images and illegal images is eighteen, but people who appear under eighteen, though older, are highly valued. If you want to see some "kiddie porn," google Brooke Shields and Pretty Baby, a movie she was in as a young girl. Actually, please don't. Those images could get you arrested, and believe me when I tell you that, because of the Patriot Act and the astonishing surveillance capabilities of Homeland Security and the NSA, you have no privacy left in this regard. None. In fact, if you want privacy, you'd better fall of the grid and disappear.
        Pornography can be exploitive of both the woman or man depicted, irrespective of the age, as well as exploitive of the "weakness" of the consumer. Child pornography is reprehensible, and that those who produce it, those who benefit financially from the exploitation children, or anyone else (and this goes beyond sexual exploitation), in my view, should be prosecuted with extreme prejudice. Perhaps we should colonize Mars with them, the way England colonized Australia. If we banished only the producers of porn in general, we'd lose, just guessing here, maybe tens of thousands of undesirables. If we banish the consumers, however, we'll loose nearly everyone else. Pornography sites get more hits than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter . . .  combined.
         I have been a consumer of pornography since I was eleven years old, when a friend and I found a copy of the Marquis de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, along with a deck of "French" playing cards from the war in the bottom drawer of his father's dresser. This was a brutal and unfortunate introduction to sex, and did me no little damage as a child, while also completely captivating me. I once viewed pornography as an abomination. As I matured I came to see it merely as a lesser thing, a representation, a shadow of something grand. Sex is a powerful, astonishing, creative force; but to view another human being solely as an object for one's personal pleasure is dishonoring to their humanity, just as those who are depicted and create the depictions are dishonoring the humanity of others by viewing them solely as a means to their economic gain irrespective of its effect upon them, or the culture at large. At the same time, we are sexual beings, sex is an irresistible force in our lives, particularly in our youth, and our expression of this varies wildly. For many of us, the lesser, the pornographic representation of this beautiful thing is all we have, and I say let us have it. To overly regulate something so complicated is a fool's quest. There may well be people whose actual calling it is to provide the lesser representation for those who, for whatever reason, have no other sexual outlet. If only it were that simple. It isn't.
          Many years ago I wrote a feature article for a magazine that I wanted to call "Porn: When Love is Just a Four Letter Word." The editor didn't like my title and called the piece simply, "The Problem With Pornography." When a friend of mine saw the title he quipped, "I'll tell you the problem with pornography, it's too damned expensive!" I laughed, because it was, then.
          Now, it is free and available to anyone, anywhere in the world who has an Internet connection. It is free and ostensibly private to politicians, teachers, pastors, priests, caregivers, psychotherapists, insurance salesmen, grocers, employees of Homeland Security, and very young people who are not equipped to deal with what they see, and can be hurt by it, as I was. Porn is as easy to access as Google, and completely accessible from Google. The same is unfortunately true for underage and child pornography. Check the number of sex offenders (you can google it) in any city. In any mid-to-major city and you will find them numbering in the many thousands. Some of them are truly dangerous sexual predators who should justly be identified and feared. Others are people who stupidly downloaded images of people under the age of eighteen onto their hard drives under the watch of Homeland Security, or their local child porn task force, perhaps not even knowing the actual age of those portrayed. And it doesn't matter how many images--five or five hundred can win a conviction and a place on the sex offenders list. I suspect that a majority of these "perpetrators" would rather die than themselves do physical harm to anyone. I know this is true of the "criminal" I know. He is someone who, before the Internet age, would not have thought to seek out "child" porn (anyone under eighteen) images that he knew were illegal. But now, such images are easy to stumble upon, and the images one stumbles upon might just be found on a police sting site, in which case a visit from the constabulary should be anticipated and feared. And think also of the emphasis on youthfulness in pornography. The porn world is full of women in their twenties trying to look fifteen, and most certainly, underage girls trying to look at least eighteen. This means that one could be, without culpability, breaking the spirit of the law by viewing legal images of someone who merely looks young, or guilty of having child porn by possessing images of someone underage who looks much older. But which one is the true offender, the one who violates the letter, or the spirit of the law? Both? And why would anyone of any age submit to being thus objectified? Well, for many, various and sometimes complicated reasons: survival, attention, pleasure, ambition, psychic wounds, creative sexual expression . . . fill in your reasons. Is it all bad? I don't think so. Is it all good? Certainly not. Like everything human, it's a stew of both.
       A recent study suggested that, at least in the Netherlands, there is little correlation between an individual's use of pornography and his/her other sexual behaviors. I suspect this study is less representative than it purports; however I know that most people can and do draw a strict line between fantasy and reality. Our current laws assume the opposite.
       Religion, our culture, and especially our legal system have yet to come to terms with the full spectrum of human sexual behavior, and what lies properly within and properly without legal behavior. Some states still have sodomy laws on the books that prohibit not just sodomy, but oral sex and adultery. Our legal system in particular dumps all "sexual offenders" into the same punitive cesspool. And this cesspool requires not just punishment, but "treatment" as well, for all, irrespective of where they reside on that spectrum. And an entire industry has grown up around this "treatment," with an economic interest in perpetuating the system--not unlike the private prison industry, and certainly related to it. We have put Homeland Security to the task of tracking pornography consumers as well as terrorists. These officials couldn't pick up on the Boston Marathon bombers' plans, despite the trail they left behind, but thank God they caught my friend who neither harmed another human being nor ever paid for illegal pornography. He had it because it was easily accessible and he was vulnerable. I hope you feel safer now that his life and freedoms, and the life and freedoms of thousands like him, have been forever altered. I don't.
        I would never defend child pornography, which is, once again, indefensible and reprehensible. I'm not even defending pornography, which is too various and across the board to defend monolithically. But I do not believe that pornography that doesn't violate laws with regard to age, violence and otherwise illegal behavior, should be illegal. I despise exploitative producers of porn as I despise those who exploit workers in China, sell addictive drugs, or those who trade in human flesh in any other way. Unfortunately, there will always be a demand for these products--underage labor, underage flesh, and drugs. Demands are supplied. But it is those who facilitate the supply who should be ostracized and punished severely. They are the ones who lure underage victims into their web and facilitate their exploitation. Consumers are mere fools, unless they are something worse, and, of course, many are. Consumers who enrich the producers are culpable fools, though not nearly so culpable as the perpetrators. There is perhaps hope for mere fools. Much of what I have said here suggests that the motive is economic only, but this is obviously not the case. There are those who produce illegal material and trade in it for perverse pleasure only. Irrespective of the motive, it is an evil that must be uncovered, punished and, if possible, treated.
        Finally, I want to address the currently popular legal notion that a victim of underage porn is re-victimized every time someone views the pornographic images of her/him. This is not a healthy notion for anyone involved, particularly the victim. There is a distinction to be made here. The Holocaust does not occur again every time someone visits a Holocaust museum and views the horrific images found there. This way of thinking permanently victimizes the individual(s) in question, and is patently absurd. Even if someone is pathetic or perverse enough to be gratified in some way by viewing Holocaust images, he is not re-victimizing the victims. Their violation was heinous, but historical and ended; the dead suffer no more, and the living are not being abused again by the museums and the images, even though they are far worse than pornographic. They tragically must live and deal with their trauma however they can, but they are not re-victimized by another person's imagination; the crime is not being repeated, no further suffering is created in the head of the sick individual who enjoys such images, unless he commits a crime. He may well be damaging his own soul, descending further into a personal darkness, but thoughts are not crimes (unless they are very dark thoughts and are widely broadcast). "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Which road is paved with evil thoughts but no correlative behavior? Only perhaps the road to a personal hell. On the other hand, one who trades in or purchases underage porn is participating in its perpetuation. It is reasonable and just that, whatever other punishment they incur, they should pay significant fines, reparations to victims of this particular crime, the proceeds going into a victims fund to facilitate whatever help a victim may require as a result of his or her exploitation.
        With respect to pornography in general, in the end we are not looking at black and white, but shades of gray. This is not to say that black and white do not comprise the ends of the spectrum. They certainly do. But our current legal system does not sufficiently recognize the gray, stuck as it is in the black and white. Much of the the Church does not recognize the gray, stuck as it is on heaven and hell; and our culture is simply stuck in gray, indiscriminately approving one practice, and condemning another behavior based mainly on the zeitgeist.
        Our culture obsesses on this stuff, but we don't often have straightforward conversations about it. We often don't recognize that, at bottom, the problem, if there is one, is "I do," as the police chief cited earlier courageously admitted. Pornography exists because we want it to. We like it. Conversations about this issue, and growth in understanding and behavior, must take place with grace, understanding, tolerance (save for the intolerable crime of abuse) and an understanding that our weaknesses and failures do not condemn us to hell, do not make us subhuman, but confirm that we share in the human condition. More importantly, we share the responsibility to repair this human condition, beginning with our personal conditions. And in all of this, there is nothing more important than protecting children from the extreme "condition" and brutally destructive behaviors of the criminals among us.
        And we really must do a better job of determining who is and who is not a criminal, and exactly what constitutes a crime.

         

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