Washington, D.C.-based Family Research Council released on Wednesday a new study detailing the effects of pornography on marriages, children and individuals.

“This is a ground-breaking review of what pornography costs families trying to create a life together,” said Dr. Pat Fagan, who authored the study and serves as FRC’s senior fellow and director of the Center for Research on Marriage and Religion. “Men, women and sometimes even children are saturated by sexual content, and more significantly, are told that it has no real effect. It’s just a little amusement.”

But through the study, Fagan affirmed that “pornography corrodes the conscience, promotes distrust between husbands and wives and debases untold thousands of young women.”

“It is not harmless escapism but relational and emotional poison,” he commented.

Pornography was defined in the study as “a visual representation of sexuality which distorts an individual’s concept of the nature of conjugal relations.”

The report showed that in families, pornography use leads to marital dissatisfaction, infidelity, separation and divorce.

Citing the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, the report pointed out that 68% of divorce cases involved one party meeting a new paramour over the Internet, 56% involved “one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites,” 47% involved “spending excessive time on the computer,” and 33% involved spending excessive time in chat rooms.

Fagan commented, “The fact that marriage rates are dropping steadily is well known. But the impact of pornography use and its correlation to fractured families has been little discussed. The data show that as pornography sales increase, the marriage rate drops.”

The FRC study revealed that among couples affected by one spouse’s addiction, two-thirds experience a loss of interest in sexual intercourse; both spouses perceive pornography viewing as tantamount to infidelity; and pornography viewing leads to a loss of interest in good family relations.

Pornography use, Fagan says, is “a quiet family killer.”

Men are more than six times as likely to view pornography as females and more likely to spend more time viewing it.

Men who habitually look at pornography have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexual behaviors, sexual aggression, promiscuity, and even rape. Moreover, men begin to view women and even children as “sex objects.”

Additionally, addictive pornography use leads to lower self-esteem and a weakened ability to carry out a meaningful social and work life.

Among teens, those who watch pornography more frequently tend to be high sensation seekers, less satisfied with their lives, have a fast Internet connection, and have friends who are younger. Viewing such material at their age hinders the development of a healthy sexuality.

The study points out that with the growth of digital media and the Internet, social sanctions from parents, mentors and the community are operating in fewer and fewer quarters.

Fagan warns, “Habitual consumption of pornography can break down the relational substrates of human life and interaction – family, friends and society.

“As such, reinforcing these relationships is the surest guard against such destructive sexual tendencies.”

The key to protecting against the effects of pornography, he says, is to foster relationships of affection and attachment, especially between the father and the mother and between parents and children. Deliberate parental monitoring of Internet use is an additional key defense. Fagan also calls on the government to “reassess its laissez-faire attitude towards the proliferation of pornography, especially on the Internet.”

Family Research Council is a Christian organization dedicated to the promotion of marriage and family and the sanctity of human life in national policy.

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Justices hear Internet free speech arguments (970319)

The Supreme Court enters cyberspace

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The Supreme Court justices ventured into unknown territory Wednesday, for the first time considering arguments regarding free speech in cyberspace.

At issue is the Communications Decency Act, passed by Congress and signed into law last year. The court has been asked to determine the constitutionality of the law, which bans “indecent” material from the Internet.

Advocates of both sides of the issue braved snow and rain outside the court, shouting slogans and carrying banners. The demonstrations were civil, however, and the impromptu debates that inevitably occur around such controversial issues were generally polite.

Inside the court, attorneys presented arguments for and against the law, which was struck down by a federal court in Philadelphia last June. That court said the law would unlawfully hurt adults’ rights to view sexually oriented material.

“The Internet threatens to give every child with access to an interactive computer a free pass into the equivalent of every adult bookstore and video outlet in the country,” Justice Department attorney Seth Waxman told the justices.

“We think this (law) is a small price to pay” to protect children, he said.

But Bruce Ennis, representing the groups who challenged the law, said the law was unconstitutional government censorship.

“The government cannot reduce the adult population to reading or viewing only what is appropriate for children,” he said.

Ennis argued that adults have a constitutionally protected right to view material deemed indecent, and that the CDA was an attempt to deny them that right.

Waxman argued that Internet service providers should use credit cards or adult-access codes to restrict access to minors, but Ennis countered that such a proposal would be too expensive for non-profit organizations that may provide questionable material.

In their questioning of attorneys, the justices struggled to find a metaphor for Internet communication.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggested the global network could be compared to “a street corner or a park,” while Justice Stephen Breyer said it “is very much like a telephone.”

Regardless of context, however, Justice Antonin Scalia said the government was within its rights to bar pornographic material from minors.

“We say ‘tough luck, you have to sell it in stores,’” rather than on the street,” Scalia said.

The CDA makes it illegal to post “indecent” or “patently offensive” material on the Internet, but would not apply to content posted from outside the United States. Ennis argued that nearly half the questionable material available on the Internet is posted from outside the United States.

A decision in the case, Reno vs. ACLU, is expected in July.

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The case for the Communications Decency Act (970300)

To save the children: CDA supporters cite Internet’s threat to minors

(CNN) — To its supporters, protecting the children from “disgusting, repulsive pornography” on the Internet is the prime purpose of the Communications Decency Act. The federal government’s compelling interest to protect minors overshadows any infringement on the First Amendment rights of adult users of the Internet, they say.

“It is not an exaggeration to say that the worst, most vile, most perverse pornography is only a few click-click-clicks away from any child on the Internet,” then-Sen. James Exon, the Nebraska Democrat who sponsored the original bill, said during debate on the Senate floor.

The Internet, Exon said, was filled with “the most disgusting, repulsive pornography ... featuring torture, child abuse, and bestiality” — all within easy access to children with a computer and a modem.

His fellow senators agreed, passing the measure overwhelmingly.

“The Internet is like taking a porn shop and putting it in the bedroom of your children and then saying ‘Do not look,’” Indiana Republican Sen. Dan Coats said on the floor of the chamber the day the Senate passed the bill.

Supporters see the bill as an aid to parents struggling to protect their children in an increasingly complex world.

“I remain convinced ... that our Constitution allows us to help parents by enforcing this Act to prevent children from being exposed to objectionable material transmitted through computer networks,” Clinton said after the bill was found unconstitutional by a federal court in Philadelphia last year.

Clinton agreed with opponents of the bill that software products that block access to sexually explicit sites on the Internet and an industry-wide rating system were both valuable tools, but CDA supporters say it’s not enough.

“Outside cyberspace, laws restrain people from displaying sexually explicit images in public places and from selling porn magazines to children,” said Cathleen Cleaver, director of legal studies at the conservative think tank Family Research Council. “So, on the Internet, the burden of protecting children from exploitation should not rest solely on the parents.”

Cleaver argued that failure to enact strong laws governing cyberspace was in essence abandoning “the information superhighway ... to pornographers.”

Supporters also point to the ever-advancing technology of computers — and say that parents are hard-pressed to keep up with their techno-savvy kids.

“We can’t expect parents to supervise their kids if they can’t set the clocks on their VCRs,” said Donna Rice Hughes, communications director for Enough Is Enough, a Virginia-based anti-pornography organization.

Additionally, said Hughes, children have access to the Internet via computers in libraries, schools and cybercafes — away from parents’ attempts to block such material from their children.

Opponents argue that the law is too broad, that it is virtually impossible to enforce — that there is no way Internet Service Providers can be certain only bona fide adults are accessing adult sites. But supporters say that’s not true.

“Every user of the Internet, unless you are stealing your access, has to subscribe to somebody,” said Bruce Taylor of the National Law Center for Families and Children, during an interview on National Public Radio last spring. “And at the time of your subscription, that is going to be an easy time to give a credit card, or an ID or a drivers license to give you an adult access code that can allow adults unlimited access to adult material.”

The Internet, Exon said during the same radio broadcast, is not so different from telephones and the mail — obscene and indecent material should not be allowed.

“I think we have a responsibility here,” Exon said. “ ... There’s nothing to say that the Internet is so different, although it is, that we dare not touch it.”

“The law won’t be foolproof, but it will work,” Exon said in an article he wrote for Windows magazine in October 1995. “Just like speed limits don’t eliminate all speeders on the asphalt highways, they do make the highways safer.”

“We want to set down some basic rules of the road to make the information highway safer for families and children to travel,” he said.

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Pro-CDA sites (970300)

· U.S. Department of Justice

· Christian Coalition

· Morality in Media - An anti-pornography organization dedicated to “combatting the distribution of obscene material in the United States and upholding decency standards in the media.”

· The National Obscenity Law Center

· The National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families - A nonprofit organization that favors the CDA as part of a broader effort to reduce sexual violence linked to illegal and child pornography.

· Family Research Council - A nonprofit, nonpartisan educational organization formed “to promote “the traditional family unit and the Judeo-Christian value system.”

· Concerned Woman for America - Founded “to protect the interests of American families and provide a voice for women who believe in Judeo-Christian values.”

· American Family Association, Inc. - A Christian ministry headed by Dr. Donald E. Wildmon.

Legal documents:

· Justice Department brief to the Supreme Court - Full text of the Dept. of Justice brief filed before the Supreme Court on January 21 (96k).

· Justice Department reply brief to the Supreme Court - This is the Justice Department’s response to the CIEC brief filed on on February 20 (45k).

· Amicus brief filed by pro-CDA members of Congress Morality in Media’s pro-CDA amicus brief to the Supreme Court

· Legal Pad’s pro-CDA amicus brief to the Supreme Court

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The case against the Communications Decency Act (970300)

Brave new medium: Opponents say CDA infringes on free speech

(CNN) — Opponents of the Communications Decency Act say the bill is nothing short of censorship —and an over-broad, vague and unenforceable attempt, at that.

Existing laws, they say, already ban obscenity, harassment, child pornography and enticing minors into sexual activity.

The CDA duplicates those, the opponents say, and adds one problematic point — its “indecency standard,” which creates a separate category of illegal material by defining indecency as that which is “patently offensive” by “contemporary community standards.”

“What strikes some people as ‘indecent’ or ‘patently offensive’ may look very different to other people in another part of the country,” Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont wrote in Roll Call last spring.

Such a vague ban, Leahy said, “may make us feel good, but threatens to drive off the Internet and computer networks an unimaginable amount of valuable political, artistic, scientific, health-related and other speech.”

The bill’s opponents say they fear abuse of the law. With such a vague definition of what is actually illegal, prosecutions could vary widely, they say.

“Frankly, I’m not comforted by advocacy groups or even by the government saying, ‘Oh, trust us, we promise not to abuse this broad power. We promise only to use it against real bad guys,’” said ACLU attorney Christopher Hansen in an interview on National Public Radio last spring.

The District Court in Philadelphia agreed with those concerns last year, ruling that the CDA violated constitutional guarantees of free speech. The Internet, the court said, is a “never-ending worldwide conversation” deserving of the “highest protection from government interference.”

The CDA, opponents contend, is government interference at its highest, stripping parental responsibility in an area where parents can easily demonstrate such responsibility.

“We all share the goal of protecting children,” America Online chairman Steve Case told Data Based Advisor last May. “Unfortunately, Congress passed this law without understanding the many technological tools available and under development that empower parents, rather than the government, to determine what their children receive on the Internet.”

Between blocking software like Net Nanny and SurfWatch and good old-fashioned parental supervision, the Internet is as safe for minors as books, television and radio, opponents say. But the Internet is different, and the case against the CDA presented to the district court last year was essentially a primer in how the vast network functions.

Opponents object to the bill’s supporters framing the Internet in broadcast media terms — unlike television, they say, a user must actively seek out information. “Surfing the net” and “channel surfing” are not the same, they argue. The Internet is, Jerry Berman of the Center for Democracy and Technology told Newsday, a “medium unlike any that has come before.”

“It is not television or radio or telephone, but a brand new, robust form of publishing that deserves the same First Amendment protections as print,” Berman said.

The CDA would create a chilling effect on free speech on the Internet, civil libertarians who oppose the bill say. Internet service providers would be likely to err on the side of caution and bar any material that might be considered indecent, they argue.

“What this bill would do would be analogous to telling your mailman that if he delivers a letter with dirty words in it, he’ll go to jail.” — Sheila Kennedy, director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, at a meeting of The Indiana Software Association.

And enforcing such a law would be a virtual impossibility, Mark Jacobson, general counsel for the online service provider Prodigy, told CNN.

“If we enforced the law the way it was written, we’d have to have someone in every single chat room, and monitor every single bulletin board, all day long, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which would have cost us a bloody fortune,” Jacobson said.

Leahy and others, like Washington Republican Rep. Rick White, fought the bill.

“I told everybody the standard was unconstitutional,” White told National Public Radio.

But the bill passed anyway in what Leahy called a moment of political grandstanding. The CDA, Leahy said, “flouts (the First Amendment) for the sake of political posturing and in the name of protecting our children.”

“I believe there was a terribly misguided effort to protect children from what some prosecutors somewhere in this country might consider offensive or indecent online material,” Leahy told Congress early last year. “The Communications Decency Act tramples on the free speech rights of all Americans who want to enjoy this medium.”

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Anti-CDA sites (970300)

· American Civil Liberties Union - The ACLU, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 275,000-member public interest organization devoted to protecting civil liberties, has led the court fight against the Communications Decency Act..

· Reno vs. ACLU: The CDA on Trial

· Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition - CIEC is a coalition of Internet users, businesses, non-profit groups, and civil liberties advocates that filed suit against the CDA on February 26, 1996 (ALA vs. DOJ). The suit was consolidated with ACLU vs. Reno.

· Electronic Privacy Information Center - EPIC is a public interest research center devoted to emerging civil liberties issues.

· Electronic Frontier Foundation - The EFF is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting civil liberties in new media.

· Center For Democracy and Technology (CDT) - CDT is a non-profit public interest organization dedicated to “constitutional civil liberties and democratic values in new computer and communications technologies.”

· American Library Association Office for Information Technology Policy - A plaintiff in the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition suit against the CDA (ALA vs. DOJ). The suit was consolidated with ACLU v. Reno.

· People for the American Way - A member of the Citizens Internet Empowerment Coalition

· Families against Internet Censorship

Legal documents:

· ACLU brief to the Supreme Court - Full text of ACLU brief against the CDA filed February 20 (105k).

· CIEC brief to the Supreme Court - Full text of the anti-CDA brief filed before the Supreme Court on February 20 (111k).

· Supreme Court brief of Amici Curiae, American Association of University Professors, et. al - A Supreme Court brief against the CDA filed by the American Association of University Professors and more than a dozen other organizations.

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Internet screeners of erotica work erratically (970326)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Net Nanny can be slow to catch on when Junior takes a raunchy tour of the Internet. But once she does, he’s caught red-handed and red-faced.

When the computer censoring program finally realizes the likes of Deviant Dictionary have been summoned, Net Nanny announces a “violation,” shuts down the system and primly records the misdeed for Mom and Dad to see.

Gotcha! There’s no stuffing the embarrassing evidence under the mattress, like girlie magazines in simpler days.

Net Nanny is one of close to a dozen screening programs being marketed to parents as an alternative or supplement to federal Internet content restrictions overturned by a judicial panel and now under Supreme Court review.

Welcome to Awesome Babes and Bikiniland

How well do they work?

Plainly, not well enough to replace other ways of dealing with children, like establishing trust.

Also, not well enough to draw anything but a ragged line between pornography on one side and disease prevention, sex education and the arts on the other.

But the judges who struck down the federal Internet law last year found such programs preferable to the government controls.

Above all, they said the strength of the Internet and liberty is the same: “chaos and cacophony.”

Hence, Awesome Babes and Bikiniland.

Net Nanny did not mind when a grown-up “Junior” who went looking for love in all the wrong places peeked at those relatively mild sites.

Screeners not very discriminating

Another screening program, Cyber Patrol (motto: “To surf and protect”), would not let Junior see material on Anne Sexton, the celebrated poet with that three-letter word in her name.

It also blocked a search for information on Sri Lanka, an exotic country that Cyber Patrol seemed to consider erotic.

The poet and the nation were “code 5” violations, not as severe as the code 1 Free Babe Zone but blocked just the same.

Even so, the program allowed the Female Appreciation Page, with explicit nudity, to slip through.

Apart from sheer mistakes, a foolproof filter “is impossible to develop because of the subjective nature of what is considered objectionable,” PC Magazine says.

Still, they may help children explore the Web “in relative safety.”

That’s a tall order in a medium connecting some 40 million people using more than 9 million computers to find material that constantly changes.

Key words trip up cybercensors

The cybercensors try to do it with lists of sites and words that will set off a trip wire. Sex, violence and language are among up to a dozen subjects that can be screened out.

Even so, censorship programs are hit and miss.

Net Nanny allowed an eye-popping exploration of the Hustler magazine home page before it cottoned on to what was happening and stopped it.

But it was quick to deny access to a discussion of erotic needlework. Junior had to disable Nanny by using the adult password before eavesdropping on mystifying messages:

“Are there male parts to cross-stitch also, like I’d bother to waste my time!”

“Where exactly would you hang this in your house once you stitched it???”

Parents can make own rules

Screening programs may help kids from becoming accidental tourists in seamy nether worlds. Users may be less likely to trigger graphic sexual content by entering an innocent search phrase for a school project.

That’s one worry about a medium that displays racy titles such as Blackberry’s and family fare such as WizKids on the same menu screen, to take just one example from the popular Yahoo search engine.

Bawdy material usually carries a warning that it is not to be seen by minors, and accessing it requires a series of deliberate, if easy, steps.

In one attempt at sorting out the smut, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer now comes with a security system offering parents five levels of tolerance for sex, nudity, language and violence. It depends on voluntary ratings.

The system can be tweaked, for example, to allow “provocative frontal nudity” or hold the line at “frontal nudity.” It will permit “clothed sexual touching” or stop at “passionate kissing.”

The parent can block all tough stuff, allow fighting, give the green light to “killing with blood and gore” or open the floodgates to “wanton and gratuitous violence.”

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Reviews of screening programs (970326)

(AP) — Below is a summary of screening-program reviews in PC Magazine’s April 8 edition, the 1997 Utility Guide. Some programs can be downloaded for free trials.

Cyber Patrol 3.1: Rated as “the most powerful package.” Complex to set up. One option keeps personal information such as names and credit card numbers from being sent online. $29.95 to register plus $29.95 for year’s subscription. Web address: www.cyberpatrol.com

Cybersitter 2.1: A “powerful tool” with free daily updates of restricted sites. Easy to set up. $39.95. www.solidoak.com

Cyber Snoop 2.0: Tracks all activity by the user. Does not come with its own blocking program but allows parents to create one. $29.95. www.pearlsw.com

Net Nanny 3.1: Flexible and easy to use but “not as robust in its filtering capabilities” as some others. Can log all activity. $39.95. www.netnanny.com

Rated-PG: Sophisticated controls of children’s computer time. Comes with more than 2,500 Internet addresses that have been rated for content. Setup is difficult, use is easy. $54.95, with updated lists of restricted sites and words available by subscription. www.ratedpg.com

SurfWatch 1.6: “Effective filtering tool” that does not allow parents to edit restrictive lists. Simple setup. Monthly maintenance plan available by subscription. Version 2.0 to allow more customizing. $19.95. www.surfwatch.com

X-Stop 2.0: “Straightforward and simple to use” with free daily updates. $29.95. www.xstop.com

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TV’s family hour loaded with sexual content (961212)

LOS ANGELES (CNN) — It’s called the family hour — a time for parents and children to gather around the TV and watch programs that aren’t loaded with sexual themes and innuendo.

But a new study by the Kaiser Family Foundation and a California-based organization called Children Now says the family hour is anything but.

“What we found is that there is a tremendous amount of sexual content on TV during the family hour, very little of which makes any mention of the risks or responsibilities of sexual activity,” Victoria Rideout of Children Now said at a news conference Wednesday.

Today, about 75% of programming between the hours of 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. EST contains some sexual content, up from 65% in 1986 and 43% in 1976.

A typical hour contains about eight sexual messages, the study said. Although many, such as flirting or kissing, are moderate in nature, the study found that young children understand a great number of them.

No responsibility

What’s missing, the study said, are messages about risk and responsibility.

“Our point is not that television should avoid the topic of sex. Our point is that we need to be aware of the kind of messages about sex that we are sending our kids,” Rideout said.

She said 700,000 teen-age girls face unplanned pregnancies every year and millions of teens contract sexually transmitted diseases — but not on television.

In fact, just 9% of scenes of a sexual nature mentioned the risks and responsibilities of sexual activity, such as unplanned pregnancy or birth control. This was an increase from 2% in 1986 and 4% in 1976.

The study involved analysis of sexual content, telephone surveys of parents with children ages 6 to 15, and eight focus groups with children ages 8 to 13 in Chicago and San Jose, California.

In the focus groups, most children ages 8 to 10 understood a joke in CBS’ comedy “The Nanny” about the title character losing her “Virgin . . . airlines ticket.”

Youngsters also understood that a reference to whipped cream in NBC’s “The Jeff Foxworthy Show” was about a man intending to “squirt whipped cream all over (his wife) and lick it off.”

Changing attitudes

Still, the study found that not all sexual themes were bad.

On NBC’s now-canceled “Malibu Shores,” a high school girl who thought she might be pregnant told children, “If you’re worried about your future, you shouldn’t have sex,” and “even condoms aren’t 100%.”

More than 43% of the parents surveyed say they worry “a great deal” about how much sex their children see on TV. At the same time, they said TV can help teach important lessons and help them raise issues with their kids.

Chris Ender, a spokesman for CBS, said attitudes toward sex and its presentation have changed dramatically in 10 years, so it shouldn’t be shocking that the volume of sexual content has increased.

He said CBS shows sexual content responsibly and the network’s 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. lineup is “programming that the entire family can watch together.”

The nonprofit Kaiser foundation is devoted to health. Children Now is a national nonpartisan group aimed at improving children’s lives.

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Court Applies Free-Speech Rights to Internet (970627)

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court extended free-speech rights to cyberspace in a historic ruling, striking down a federal law that restricted indecent pictures and words on the Internet computer network.

The nation’s highest court dealt the Clinton administration a major defeat by declaring unconstitutional the law that made it a crime to transmit sexually explicit material to anyone younger than 18.

The high-profile case marked the first time the Supreme Court granted full constitutional free-speech protections under the First Amendment to the giant worldwide network of linked computers used by tens of millions of people.

The justices by a 7-2 vote ruled that all key parts of the Communications Decency Act violate free-speech rights, amounting to illegal government censorship.

“Notwithstanding the legitimacy and importance of the congressional goal of protecting children from harmful materials, we agree ... that the statute abridges ‘freedom of speech’ protected by the First Amendment,” Justice John Paul Stevens said for the court majority in the 40-page opinion.

The law, signed by President Clinton in 1996 as part of a telecommunications overhaul, barred distribution to minors of indecent or “patently offensive” materials on the Internet. It provided for fines and a maximum two years in prison.

The law defined indecent as anything that “depicts or describes in terms patently offensive, as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs.”

The law did not target obscenity or child pornography, which already were illegal. The Internet indecency law has never taken effect because of the court battle.

The ruling represented a major victory for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and groups representing libraries, publishers and the computer on-line industry, which brought the lawsuit challenging the law.

ACLU attorney Stefan Presser said, “Essentially the Supreme Court of the United States took an idea from the 18th century, that is free speech, and said it has enduring quality, and will extend into the 21st century, because government will not be allowed to censor what’s on the Internet.”

Clinton said he would study the decision, gather people representing industry, parents, teachers and librarians to review it, and continue to look for a way to keep children from viewing pornography on the Internet.

“With the right technology and rating systems we can help ensure that our children don’t end up in the red light districts of cyberspace,” he said in a statement.

The Supreme Court said the rapidly growing Internet deserved full First Amendment protection, citing its unique characteristics as a public forum for the exchange of ideas and information.

The high court rejected arguments that the Internet was similar to the television and radio industries, where there has been a history of extensive government regulation and where indecent speech may be restricted.

“The (Communications Decency Act) is a content-based regulation of speech,” Stevens said. “The vagueness of such a regulation raises special First Amendment concerns because of its obvious chilling effect on free speech.”

“As a matter of constitutional tradition ... we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it,” Stevens said.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed that the law was unconstitutional in that it would restrict adults’ access to material they otherwise would be entitled to see.

Writing for the two, O’Connor said they would invalidate the law only in those circumstances. That part of the court’s ruling was unanimous.

But O’Connor said for the two dissenters that she would uphold other restrictions that prohibited the use of indecent speech in communications between an adult and one or more minors.

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Milk stores hustle skin magazines ‘catering to pedophiles,’ watchdog says (Ottawa Citizen, 970819)

Nude models touted for their youth in Barely Legal

A magazine that a media-watch group says is “catering to pedophiles” can be purchased along with milk and chocolate bars at Ottawa area convenience stores.

Several Becker’s and Mac’s Milk stores in the region stock copies of Barely Legal, a Hustler publication selling for $6.99 that shows raunchy naked photographs of young women who have just passed their 18th birthday, the legal age to pose for adult magazines.

“This thing is so very vulgar, I’m appalled,” said Jeanne Maranda of MediAction, a Montreal-based group working to improve the image of women in the media.

“It is pedophilia, it’s catering to pedophiles,” she said yesterday. “They’re marketing young girls, making them look as young as possible for old men and it should be stopped.

“I don’t like anything that exploits the bodies of women or uses it as a sexual object, but for things like Playboy, well, I disagree with it but guys like that stuff and I’m not going to fight it that hard. But when it comes to using the bodies of young, young girls as sexual objects for distorted, disgusting men, I will fight until I die.”

Barely Legal, which boasts that its models are “sexual debutantes” who are “young enough for pre-med, old enough to play doctor,” is just one of several magazines capitalizing on a recent boom in sexually explicit entertainment featuring young people.

As the magazine’s managing editor, Allan MacDonell, explained, “It’s a huge market right now.”

“Everyone loves young girls,” Mr. MacDonell said from the Los Angeles-based Hustler offices. “When you get to be 30, a 19-year-old girl still looks good. When you’re a 19-year-old man or a 65-year-old man, a 19-or 18-year-old girl looks really good. It’s not like he’s perverted. It’s a biological imperative.”

Indeed, local adult entertainment shops stock a variety of magazines —all legal —featuring young women, including titles like Just 18, Over 18, and Young and Tender. But Barely Legal is the only such title available in the convenience stores.

Local Becker’s and Mac’s Milk outlets, (both of Ontario’s big convenience-store chains are owned by Silcorp Ltd.) decide which magazines are sold in their stores.

A spokesman for Silcorp Ltd. couldn’t be reached yesterday to explain the company’s rationale for stocking Barely Legal, but the magazines sold in area stores are wrapped in plastic, with their covers hidden, as required by law.

Even those in the adult entertainment industry question whether material like Barely Legal should be sold in convenience stores.

“Putting aside the business competition aspects, and the dollars and cents of it, I’m not sure how I feel about it,” said Chris Giacobbi, 24, owner of Apexxx, an adult store that specializes in adult-rated videos, magazines and specialty items

“No one under 18 is allowed in my store, but in Mac’s Milk and other places, anyone can walk in,” he said.

“Sure, they may be stored behind the counter and kept wrapped so that kids don’t have access, but it’s hard to control (and) kids can find a way.”

There are different theories as to why there is a sudden surge in sales of such magazines —and sites on the Internet with similar content —featuring the youngest possible models.

Mr. Giacobbi said it’s part of an overall explosion in the “specialty” adult entertainment market.

“The industry has grown over the past five years,” he said.

“Everything before was very generic. Now there’s a lot of specialty magazines that are doing very well. There are more magazines with 18 year olds, but there are also more magazines featuring 40-plus women and trans-gender magazines, whatever.”

Aside from what he describes as the “natural attraction” that older men feel for younger women, Mr. MacDonell attributed the success of Barely Legal, which Hustler launched in 1993, to the fact that the women inside look “real.”

“The way we present these women, they look like real girls you could meet. Men are tired of the silicon-breast implants, dancer types who you never actually see anywhere.”

It should be noted too, that while the pornography laws in the United States and Canada require women to be 18 years old to pose, according to Mr. MacDonell, in England, a 16-year-old girl can pose naked as long as she isn’t pictured with a man and has parental consent forms signed.

No matter what the drive behind the recent boom, Ms. Maranda says, it is an industry that fuels itself and will continue to grow as long as it remains legal.

“The magazines teach men to sexualize young women’s bodies, makes them think it is natural to want them. Once that becomes acceptable, it’s hard to change.”

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Computer pornography: questions and answers (Family Research Council, 951108)

What types of pornography are freely available to anyone on the internet?

The entire spectrum of pornographic material is available on computer networks including images of soft-core nudity, hard-core sex acts, anal sex, bestiality, bondage & dominion, sado-masochism (including actual torture and mutilation, usually of women, for sexual pleasure), scatological acts (defecating and urinating, usually on women, for sexual pleasure), fetishes, and child pornography. Additionally, there is textual pornography including detailed text stories of the rape, mutilation, and torture of women, sexual abuse of children, graphic incest, etc.

Who can access pornography on the internet?

Virtually anyone with an account or access to the Internet can access pornography. Once “on-line” there are no truly effective safety measures to prevent children from accessing all of the pornography described above. This unlimited access to pornography, with no accurate, enforceable age check and no verification procedures, has never occurred in the print, broadcast, satellite or cable media before. Cyberspace is currently the free speech absolutist’s dream world.

Where do children and adults find pornographic material on the internet?

Pornography is publicly available through the Internet by accessing sections in the hierarchies of the Usenet and at a number of sites on the World-Wide-Web. It is also traded daily via Internet e-mail and sites set up for the exchange of pornography.

Are these sites popular or is this really a small problem?

Although surveys done by on-line administrators indicate that pornographic sites are among the most often used on the Internet, the relative percentage of pornographic sites is not certain. Regardless of the actual number of sites, which is on the rise, the problem of pornography continues to be a very serious one. Like drugs, pornography’s destructive effects are felt far beyond the “pusher” and “user.”

Don’t we need further study before we take action on an issue that affects the future of cyberspace?

Proposals to “study” the issue of computer pornography are attempts by the ACLU and other ideological groups to delay legislative action on this problem. They fight virtually any legislative restriction on materials distributed on-line, and want to dump all responsibility for action into the laps of parents, many of whom are far less technologically capable than their children.

Isn’t the on-line community against proposals for “decency” on the internet?

Some of the on-line community and many of the media are opposed to any proposals to regulate the Internet or children’s access to pornography. However, out of an estimated 20 million predominately male users of various on-line networks, fewer than 2% have opposed the proposals.

What is the difference between obscenity and indecency?

Obscenity is hard-core sexual material so graphic and unredeeming that it meets the Supreme Court’s three-part test: (1) it appeals to an abnormal or excessive interest in sex; (2) it depicts or describes sexually explicit conduct in a patently offensive way; and (3) it lacks serious literary artistic, political, or scientific value. Miller v. California (1973). Indecency is a pattern of patently offensive depictions or descriptions of sexual or excretory activities or organs. Pacifica v. F.C.C. (1978). This material is legal for consenting adults, but can be regulated so that it is kept from children.

Won’t the banning of “indecent” materials jeopardize serious works of literature or library art?

No. This argument is no more credible now than it was when used against indecency laws in other contexts. No serious literary or artistic works would be banned by an indecency law. Society has long embraced the principle that those who peddle harmful material have the obligation to keep the material from children. Computer indecency should be no exception.

Aren’t there “technical fixes” that are less intrusive than a regulatory or criminal law approach?

No. To date, only a few software programs have been released to regulate children’s access to pornography, such as SurfWatch and NetNanny. Also, these programs can be bypassed by users with a good knowledge of the Internet and some technical sophistication. Even if better technical solutions become available, this approach is inadequate in and of itself because:

children can walk down the street to another computer parents’ technical ability often pales in comparison to their children’s expertise pornographers aren’t legally discouraged from peddling their materials to children

The above material includes excerpts adapted from “Children, Pornography and Cyberspace: The Problem, Solutions & the Current Congressional Debate” published by the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families.

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Hugh Hewitt: Blighted Images in America’s Heartland (Crosswalk, 040112)

Salem Radio Commentary

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story on the newest development for travelers on the nation’s interstate highways: the proliferation of pornography superstores at off-ramps throughout rural America.

The I-70 through the nation’s heartland has been particularly hard hit by the spread of these stores. Where trading posts and dairy queens used to dominate, now the triple X has become ubiquitous.

The article quoted a number of residents of these communities who are offended and opposed to these oases of skin showing up in their communities, but who have also been told by local officials that there is nothing that can be done.

In fact, the Supreme Court has consistently upheld well-crafted zoning ordinances that restrict the spread of such stores. But residents need to urge their local representatives to act, and not merely wait for the arrival of the adult businesses. It is much easier to act before the billboards go up at the off-ramps than after the doors to the stores have opened.

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Pornified America—The Culture of Pornography (Christian Post, 050822)

“For most of my life, I gave little thought to pornography. It was not something I considered relevant to me, nor did I consider it—in the daunting spectrum of social, cultural, and political problems—a particularly pressing issue facing this country,” recalls Pamela Paul, author of Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families. Her new book is likely to attract attention as it represents one of the few comprehensive reports on how pornography has transformed American culture.

Paul, a contributor to TIME magazine and other major journals, developed her interest in the cultural impact of pornography when she was asked to write about the subject for TIME. “Like many Americans, I believed pornography was no big deal,” she explains. Nevertheless, her experience writing about pornography for TIME changed everything. “My eyes were blown open,” Paul now remembers.

What Pamela Paul discovered was that pornography is not merely a major player in the economy. Now, it has become an engine for transforming the entire culture—and corrupting countless lives.

Pornified is really an extension of Pamela Paul’s investigative work for TIME magazine. The book is more a journalistic report than a sociological analysis. In one sense, that’s what makes this book all the more significant in terms of impact. Paul has filled her book with anecdotes drawn from her interviews with hundreds of porn users and analysis drawn from a massive study on pornography’s effects, done in partnership with Harris, Interactive.

Paul begins by recalling a conversation with a septuagenarian couple. Explaining that she was writing a book on pornography, the wife responded: “It’s ruining this country. Just terrible. Pornography everywhere. Not like it was when we were young.” Then she asked her husband, “Do you remember your uncle Joe?” Her husband was instantly reminded of his uncle’s collection of “wolf cards”—playing cards that featured explicit sexual images. At least, the images were considered sexually explicit for that day. “But it was so much tamer than what’s out there today,” the wife explained.

Paul quickly takes her reader into the real-life world of modern pornography. In “pornographied” America, millions of men are like the husband described by a 38-year-old woman from a Chicago suburb. “He would come home from work, slide food around his plate during dinner, play for maybe half an hour with the kids, and then go into his home office, shut the door, and surf Internet porn for hours. I knew—and he knew that I knew.”

Paul describes contemporary American culture as “pornographied” because porn is now literally everywhere. The users are no longer just fraternity boys and those written off as “dirty old men.” Now, the users of virtually unrestricted porn include children, teenagers, and adults of all ages. The victims include not only those whose lives, marriages, relationships, careers, and sexuality are corrupted, but also everyone involved in the vast pornography industry at every stage.

A sense of historical development adds credibility to Paul’s analysis. She recognizes that some forms of pornography have been a part of human culture since antiquity. A quick look at the various sculpture galleries in the British Museum should be sufficient to prove that point. Nevertheless, she recognizes that today’s pervasively pornified culture represents something new. Even in her own life span, Paul can note the development. “Men and women who came of age during the sixties, seventies, or eighties, or whose experience with pornography dates to those eras, think of pornography in terms of gauzy centerfolds, outre sexuality, women’s liberation, and the Hugh Hefner lifestyle. Back then, the lines between softcore and hardcore pornography were clear and distinguishable.”

We now face a very different reality. “Today, pornography is so seamlessly integrated into popular culture that embarrassment or surreptitiousness is no longer part of the equation.” As she observes, millions of today’s teenage boys would simply roll their eyes when confronted with what would have been considered explicitly pornographic just a few years ago.

Paul’s analysis looks at the impact of pornography on both men and women. While increasing numbers of women are involved with pornography in various ways—as producers, users, distributors, and victims—the major users of sexual pornography are men, both young and old.

The statistics are truly frightening. According to industry studies, seventy percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old men visit pornographic sites in a typical month. These young men represent something like one-fourth of all visitors to pornography sites on the Internet. The next largest group of users are young men in their twenties and thirties, 66% of whom report being regular users of pornography.

The appeal of pornography to teenage boys and young men is clear. Highly interested in sex, young males find their way into patterns of sexual excitement and arousal by being introduced to what, for most boys, are soft-core pornographic images—at least at first. Before long, pornography becomes a sexual whirlpool, pulling users into deeper and deeper habits and into more and more extreme versions of pornography.

The pornography industry understands that pornographic images desensitize viewers over time. Therefore, regular users of pornography—especially on the Internet—fuel their patterns of arousal and sexual excitement by expanding their “menu” of pornographic subjects and images.

Today’s average teenage boy is likely to have seen thousands of explicit sexual images, ranging across the spectrum of sexualities and perversions. Many of these boys and young men are driven by sexual fantasies that previous generations of young men would not even have known to imagine. In the language of contemporary academic jargon, the “transgressive” has become the normative.

The economic incentives are a big part of the pornography industry, Paul understands. According to the trade publication Adult Video News, one in every five videos were categorized as “adult” almost twenty years ago. Now, Americans rent more than 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs per year—about twenty percent of all rentals. At least 11,000 pornographic videos are produced annually, amounting to revenue for the adult film industry estimated at between five and ten billion dollars per year.

The pornography industry also includes cable and satellite television, where pay-for-view pornographic programming is big business.

Paul also documents the profit incentive that has attracted the hotel industry. “Television pornography also pays off big in the travel industry for chains such as Holiday Inn, Marriott, Hyatt, Hilton, and Sheraton,” Paul reports. “Given that half of all hotel guests order pornographic pay-per-view movies, the industry is hot for porn. Such films on pay-per-view compromise 80% of in-room entertainment revenue and 70% of total in-room revenue.”

The latest new “delivery system” for pornography is cell phones. The cell-phone pornography industry is expected to reach 1.5 billion dollars in Europe this year. “America is scrambling to catch up,” Paul explains. “Now, with more cell phones featuring color display screens, digital cameras, and Web browsers, technology firms are offering more sophisticated ways to provide pornographic content.”

Parents will be especially interested by Paul’s finding that libraries, including both public libraries and school libraries, have become a major conduit for getting pornography to teenage boys. Stephen Jones, a 14-year-old boy from Washington State, complained to his hometown newspaper: “I love to read. I love the Internet service the library provides; but we have a problem. Pornography is available through the library Internet. The library has filters, but as it stands now anyone over the age of twelve can have the filters taken off.”

We can be sure that many parents are unaware of these policies. David Burt, a public librarian concerned about the trend, cited a librarian in Washington who told him: “On Monday of last week a group of about eight to ten teenage boys came to the library and asked if they could get pornography on the Internet. I replied that they could . . . . Later that afternoon one of the younger boys (elementary age) said that the big boys had shown some dirty pictures on the computer . . . .When I applied to work at the library, running a porn shop was not in the job description . . . . We are supplying pornography to minors without their parents’ permission or knowledge.”

Put simply, porn is now considered cool. As Paul argues, “Pornography is wildly popular with teenage boys in a way that makes yesteryear’s sneaked glimpses at Penthouse seem monastic. For teenagers, pornography is just another online activity; there is little barrier to entry and almost no sense of taboo. Instead pornography has become a natural rite and acceptable pastime.”

Paul goes on to report that if pornography is popular among high schoolers, when boys get to college, “Pornography is more than accepted—it’s exalted.” On some campuses, young men are known to leave notes on their doors that read: “Leave me alone, I’m watching porn.”

Pamela Paul functions as a reporter in this book, and her report should send a message of alarm throughout the culture. Regrettably, her book may find a chilly reception in a society increasingly given over to the titillation, perversion, and profits offered by pornography.

Christians cannot afford to be seduced by this complacency. God’s gift of sexuality is being trampled underfoot and grotesquely corrupted by the commercialized debasement of sexuality. The wreckage left in the wake of pornography reaches many Christian homes, schools, churches, and countless Christian lives. Some pastors report that pornography is now the leading cause of marital distress and breakup. This crisis calls not only for Christian concern, but for a bold Christian response.

_____________________________________________________

R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Rated X (National Review Online, 051010)

Pornified: How Pornography

Is Transforming Our Lives,

Our Relationships, and Our Families,

by Pamela Paul

(Times, 320 pp., $25)

Commenting on our contemporary sexual mores, the poet and agrarian essayist Wendell Berry has written that “in sex, as in other things, we have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed ourselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead us away from ourselves. It is by imagination that we cross over the differences between ourselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love.”

Berry’s observation dates back to the early 1990s, before the explosion of Internet pornography. The cultural impact of that explosion is explored in Pornified, by Pamela Paul, a journalist. Based on more than 100 interviews and a nationally representative poll of “pornography consumers,” Paul’s book never rises to Berry’s level of ethical insight, but it confirms Berry’s thesis as it describes in ample, if often repetitive, detail our “pornified culture.”

Paul stumbled into the Sadean world of Internet pornography while on assignment for Time magazine. Although she eventually addresses the legal issues surrounding the censorship of pornography, her focus is more on pornography’s cultural and psychological impact.

The narratives of “pornography consumers” are, with minor variations, tediously similar. A wife or girlfriend discovers — sometimes through the surprising appearance of obscene images on a computer screen — the heavy Internet-porn activity of her male partner. She objects and is rebuked as sexually frigid and closed-minded. At this point, she can back off and tolerate the man’s habits, rebuke him in turn, or join in. Some of the women who opt for the last path proclaim that their decision is in accord with sexual freedom but almost in the next breath confess to gnawing feelings of inferiority as they compare their own bodies to those of the eager sexual gymnasts the man finds so tantalizing. With or without the woman’s complicity, the man’s online activity often intensifies and focuses increasingly on, to put it delicately, taboo sexual practices. In one accidentally humorous case, the man’s interest in sex with his female partner gradually subsides and he begins perusing online sex shops for the purchase of a life-size doll. Confronted, he explains: “It has nothing to do with you. When you’re not available, I could use this.”

Although she did not initially intend it this way, Paul’s new book reads very much like a sequel to her first book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, for which she interviewed 60 couples from starter marriages, defined as childless marriages that last less than five years. In that book, she argued that engaged couples need more “realistic expectations” as to “what marriage can and cannot offer”; now, in Pornified, she notes that marriage counselors and divorce lawyers increasingly identify porn addiction as one of the contributing causes of marital splits. Even apart from addiction, porn usage fosters false expectations about marital sex. The intensity of stimulation is difficult to parallel in the world of matrimonial sex. Porn, in which there is “no reciprocity” and “nothing veers from the automated path to pleasure,” is geared toward the “adolescent mind: simple, primal, hormone-driven, results-oriented, a winnable game.” Not exactly the best preparation for marital commitment and fidelity — and this is porn at its most mild.

The massive increase in the popularity of pornography in recent years is directly traceable to the ready availability of pornography on the Internet. Paul stresses the “intoxication effects of anonymity, accessibility, and affordability” of Internet porn, whose power of attraction frequently overwhelms the resistance of otherwise well-adjusted individuals. Americans spend more than $4 billion a year on video porn, more than is spent on any professional sport. Half of hotel guests order “adult” entertainment. While mainstream Hollywood produces about 400 pictures a year, the porn industry cranks out 11,000 videos, most on a measly $5,000-$10,000 budget. The regularity of such images on the Internet is likely contributing to the steady demise in the longstanding taboo against pedophilia. From 1996 to 2004, the FBI witnessed a 23-fold increase in the number of child-porn cases.

Paul is not arguing that every adolescent who takes a peek at Playboy is on an inevitable path to the practice or even the viewing of sadomasochistic sex and bestiality. There is little evidence in her research of any direct correspondence between the viewing of taboo sexual activity and the practice of such activities by viewers. There is, however, some evidence that exposure to pornography has a striking impact on how severely individuals view sexually violent crimes: Members of one studied group were inclined toward much lighter sentences for rape.

Ironically, the very thing that militates against imitative enactment — namely, the isolation of the Internet viewer and his sense of the unreality of the images he views — causes all sorts of other problems. The isolation of sexual acts from all human complications places a premium on intensely powerful visual stimulation. It is, to use Berry’s language, about the fulfillment of the fantasies of isolated sexual consumers. Paul attributes some of the fascination with formerly marginal fetishes to the American spirit of “more, bigger, better.” But she comes closer to the reason for the increase in her assertion that porn needs an “edge.” Internet porn is, not surprisingly, subject to the laws of diminishing returns. A number of men testify to the need for greater stimulation, moving from sexual acts of a variety of sorts to an interest in sex with children, other men, or even animals. “To my surprise, I was curious,” confesses one man.

Paul’s book is repetitive, both in its empirical narratives and in its conclusions — yet there is a bracing freshness to her approach, the approach of someone who once assumed pornography was simply an innocuous and occasional entertainment for a minority of adults, but whose seasoned knowledge of the reality of the industry registers genuine horror. It may help her case that she brings no religious doctrines to bear upon the issue; indeed, she thinks that the attacks from religious groups on the porn industry have made it all too easy for the industry to label its opponents fanatical puritans. She thinks the Religious Right’s campaign against sex education is counterproductive; sexual education is precisely what is needed to distinguish between healthy and unhealthy conceptions of sexuality, she says.

Part of the rhetorical force of the porn industry is the way it has insinuated itself into the ideals of progressivism and the defense of civil liberties. To speak against it is to be “pornophobic” or to engage in sexual correctness. Of course, the way the pro-porn industry makes its case by foreclosing the very possibility of argument is itself an egregious example of political correctness. She rightly mocks the notion that these folks are motivated by the defense of free political discourse and stresses repeatedly that porn is an industry with big bucks on the line. The ACLU argues that requiring a credit card for access to porn sites to try to deter children from viewing them violates the Bill of Rights and constitutes an undue burden on citizens. Although her emphasis is less on criminalization than on condemnation and public outrage, the author does suggest that pornography could be governed by the rules appropriate to commerce rather than to communication — much in the way guns and pharmaceuticals are regulated.

Reforming a pornified culture, Paul rightly observes, will require multiple strategies. One strategy she does not mention would take aim at contemporary liberalism’s values deficit with the American public. What does it say about the shrinking ambitions and declining seriousness of contemporary liberalism that Larry Flynt is lionized as a civil-rights leader? Paul’s remarks about sex education might be turned to good effect as well, although she seems ignorant of how clinically abstract such an education is apt to be in today’s public-school curriculum. Here we might return to Berry, and his observations concerning “the best representations” of sexual love as “surrounded and imbued with the light of imagination, so that they make one aware, with profound sympathy, of the two lives, not just the two bodies, that are involved.” That’s precisely the sort of education — found in great literature, art, and music — needed to combat a “pornified culture” and educate the passions and imagination of today’s youth.

Mr. Hibbs, the author of Shows About Nothing, is a contributor to National Review Online.

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TV porn alert:’Girls Next Door’ — Author warns about E! channel’s ‘reality’ show about Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, 3 live-in girlfriends (WorldNetDaily, 051125)

The scholar who exposed fraud and exploitation in the work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is blowing the whistle on the E! cable channel’s new “reality” show about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends.

Girls Next Door

Judith Reisman, author of “Kinsey: Crime and Consequences” and a soon-to-be-released new title, “Kinsey’s Attic: How One Man’s Pathology Changed the World,” says “Girls Next Door” is Hollywood’s latest and boldest attempt to normalize pornography in our culture.

The author, who served as a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department on obscenity issues, is angry the network is investing so much time in glamorizing a man she refers to as “a 79-year-old pornographer.” The show is advertised as a reality show filmed exclusively from the Playboy mansion in Los Angeles.

Reisman charges Hefner “actually drew the first ‘sibling’ incest cartoon for Playboy in 1954.” She adds he “personally selected the thousands of child sex abuse jokes and cartoons that were a Playboy staple.”

In one “Girls Next Door” episode, the three girls are shown getting ready for a nude lay-out in the famous magazine, all under the watchful eye of the magazine’s patriarch. Much of the reality show centers around the famous Playboy Mansion and the “everyday lives” of these girls.

“The fact (that the network) states on its website it is owned 49.9% by Disney says it all,” Reisman told WND. “Disney now pimps the antique, surgically enhanced Hugh Hefner playboy. Hefner’s ‘innocent’ pornography will seduce dad. Seduce dad and you will get his kids. Seduce kids and you control; you own an entire impotent male population of users and female wannabees – forever.”

Reisman sees the E! TV program, which airs Sunday nights, as another step in mainstreaming Playboy’s endorsement of multi-partner sexual relationships. Hefner’s live-in girls illustrate that, she says.

“Many male consumers are easily trained to believe they are being cheated if they have a love life with one woman,” says Reisman. “Sex merchants intend to displace woman-wife and love. Sex merchants intend to become the consumer’s substitute lover!”

Reisman is not alone in her concern about “Girls Next Door.” Syndicated radio talk-show host, Paul McGuire, heard in Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver and St. Louis, agrees with Reisman.

“You can package Hugh Hefner and the ‘Girls Next Door’ any way you want, but ultimately the show is about normalizing pornography,” he says. “Hefner is a pornographer and has made his fortune exploiting women. I know women who were playmates in Hefner’s Playboy-porno empire. Their lives were ruined at a young age and they continue to suffer many years later. Many of them are terrified of going public and telling what really happened to them. … This is the dark side of the Hefner and his porno empire that E! TV and Playboy don’t want you to see.”

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‘Pornography’: TV’s taboo word (WorldNetDaily, 051125)

Following a recent interview for yet another documentary on pornography, I thought of so many things I should have said about pornography.

I had discussed its role as producing impotence, robbing men of their manhood. I had addressed its psychopharmacology as an “erototoxin.” I had documented its presence in adultery, divorce, rape, child sex abuse and incest.

Civility, humanity, I said, has always hung by the thinnest of threads. We allow ourselves to be coarsened at the greatest risk. Life in the last five decades should have proven to us all – or at least to any hominoid with a modicum of sense – that the license of licentiousness is always followed by the most heart-rending violence to our bodies and our souls. We can daily see around us that the most vulnerable, the smallest and the weakest pay the price for our arrogance and our appallingly selfish ignorance.

I watched television on and off this evening. I switched from one station to another, revolted by one sudden graphic depiction of a crime show’s serial rapist torturing his female victims. Another station dramatized a vicious tale of children being prostituted by dad.

I next saw a defaced young male corpse, at first thought to be a boy who had defended a brutally raped young girl. Cadavers, once restricted to horror flicks are now a TV staple. The dead are commonly uncovered (still neck up) and discussed by a coolly attractive and yet sympathetic female coroner – often a minority woman – filling the professional working-woman diversity quota, while thrilling the desensitized audience at the same time.

On another station, “Dr. Phil’s” team is seeking missing American girls. Their distraught parents on camera, Dr. Phil explains that the girls are doubtless dead or enslaved in the foreign sex traffic.

During commercials, a lovely female newscaster says stay tuned for the “news” story of an 8-year-old being marketed for sex. Also “coming up,” says another professional lady news “reporter,” police just rescued a kidnapped teenager who had been locked in a dog kennel and rented out for sadistic sex. The “news” announcement of coming attractions shows police carrying out the dog kennel should anyone miss the latest in “how-to” commit copy-cat sex hate crimes.

ABC’s “Prime Time” righteously reports on the increase in sex crimes, including murder on American university campuses, suggesting that silly kids just don’t protect themselves and that the universities don’t police sufficiently. True, as far as that goes.

Naturally “Prime Time” makes no connection between sex crimes and their own fare – such as “Desperate Housewives” – entertaining the public with adultery, drug use, prostitution and mom’s sex with teenage boys. “CSI” on CBS, NBC’s “Law & Order,” and “Sex and the City” are now inseparable from the “news” of dog kennels and Dr. Phil’s search for child pornographers as we are driven into the pornographic sewer of thematic coming-of-age adventures.

“But, are you sure it’s not just more reporting?”

In all of these emotional molecules of dramas and news stories, the good guys are good; prosecuting minorities and lady lawyers are wonderfully empathetic; coroners notably dispassionate but caring. Women are getting equal time as rape and torture victims and as professional legal and crime-solving mavens.

Of course, the Big Five mass media corporations, those which Michelle Malkin calls the most effective corporate pimps of human history – Time Warner, Disney, Viacom-CBS, NewsCorp and AT&T – are raking in the money by exploiting visual sado-sexual brutality as far as they can.

For unless it’s “child pornography,” TV dramas and news programs never use the word “pornography.” No news or drama programs ever describe the media itselfas causing copy-cat crime and sado-sexual violence.

The mass media breeds serial-rapist-murdering juveniles and adults who imbibe their stimuli alongside Internet sex games and legal pornography, while Big Pharma hawks every sex and depression medication it legally can inbetween these increasingly pornographic programs.

One neurologist writes, our “brains are not in charge;” our bodies are our “subconscious minds.” If so, our bodies are being aroused and conditioned to children locked in dog kennels for sex, cadavers coolly uncovered and sado-sexual lust dramas alongside Madonna (also on television the last day or so) as a new, happy “mom.”

This is the same Madonna who tongue-kissed Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera on the MTV Awards in 2003, while her 6-year-old daughter (dressed in first-communion white, wearing a “BOY TOY” belt) tossed flower petals on the dance floor.

James Joyce of “Ulysses” obscenity fame, said all pornographic spectacles rouse the flesh to reflex actions of the nervous system. Yes, our body is our subconscious mind.

Ah, for those clucking, elderly ladies who kept the young in check by their repressive gossip, as described by Evelyn Wyeth in “Brideshead Revisited.” Gone.

Instead, we have widespread mass-media pornography to breed a cultural collapse that is beginning to rival the sado-sexual brutality and insanity of the likes of Titus, Caligula and Nero.

Dr. Judith Reisman is president of the Institute for Media Education and is the author of “Kinsey, Crimes & Consequences.”

==============================

Child porn ring busted: At least 10 of 40 arrested in Canada (National Post, 060316)

TORONTO - What started a year ago with an Edmonton woman overhearing a disturbing conversation between two children ended yesterday with the Attorney-General of the United States announcing the dismantling of a large, highly organized child porn ring that swapped pictures and live video of children being sexually abused and raped.

More than 40 people were under arrest, at least 10 of them in Canada. Two “administrators” who allegedly helped run the Internet child porn trading post are from Canada, one in Edmonton and the other in Longueuil, Que., police and prosecutors said.

Others charged are from at least nine U.S. states, Australia and England, with other arrests expected, including several more in Canada.

Authorities allege some of the participants in the chat room created digital movies and took pictures of themselves molesting children ranging in age from 18 months to about 11 years old. One video was allegedly sent live from a man in Illinois to a man in Edmonton, who then reciprocated with a video of himself with four minors.

“The behaviour in these chat rooms — and the images many of these defendants sent around the world through ‘peer-to-peer’ file sharing programs and private instant messaging services — are the worst imaginable forms of child pornography,” said Alberto R. Gonzales, the U.S. Attorney-General, at a media conference in Chicago. “This international undercover investigation revealed an insidious network that engaged in worldwide trafficking in child pornography, including live molestations of children transmitted over the Internet.”

Such a thorough infiltration of the secretive and security-conscious group came when officers with both Edmonton and Toronto police burst into the home of an Edmonton man — while he was still logged on to the central chat site — and yanked him away from his computer keyboard.

For nearly two months — while the man was held in jail — police pretended to be him, the man who had earned such trust within the group that he had gained the status of administrator, a position that gave him special access, officials said.

“We took over his account,” said Detective-Constable Paul Krawczyk, with the Toronto police’s Child Exploitation Unit. “It allowed us to trace everybody in the chat room because he was so trusted,” he said.

But a year before that investigative coup, good fortune and good citizenry started police on a year-long journey into the dark world of abuse and obscenity.

Two Edmonton children, aged nine and five, a boy and a girl, were talking about a secret.

“The statements they were making amounted to them talking about their sexual abuse. It wasn’t a lot but someone heard,” said Detective Randy Wickins, with Edmonton police’s Internet Child Exploitation Unit.

That woman alerted authorities in May, 2005.

“She’s a hero,” he said.

Police raided the home of an Edmonton man and inside they found thousands of images and videos of child abuse, some made by the man of those children.

The man has since been sentenced to 14 years in jail for sexually abusing his step-children and their friends.

“It became clear that a lot of the abuse was happening in front of a camera and a computer was involved,” said Det. Wickins. The scope of the case was immense and Edmonton police turned to the acknowledged leaders in the field, the Toronto police.

Jointly, they connected the Edmonton man to the alias Big_Daddy619, a nickname used in an Internet chat room. Officers started to log onto the chat room and recorded the aliases of contributors and “got the feel of the room,” said an investigator.

By November, 2005, an arrest was made in another jurisdiction and the images found by police in that case had been specially made for the chat room that Detectives Wickins and Krawczyk were probing. Signs with that chat room’s name, “Kiddypics & Kiddyvids,” were seen in the images, and pieces of paper with the nicknames of its users were displayed, police said.

“We realized we had people producing child pornography specifically for this chat room. They were doing it to show what they personally had access to in order to gain access to other’s material,” said Det. Krawczyk.

“We knew this was really big and we started going full-time into the room, undercover.”

Security in the chat room was high and several attempts were rebuffed. The leaders had rules others had to follow and anyone suspected of being in law enforcement was ejected from the site, authorities said.

As the participants typed their messages — “chatting” — they swapped brutal images of abuse and even shared live streaming video of molestation and rape, authorities allege — it was termed “molestation-on-demand.” Some of the victims were children of the accused. The undercover officers started analyzing what the users were saying about themselves while they were online, trying to find out where they lived.

One mentioned the temperature outside in one message and in another that he lived near a landmark. Each clue was noted on a board and was compared to other clues. By January, it became clear that one of the alleged ringleaders lived in Edmonton — the same city where the investigation had started.

This user was an “administrator” for the site and was one of its most trusted members, authorities allege.

On Jan. 26, Edmonton and Toronto police officers raided his home in a lightning fast strike.

“With good planning we were able to take him out while he was logged on and we then assumed his identity,” said Det. Krawczyk.

The man did not have a chance to disconnect, erase files or warn others; no one in the chat room knew he had been taken into police custody.

The investigators who had been monitoring him and analyzing him for months were then able to perfectly mimic him online in the chat room.

The undercover infiltration was so sound that the man’s account was still active late yesterday, uncompromised and still getting responses online.

That man, identified as Carl Treleaven, 49, has since pleaded guilty to distributing child pornography and will be sentenced tomorrow in Edmonton.

“It’s one thing to take down a guy in West Edmonton who’s involved in this sort of thing but quite another to see how its tentacles spread out around the world,” said Steven Bilodeau, a prosecutor with Alberta Justice who is assigned to the case.

Among those arrested in Canada are men in Toronto, Kingston, and Woodbridge, Ont.; Brandon, and Selkirk, Man.; Prince George and Courtenay, B.C.; the two Edmonton men; and the alleged administrator in Longueuil, Que., who was identified as Marcel Deslauriers, 27.

The Canadians allegedly hid behind Internet nicknames such as LoneWolf_95, Horny40Babe, Lumberjack, Fydei and 10_boy_canada, as the images were traded.

A woman was among those arrested in the U.S. She allegedly used the name HumbleDuchess as she took over hosting the chat room when the first host, who used the name G.O.D., was arrested. A man arrested in Buffalo, who used the nickname A_School_Teacher, is a Sunday school teacher, authorities said.

U.S. authorities have identified seven child victims, some of whom have been taken into protective custody. The two children in Edmonton who started the probe have also been taken into protective custody.

The youngest victim appearing in the pictures and movies was 18 months old.

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ETHICS: Hugh Hefner—A Playboy to the Bitter End (Mohler, 060410)

Hugh Hefner turned 80 on Sunday. That’s right—the world’s most famous playboy entered his ninth decade, still wearing his pajamas and still preaching his gospel of free sex, paid pornography, and liberation from sexual morality.

The story of Hugh Hefner is the story of America in the midst of a great social and moral transformation—the Sexual Revolution. In the span of a few short decades, America (and much of the Western world) rewrote the entire system of sexual ethics. What had once been condemned was now celebrated, and what was once unmentionable became material for mainstream conversation, entertainment, and debate. Few revolutions have been so comprehensive in scope and reach—from the personal to the political. And Hugh Hefner has been one of the major revolutionaries of our times.

Hefner’s Methodist mother wanted him to be a missionary. In a very real sense, she got her wish in reverse. Hefner became a missionary all right, but a missionary that preached a rejection of the Christian sexual ethic. Hefner has been one of the most effective instruments of social change of the past century. At an early age, he set for himself a major goal—to be an agent of sexual revolution. Along the way, he also intended to make a great deal of money. He was to accomplish both goals in a big way.

It all began with Hefner’s idea for a magazine that would mainstream pornography. He obtained revealing photographs of Marilyn Monroe and intended to launch his new magazine to the American male, calling it Stag Party. Legal complications required a name change, and a friend suggested Playboy. Few brands have become so dominant in America’s cultural imagination—or done so much damage to the fabric of our society.

Pornography was not invented by Hugh Hefner, of course. His commercial achievement was finding a way to mainstream porn in the culture by selling it as a liberated lifestyle, complete with other features of the “good life,” including everything from fast cars to expensive clothes—all intended to sell a new image to the American male, who would rationalize pictures of naked women as “art” and culture.

For Hefner, selling himself was central to selling his magazine—and his empire of pornography. He created a persona by cultivating his image as a silk pajama-wearing playboy who lived the ultimate good life, housed in the Playboy mansion and accompanied by the constant company of beautiful young women. With Hefner, the personal was the commercial. He was, in effect, his first real invention. His image of the good life in the fast lane was picked up by the larger culture. For several years, his Playboy Mansion became the stage for a television show that drew major Hollywood celebrities as guests. His strategy was to remove the shame from pornography by linking the pornographic lifestyle to cultural respect, big money, and political power.

Nevertheless, the money was never far from mind. Playboy Enterprises became the first explicitly pornographic business to go public, with shares traded in the stock markets. As Matthew Scully commented in The Wall Street Journal, “It was Mr. Hefner who put the real money in porn, a business hard to go poor in under any circumstances (except for the unfortunates given starring roles) and today a $57 billion-a-year global industry. He brought it into the central stream of culture, so that now even upscale bookstores stock Penthouse or similar offerings without a second thought. He gave porn that ‘classy’ feel and its phony creed of ‘artistic’ expression and protected ‘speech’ by which far livelier fare than Playboy would soon ease into the popular culture.”

Playboy may have mainstreamed pornography, selling itself as “soft” porn, but Hefner and his company quickly ventured into the “hard core” sectors of the squalid business of pornography. As Scully remarked, “Playboy Enterprises itself, years ago, dropped the pretense of refinement and delicacy, following the money into hard-core cable. Soft-core, hard-core, these were all along just degrees of exploitation and self-debasement and for the procurers a purely legal and commercial calculation.”

Just this month, Hefner’s daughter, Christine Hefner, the CEO of Playboy Enterprises, announced that the company intends to roll out a new line of product for homosexual men. “We’ve extended the Playboy brand to women, and where there is a meaningful gay market, launching under a different brand is something we are very comfortable doing,” she said. Like father, like daughter.

The company is also a global business, with a reach that extends to all parts of the globe. That doesn’t mean that its products are always well received. This past week, Playboy Enterprises attempted to launch a soft-core pornographic version of Playboy in Indonesia. The venture hasn’t gone well, with death threats and public protests by local Islamic figures greeting the magazine’s arrival at the newsstands.

Playboy Enterprises now wants to describe itself as “pro-sex” rather than pornographic. This marketing ploy is slick and also at least partially effective, branding all opposition to the magazine and its constructed lifestyle as “anti-sex” and repressive. Hefner repeats one theme over and over—describing America as a land mired in moral and sexual repression due to what he describes as its Puritan roots. Speaking on Playboy magazine’s fiftieth anniversary, Hefner reflected: “I recognize that I remain—even after half a century—a controversial figure, but America has always had conflicts related to things related to sex. In other words, we remain essentially a very Puritan people. It was the Puritans who arrived on the Mayflower, and they came over to England because they were trying to escape from religious persecution, and the first thing they did was turn around and persecute the people who didn’t agree with them.”

In other words, America should hail Hugh Hefner as a great liberator, he feels. He styles himself as the smiling prophet who has led America out of the darkness of moral hysteria about sex into a new and hedonistic era of sexual freedom. He never admits that it is all based in a lie.

Millions of American males gained their early conception of women and sex from Playboy and its pictures. Hefner sold America on a false and distorted vision of sex and a degraded vision of women as sexual playthings for male fantasies. The magazine does not present sexual reality and the truth about sexuality freed from moral constraints—it just rolls out a monthly issue filled with fresh pictures.

The playmates of the month are airbrushed into unreality, and their true selves are hidden from view. Their bodies are ‘artistically enhanced,’ and their services are merely for hire. This is a business, after all.

There is no truth in this presentation, other than the tawdriness of the entire enterprise. Hefner and his magazine mainstreamed pornography by selling America on the idea that women can be reduced to nothing more than visual images for male sexual fantasies. Hefner’s women never age, never blush, and never say no. The men (and boys) who consume these images never have to grow up, even as their objects of lust never grow old.

But Hugh Hefner’s vision for the Sexual Revolution never ended with heterosexual lust. “Part of the Sexual Revolution was bringing irrationality to sexuality,” he once commented, “and that means sometimes it’s within the bounds of marriage, sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s heterosexual, sometimes it’s homosexual. But it should be done in an enlightened way and should not be done in secrecy.”

As far as his own experience with marriage goes, Hefner has little use for bonds or matrimony and fidelity. “I tried the more traditional way,” he told National Public Radio, “I’ve been married twice. I paid an emotional price for it. I have less conflict and emotional turmoil in my life now with seven girlfriends than I did when I was married.”

The legacy of the Playboy lifestyle will be with us long after Hugh Hefner is gone. Millions upon millions of lives have been warped by Playboy’s corruption of sex and sexuality. The total impact of his personal crusade defies calculation.

As for Hefner himself, this is one missionary who has never stopped preaching his message, even as he is now a pathetic picture of sexual excess. He is still wearing those silk pajamas and grinning into the cameras—a playboy to the bitter end.

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Survey: Churchgoing Women also Struggle with Porn Addiction (Christian Post, 060810)

Responses from a recent poll indicated that sexual addictive behaviors are not foreign inside churches and a large number of women in the pews struggle with the same temptations.

According to a poll by ChristiaNet.com and Second Glance Ministries, half of all Christian men are addicted to pornography. While the statistics for men are nothing new, the poll found 20% of all Christian women to be addicts to pornography.

Additional findings showed 60% of the women respondents admitted to having significant struggles with lust, 40% admitted to being involved in sexual sin in the past year, and 20% of the church-going female participants struggled with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

“There have been dynamic paradigm shifts in the behavior of Christians over the last four years,” said Clay Jones, founder and president of Second Glance Ministries. “Technology (the Internet) has allowed pornography to flood the market place beyond a controllable level.”

Second Glance Ministries, a nonprofit, recognizes and provides information on the growing problem of sexual problems in society and its “catastrophic” impact on the church.

The new poll, featured on ChristiaNet.com, received 1,000 responses which were evaluated with Second Glance.

“We directed over 100,000 inquiries to Second Glance Ministries in one year,” said ChristiaNet.com’s president, Bill Cooper. “We are seeing an escalation to the problem in both men and women who regularly attend church.”

As recent reports have exposed, music lyrics, the Web, books and even grocery stores have posed “temptations” of pornography whether it be by the glance of an eye or a three-minute song. The rise in sexual addictive behaviors inside and outside the church prompted the development of an addiction recovery resource – The Journey of Recovery (www.journeyofrecovery.org) – by the International Bible Society a few months ago.

The resource is directed to sexual addicts as well as those addicted to alcohol, drugs, gambling and eating disorders. Although the problem of porn or other sexual addiction persists inside church walls, churches were said to be ill-equipped to do much about it.

The Purpose Driven Ministry will also be filling in the gap existent in most churches with its upcoming Celebrate Recovery Summit which has changed thousands of lives in more than 4,500 churches for the past 15 years. The summit will be held on Aug. 16-18 at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.

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Pornography — The Real Perversion (Townhall.com, 070116)

By Dinesh D’Souza

On a recent trip to Istanbul I encountered a group of Muslim students who insisted that American culture was morally perverse. They called it “pornographic.” And they charged that this culture is now being imposed on the rest of the world. I protested that pornography is a universal vice. “Yes,” one of the students replied, “but nowhere else is pornography in the mainstream of the culture. Nowhere else is porn considered so cool and fashionable. Pornography in America represents an inversion of values.”

As I returned home to the United States, I wondered: are these students right? I don’t think American culture as a whole is guilty of the charge of moral depravity. But there is a segment of our culture that is perverse and pornographic, and perhaps this part of American culture is the one that foreigners see. Wrongly, they identify one face of America with the whole of America. When they protest what they see as the glamorization of pornography and vice, however, it’s hard to deny that they have a point.

Pornography has become big business in the United States. You no longer have to go places to find it; it now finds you. Once confined to “dirty old men” and seedy areas of town, pornography has now penetrated the hotel room and home. The Internet and cell phone have made pornography accessible everywhere, all the time.

The spread of porn is not surprising, and neither is its popularity. It is not the appeal of sex, but the appeal of voyeurism. After all, the actors in porn films seek to gratify not themselves but the viewer. The spectator finds himself in an unnatural position of being witness to a sexual act which is conducted fully for his benefit. It’s hard to deny that there is something degrading in the continuous exposure to increasingly hard-core pornography.

In a manner that the older generation of Americans finds scandalous, porn has become socially acceptable and lost its moral stigma. A good example of this cultural cache is that today a porn star like Jenna Jameson appears on billboards and on the cover of magazines like Vanity Fair. In some liberal intellectual circles, the advocacy of porn is now viewed as a mark of sophistication. Recently the New Yorker reported on an event held at the Mary Boone art galley in Manhattan where “artists, collectors, literati, and other art world regulars mingled seamlessly with adult-movie producers and directors and quite a few of the performers themselves.” The purpose of the event was to celebrate the publication of the book “XXX: Porn Star Portraits.” The pictures in the book are accompanied by appreciative essays by leading figures on the left like Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Salman Rushdie.

The liberal defense of obscenity and pornography began many decades ago as a defense of great works of literature and of free speech. It began as a defense of books like James Joyce’s Ulysses, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover. But now some liberal advocates insist that all forms of sexual explicitness are equally deserving of legal protection and that no restriction of obscenity or pornography should be allowed.

This is the position defended in former ACLU president Nadine Strossen’s book Defending Pornography. As liberal pundit Wendy Kaminer puts it, in her foreword to the book, “You don’t need to know anything about art—you don’t even need to know what you like—in order to defend speech deemed hateful, sick or pornographic.” Kaminer even takes the view that child pornography should be permitted because “fantasies about children having sex are repellent to most of us, but the First Amendment is designed to protect repellent imaginings.” Actually this is pure nonsense: the framers were concerned to protect political speech and not depictions of pedophilia. But Kaminer’s view is a good reflection of what some liberals would like the Constitution to say.

Groups like the ACLU have taken the approach that pornography rights, like the rights of accused criminals, are best protected at their outermost extreme. This means is that the more foul the obscenity, the harder liberals must fight to allow it. By protecting expression at its farthest reach, these activists believe they are fully securing the free speech rights of the rest of us.

It is a long way, for instance, from James Joyce to a loathsome character like Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. There would seem to be an obvious distinction between fighting to include James Joyce in a high school library and insisting that the same library maintain its subscription to Hustler. For the ACLU, however, the two causes are part of the same free speech crusade. In a sense, the ACLU considers the campaign for Hustler a more worthy cause because if Hustler is permitted, anything is permitted, and therefore free speech has been more vigorously defended.

In recent years, leading liberals have gone from defending Flynt as a despicable man who nevertheless has First Amendment rights, to defending Flynt as a delightful man who is valiantly fighting against the forces of darkness and repression. “What I find refreshing about Larry Flynt is that he doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a scumbag,” Frank Rich writes in the New York Times. “At least Flynt’s honest about what he’s doing.”

These liberal virtues—honestly and openness about being a scumbag—are on full display in Milos Forman’s film The People vs. Larry Flynt. The movie sanitizes Flynt in order to make him a likeable, even heroic figure. In reality Flynt is short and ugly; in the movie he is tall and handsome, played by Woody Harrelson. In life Flynt was married five times. His daughter accused him of sexually abusing her, a charge that Flynt has denied. All of this is suppressed in the movie, where Flynt has one wife and is portrayed as an adoring and supportive husband.

Hustler features a good deal of gross and repellent material, such as its parody of Jerry Falwell having sex with his grandmother, or its picture of a woman being processed through a meat grinder. The movie, by contrast, features mostly tasteful erotica; if Flynt goes over the line, it is always presented as mischievous fun. If there is anyone who is despicable in the movie, it is Flynt’s critics, who are unfailingly shown as smug, hypocritical, vicious and stupid.

The pornographer generally knows that he is a sleazy operator. I have read interviews with men like Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw magazine. Typically such men do not even try and defend the social value of what they do, other than to point out that there is a demand for it. It is only the ACLU and its supporters who celebrate the pornographer as a paragon of the First Amendment and a contemporary social hero. Social liberals like Frank Rich seem to have a much higher view of Flynt than Flynt himself. If we confine ourselves to liberal culture and its apologists, my Muslim interlocutors would seem to have a justified complaint. The liberal defense of pornography is even more perverted than the pornography itself.

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Porn Addiction Flooding Culture, Church (Christian Post, 070605)

In a culture where sexuality and porn is now a part of everyday life, porn addiction in the church is escalating, according to a new survey.

In a poll of 1,000 respondents, 50% of Christian men and 20% of Christian women were found to be addicted to pornography. Conducted by ChristaNet.com, a popular Christian marketplace website, the poll asked visitors about their personal sexual conduct.

“There have been dynamic paradigm shifts in the behavior of Christians over the last four years,” said Clay Jones, founder and president of Second Glance Ministries, which partnered with ChristiaNet.com to evaluate poll responses.

Many point to the Internet for the pervasive problem of sexual addiction.

“Technology (the Internet) has allowed pornography to flood the market place beyond a controllable level,” said Jones.

For the first time in history, the American culture has point-and-click pornography; porn stars have MySpace pages; and the Internet and reality TV have provided new platforms for young women to flaunt their sexuality, as reported by the Associated Press. In April, more than a third of the U.S. Internet audience visited sites that fit into the online “adult” category, according to comScore Media Metrix.

And according to Michael Simon, a therapist and high school counselor in the San Francisco Bay area, pornography or performative sexuality has “essentially become the standard of sexiness” rather than being one choice among many ways of being sexual, he told AP.

Yet a 2006 study reported by Morality in Media found that 73% of U.S. adults think that viewing pornographic websites and videos is morally unacceptable. Males ages 18 to 34 were more likely to say viewing pornographic material is morally acceptable (44%) than older males and females overall.

Still, today’s sexualized culture also has churchgoing women struggling with sexual addiction. The ChristiaNet.com survey found 60% of Christian women admitting to having significant struggles with lust; 40% saying they were involved in sexual sin in the past year; and 20% struggling with looking at pornography on an ongoing basis.

“We are seeing an escalation to the problem in both men and women who regularly attend church,” said ChistiaNet.com president Bill Cooper.

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Americans Urged to Campaign Against Porn Floodtide (Christian Post, 071029)

WASHINGTON - Americans concerned about the floodtide of pornography pouring into homes, the workplace and even churches are urged to raise their voices about the harms of sexual addictions that many believe is devastating the country.

“Our nation ... faces a moral crisis, giving rise, among other things, to teen promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases (including AIDS), abortions, children born to single mothers, divorces, sexual abuse of children, sexual harassment, rape, and trafficking in women and children,” said Robert W. Peters, president of Morality in Media, which is spearheading a national awareness campaign. “It is clear that the explosive increase in the availability of hardcore pornography is helping to fuel this moral crisis.”

The 20th annual White Ribbons Against Pornography (WRAP) Week kicked off on Sunday as a yearlong effort to combat the spread of porn across the American culture and to push for the enforcement of federal obscenity laws.

Conservative groups including Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America (CWA), American Mothers, Inc., and GirlsAgainstPorn.com have joined Morality in Media this week to raise public awareness of the harmful effects of porn and to call for a respect for sexual virtue.

“Seventy-five percent of convicted rapists admit they were acting out what they had seen in pornography, and 80% of child molesters admit their spiral down began with pornography,” noted CWA president Wendy Wright.

Over the last decade, employers have cracked down on those who view online pornography at work, but with laptop computers, cell phones and BlackBerrys and other portable devices providing wireless access to the Internet, reports indicate that porn viewing at work is still a major problem.

“Liability is the thing that keeps me up at night, because we are liable for things people do on your premises. It’s serious,” said Richard Laermer, CEO of the public relations firm RLM, according to ABC News. “I’ll see somebody doing it, and I’ll peek over their shoulder, and they’ll say, ‘I don’t know how that happened.’ It’s like 10-year-olds. And it’s always on company time.”

The majority of U.S. adults say viewing pornographic websites and videos is morally unacceptable, according to a 2006 survey commissioned by Morality in Media. Younger Americans (ages 18 to 34) are more likely to think viewing porn is morally acceptable compared to 35- to 54-year-olds.

“A disturbingly larger number of our nation’s youth and young adults are viewing pornography, and they don’t even see this as a moral problem!” said Peters. “Our nation has failed miserably in shielding minors from pornography.”

Explicit sex scenes bordering pornography have increasingly hit the television airwaves this season, raising eyebrows among critics who say it’s too much.

“This season I think cable has pushed the limit of acceptability of sex on television as far as it could possibly go,” Mary Murphy of TV Guide commented on CNN. Murphy believes several shows, such as HBO’s “Tell Me You Love Me,” are bordering on obscene.

Explicit sex scenes are even found on network TV including ABC’s “Dirty, Sexy, Money.”

“When I’m looking at some of these shows, I say to myself ‘What is the difference between this show and porn?’ I look at it two ways. I look at it as a critic and a reporter and I say ‘Is it essential?’ I don’t think so,” said Murphy. “And then I look at it as a daughter and a mother, and I pray that neither my mother nor my daughter will ever walk into the room while this is on television.”

“I don’t think it’s appropriate at all,” she added.

Matt Barber, CWA’s policy director for cultural issues, said many people don’t realize that many forms of widely accepted pornography “are in fact a direct violation of federal and state obscenity laws.”

“These laws should and must be enforced,” he said. “Ultimately, it is women and children who are most victimized by pornography and the lack of obscenity law enforcement.”

The Supreme Court determined in 1973 that the First Amendment does not protect “obscene material” (hardcore pornography).

Morality in Media’s Peters calls for obscenity laws to be vigorously enforced. During WRAP Week, Peters urges Americans to sign anti-porn petitions, hold rallies in their city or state capitol, and to write letters to their local, state and federal representatives against pornography. People are also encouraged to invite someone to speak against pornography at your church or civic group.

And as Americans are soon to elect a new president, Peters called on all presidential hopefuls to pay attention to the “moral crisis.”

“While President Bush’s record of enforcing obscenity laws has been disappointing, to date it is clearly superior to the Clinton record, and we will be working to encourage the Bush Administration to pick up the pace of prosecutions, with the hope that the next President will build on that progress,” he said.

“Given a choice, I think most adult Americans would rather live in a safe, healthy and decent society than in a pornographic cesspool,” said Peters.

Morality in Media (MIM) was established in New York City in 1962 to combat pornography. MIM works to inform citizens and public officials about the harms of pornography and about what they can do through law to protect their communities and children. It also works to maintain standards of decency on TV and in other media.

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The Victims of Porn: White Ribbon Against Pornography Week (Christian Post, 071031)

By Chuck Colson

A teenage girl was recalling what her childhood had been like—a childhood marred by porn. “When I was eight years old,” she wrote, “my father made me look at [pornographic] pictures” involving sex acts he wanted her to perform. “I went along with him, not knowing any better,” she said.

For years this girl’s father raped her while using these pictures—and at age 16, she had a sexually transmitted disease. “I may die of this disease,” she wrote sadly. “Pornography has ruined my life.”

So much for the claim—often made by porn advocates—that pornography is a victimless crime. This week is White Ribbon against Pornography Week—a good time to remind ourselves of how destructive porn is.

The numbers are staggering. Porn is a 10-billion-dollar-a-year industry. One study revealed that more than 32 million individuals visited an Internet porn site in just one month. Some 800 million pornographic DVDs are rented each month. Other surveys reveal that one in five children on the Internet receives a sexual solicitation.

Christians are not immune to the siren call of porn. A Focus on the Family poll found that 17% of Christian adults have visited sexually oriented sites.

There is no longer any doubt that pornography inspires crime. Most child molesters admit that they consume hard-core porn on a regular basis.

And those who create porn are now victimizing even the youngest children. Police who seize pornographic films and pictures note that they are seeing X-rated images of toddlers and even babies—this is sickening.

As surprising as it may seem, sexual addiction—like all addictions—represents a deep hunger for God. In their book, The Sacred Romance, Brent Curtis and John Eldredge point out that humans are designed for intimacy with God. Sometimes we allow the world, however, to drown out God’s voice. But our need for communion with Him never goes away. Instead of seeking fulfillment in Christ, the addict tries to fill the emptiness with other things: pornography, an affair, or a fantasy life.

As the authors put it, “We put our hope in . . . some form of immediate gratification, some taste of transcendence that will place a drop of water on our parched tongue.” And they add that “this taste of transcendence, coming as it does from an obsession with . . . pornography . . . has the same effect on our souls as crack cocaine.” The addiction “attaches itself to our desire [for God] with chains that render us captive.”

That’s why addiction expert Gerald May calls addiction “the most powerful psychic enemy of humanity’s desire for God.” And nothing can free the captives of addiction except God.

If you or someone you know is struggling with porn, a website called PureIntimacy.org, run by Focus on the Family, may help. And if you go to the BreakPoint website, you will find ways to participate in the White Ribbon against Pornography campaign this week—ways you can help shut down illegal, hard-core porn in your own town. Get your church involved, as well.

Those white ribbons we wear this week are a public witness that we refuse to accept the crack cocaine of porn in our society—porn that destroys the lives of all it touches.

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Hard-Core Pornography Isn’t “Free Speech” (Christian Post, 080122)

By Matt Barber

In recent years, the U.S. Department of Justice has paid only lip service to the enforcement of federal obscenity laws. In some instances, DOJ has gone after child pornographers and — in a scant few cases — has prosecuted purveyors of the most obscene and graphic adult pornography. But unfortunately, the government has been largely AWOL when it comes to enforcing an entire section of U.S. law, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1460-1470, which criminalizes much of the adult hard-core pornography that has saturated both the Internet and our communities.

Although obscenity enforcement has not been a priority for the DOJ, it is a priority for most of the American people. A 2004 Wirthlin Worldwide opinion poll found that more than four out of five Americans want existing Internet obscenity laws vigorously enforced. To help illustrate that reality, Concerned Women for America is preparing to send the Justice Department more than 16,000 signed petitions that firmly but respectfully demand our nation’s obscenity laws be properly enforced.

The courts have held that there can be constitutional coexistence between federal obscenity laws, which criminalize certain hard-core pornography, and the First Amendment. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973), that obscene material is “unprotected by the First Amendment” (413 U.S. at 23) and that obscenity laws can be enforced against “hard-core pornography” (413 U.S. at 28).

Yet law enforcement officials at the local, state and federal levels have chosen to sit back and do almost nothing while the pornography epidemic hits critical mass. Like a sexually transmitted cyber-disease, it widely infects men, women and even children.

Due to the instant availability of such obscenity and the lack of enforcement against it, there are, no doubt, many good people reading this article right now who know someone, love someone or have themselves been ensnared by this public pestilence. And, like a drug dealer doling out crack cocaine to his hopelessly addicted prey, those who produce and distribute this smut are getting away with societal murder.

Many say pornography is victimless, but we know that’s a lie. It is extremely destructive to all parties involved. It reduces women and even children to mere sex objects and destroys individuals, families and communities.

Adult pornography creates a trap that is difficult to escape. It entices viewers to consume more and more smut and to delve deeper and deeper into more graphic and obscene material.

During a 2004 hearing held by the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, several experts testified as to the highly addictive nature of pornography. Those experts further testified that regular consumption of adult pornography can breed sex offenders who prey on women and children. It provides a gateway to child pornography and eventually to child sexual assault.

Regrettably, our federal government’s lack of enforcement has sent a clear signal — whether right or wrong — to smut peddlers and sexual predators: The government is a paper tiger. There are no real consequences for violating obscenity laws and abusing women and children.

That’s why it was very encouraging to hear Michael Mukasey, the new U.S. attorney general, declare during his confirmation hearings that he, too, is concerned about the proliferation of such illegal and obscene material.

In a Nov. 9, 2007, letter to Mukasey, Wendy Wright of CWA and several other leaders in the fight against obscenity — including Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, Alan Sears of the Alliance Defense Fund and Pat Trueman, former chief of Child Exploitation and Obscenity for the Justice Department — requested a meeting with the attorney general to discuss this rapidly growing pornography epidemic. He has not yet replied, and with less than a year left in the current administration, it is imperative that he soon does.

Attorney General Mukasey is now in the unique position to reverse the ever-increasing tide of illicit obscenity. He has been given both a momentous opportunity and a grave responsibility. It is up to him to quash this epidemic at its source.

The days of looking the other way are over. It’s high time the welfare of families and children takes a greater priority within the Department of Justice than in previous years.

The American people have spoken. The pornography plague on our culture can no longer be ignored. Federal obscenity laws are already on the books; they need only be enforced.

General Mukasey, you have publicly indicated a willingness to take on this affront to decency, for which we are very grateful. Now it just needs to be done.

Do it because it’s right. Do it because the law demands it. Do it for our children. But, please, sir, for whatever reason — just do it.

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Today’s porn in it for the big titillation (National Post, 080209)

A woman looks at a nude photo from the Kinsey institute archives at a British art gallery. The debate between erotica and porn will continue to rage.

From the new two-volume Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature, we learn many things about the artistic representation of the ol’ slap and tickle, including the carnal applications of the Islamic chador, the chaise longue and the “luxury hotel negro.”

We learn that Ubayd Zakani, a 14th-century Persian poet, cheekily defined “virgin” as “a noun with no referent,” and that the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, himself no prude, thought pornography was “rather like trying to find out about a Beethoven symphony by having someone tell you about it and perhaps hum a few bars.”

We learn that Holland, historically, has produced little erotic literature of lasting quality, but that China is second only to France, which is ironic given that Beijing is currently trying to wipe out online pornography, and you can get away with just about anything in Amsterdam.

There are as yet no EEL entries on Bruce LaBruce, Russell Smith or Michael Kronish. These are predictable but unfortunate omissions, because all three are peculiarly modern Canadian pornographers, and each in his own way is changing our understanding of the term.

Mr. Smith, for instance, author of several novels and short stories about hip, young Torontonian angst and columnist for the Globe and Mail newspaper, describes his short book Diana: A Diary In The Second Person — in which he literally orders the reader around town from tryst to imaginary tryst, many involving female submission — as a “masturbatory aid” for women, written for no other reason than to “titillate.” It is to be re-released this month, after he submitted it five years ago to a British publisher of erotica by women for women, which demanded proof he was female. Inarguably male, he published it instead in Canada under a female pseudonym, but was promptly outed by a National Post book critic. In coming clean now about his authorship, he is adamant about one thing— this is porn, not erotica.

It is a distinction that has been at the heart of culture-defining legal decisions, zeitgeist-shifting academic writings, popular post-modernist bafflegab — even high philosophy. The Supreme Court of Canada itself has come up with three separate legal tests on the matter, none of which has proved to be the final word. But today’s pornographers seem to think that the very question is no longer of any practical purpose, that the distinction between pornography and erotica, between artsy or crass smut, is as quaint as that between VHS and Beta.

“I guess people still use the word ‘erotica’ after Madonna stole it [for the title of her 1992 album],” said Mr. LaBruce, a filmmaker. “It used to be soft core and hard core, but I don’t even know if those kinds of categories even work anymore, because I don’t think there is much erotica, really.”

In Mr. LaBruce’s new gay zombie porn movie Otto; or Up With Dead People, which premiered at last month’s Sundance film festival, a character declares that “death is the new pornography.” She is talking about Otto, a young man who may or may not be a zombie with an eating disorder (he can’t stomach human flesh, so instead eats roadkill), and she means that Otto’s feelings of hollowness and alienation are the inevitable results of living in an industrialized society.

Through her, Mr. LaBruce was saying that cinematic violence, and the modern obsession with death and torture— witness the popular films Saw and Hostel, but also the Abu Ghraib photos and al-Qaeda beheading videos — have become entertainment, and people “get off on it in a very sexualized way.”

And so he was “shocked by the shock” when a sizeable portion of the audience walked out in disgust when Otto gastrically penetrates (“gutf—s,” as Mr. LaBruce puts it) one of his victims. The irony of their outrage, he said, is that this bloody belly rape is followed by a love scene, marking Otto’s redemption. He said one critic of his work got the point, that when the norm is sexual perversion, the last taboo is the kiss.

“I think [pornography] is a taboo that always exists. That’s why I personally don’t think porn should be mainstreamed. Porn is like this collective unconscious thing, it’s a place where people work out their darkest sexual fantasies, and sometimes it’s shameful for people. But if it were more popular, more overground and visible, I don’t think it would have that same function, because people would be less likely to allow themselves that kind of space to think or be turned on,” Mr. LaBruce said.

Tracing the porn/erotica debate back through Canadian courts, one passes some notorious names: Little Sisters Book and Art Emporium, Glad Day Bookshops, Donald Victor Butler, Towne Cinema, all the way back to the jurisprudential grand-daddy, Brodie v. the Queen, 1962, about D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which gave us the “internal necessity” test, often described as the “dirt for dirt’s sake” test.

As that decision notes, the book “has none of the characteristics that are often described in judgments dealing with obscenity —dirt for dirt’s sake, the leer of the sensualist, depravity in the mind of an author with an obsession for dirt, pornography, an appeal to a prurient interest, etc.”

It is interesting to speculate what judges in 1962 would have made of Webdreams, a Gemini-nominated Showcase “docusoap” now in its second season, in which a Canadian cast of online porn entrepreneurs — Violet, the gothic Web-chat tease; Uncle D, the globetrotting Canadian Ass Man; Diesel, the impossibly ripped model; and Montreal’s MsM Crew, with their tickle trunk of lubes and douches — are shown going about their business, with the actual business mostly concealed from the camera. It is deliberately unsexy porn.

“It would be very easy for us to edit the show to be very much more so,” said producer Michael Kronish.

For three decades, “dirt for dirt’s sake” was a major test of the porn/ erotica debate, along with the question of community standards, until the Supreme Court’s 1992 Butler decision about a sex-shop operator. That ruling focused on whether a work was “degrading and dehumanizing,” which remains the central test.

Today, each of these three Canadian pornographers can be seen as offering a reply to the Supreme Court’s obscenity tests, and to the culture that abides by them.

Mr. Smith’s book is proudly dirty. Mr. Kronish shrugs off community standards of decency to show that porn is a typical business. And, obviously, it is hard to imagine anything more degrading and dehumanizing than to be frontally mounted by a zombie, gay or otherwise.

These artists are at the cultural edges, of course. Cheesy, plotless, vaseline-on-the-lens erotica continues to be made, and much pornography continues to demean women especially. But for modern moralists to force new smut into the old erotica-versus-porn debate is to clutch at the wisps of history, and to impede the unpredictable progress of art.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of zombie porn in the next five years,” Mr. LaBruce mused. “I think it’s going to become a genre.”

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Not your grandmother’s romance novel anymore (National Post, 080209)

Melissa Leong

In Bobby Hutchinson’s first romance novel, the heroine, a teacher for the deaf, meets the handsome owner of a coal mine in small-town Sparwood, B.C.

The protagonist finds the hero high-handed and arrogant, but halfway through the book they are making passionate love: “His need for her was tangibly apparent as his hands cupped her hips, drawing her tight against his maleness.” The characters get married three pages from the end.

Sheltering Bridges was published by Harlequin in 1985.

Ms. Hutchinson’s more recent romance titles still follow the same formula: man meets woman, they overcome obstacles to their union and live happily ever after. But much of everything else has changed.

Her 2002 book, Gentleman Caller, is about a single mother working as a phone-sex operator. And later, Straight to the Heart begins with a woman screaming at a man, “I don’t want a relationship. All I want is sex!”

The romance-fiction industry, which generates more than $1-billion in revenue each year and makes up nearly 55% of all paperback fiction sales, has been reinventing itself on a regular basis for the past decade to keep up with a increasingly sophisticated and demanding audience. Books have traded virgin brides for sexually aggressive businesswomen. Authors have abandoned “pulsing tumescence” and “turgid manroots” for frank language.

In the past few years, publishers have flooded the market with sexually explicit erotic literature, touted as “not your grandma’s romance novels.” Writers say the raw intimacy is a reflection of modern relationships. Pop culture experts say the graphic material is due to a cultural desensitization; young readers are more blase and have a morbid fascination with vulgarity, having been brought up on music videos and the Internet.

By the time Ms. Hutchinson, 67, started writing, romance novels were moving away from rape scenes which were more prevalent in the ‘70s (leading to the ‘bodice-ripper’ label). Heroines were bolder, more independent, culminating in 2004 with Harlequin’s line, Silhouette Bombshell, featuring former cops, spies and martial arts experts embarking on dangerous missions with sexy results.

“There is a strong element of escapism in it,” said Gisele Baxter, an English literature and popular culture lecturer at the University of British Columbia. “Life has become threatening. Life has become very stressful.… But here is something that you can escape into where people experience emotions that seem larger than life.”

Ms. Hutchinson, the twice-divorced proprietor of a bed and breakfast in Sparwood, B.C., has written about 50 books, drawing inspiration from her own life. One of her three sons is deaf, inspiring her to write Sheltering Bridges. One of her friends once worked as a phone-sex operator. “Feminism has influenced romance. The Boomer generation certainly has.”

Jo Beverley, a prolific and best-selling writer of historical romance novels, says she is hard-lined about the romantic finale.

“When you get into books that have more to do with a woman’s journey, which end up with her setting off on her own, they are wonderful books but they are not romance novels,” she says.

—

GLOSSARY

A few euphemisms found in romance novels which have since been replaced with more frank terminology in some books:

Breasts: mounts, globes, orbs, twin peaks

Erection: arousal, male tumescence, hard maleness, savage insistence, swollen loins, engorged wand of passion

Ejaculation: release one’s seed

Penis: turgid member, quivering staff, shaft, manroot, manhood, velvety sword, love rod, lance of desire, tube of fire, beast of lust

Vagina: sheath, treasure, citadel, love valley, love tunnel, womanly wetness, womanhood, feminine receptacle, moist warmth, nest of desire, welcoming folds

Take her virginity: breach her maidenhead, conquer the barrier to her womanhood

Clitoris, nubbin of desire

Nipples: hard little berries, pebbled peaks

French kiss: tongues engaged in a mating dance

Orgasm: throbbing waves of desire, magical cataclysm, soaring to the heavens

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How to make love to a robot (National Post, 080209)

‘As science develops rather quickly, so will our thinking and ethics,’ says author David Levy. ‘Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans.’

Consider a couple deep within the throes of passion, their arms and limbs wrestle as the act of lovemaking becomes all but an inevitability.

But upon closer inspection, something seems deeply amiss.

Instead of warm lips, one lover has a cold, plastic mouth; instead of a brain, a piece of computer software; instead of a sexual organ, an engineered set of cables and steel wiring that any witness would testify is anything but arousing.

This is the bizarre romantic future envisioned by David Levy in his new book, Love and Sex With Robots: “Love with robots will be as normal as love with other humans. While the number of sexual acts and lovemaking positions commonly practised between humans will be extended, as robots teach us more than is in all of the world’s published sex manuals combined. Love and sex with robots on a grand scale are inevitable.”

Speaking by phone from his home in London, Mr. Levy said he became interested in robotic love after reading a book written by famed psychologist Sherry Turkle about an MIT undergraduate who was more interested in his computer than girls.

“If this smart person could feel that way about a computer, then millions of people could be out there that could be susceptible to the same thing,” he said. “What a fascinating idea that the humanization of electronics could get to the point where humans could fall in love or have with them.”

In Japan, home of the Tamagotchi and Honda’s ASIMO robot, scientists have made significant leaps in creating realistically lifelike robots whose response to stimuli gets more sophisticated with each new model.

Still, there will be a number of ethical, moral and, well, physical issues to deal with before any relationship with a machine goes carnal.

For about $7,000, you can be the proud owner of a robot “sex-doll” and comes complete with “nipple sensors,” Mr. Levy says. It will likely be in the next five years, he adds, that an android is created so lifelike that sex with a robot starts becoming normal practice.

It could also be a solution for the masses of socially awkward or unattractive people to fulfill their sexual urges and desires when all other avenues to meet a partner have been exhausted. “Not everybody can go out and get a date when they want one,” Mr. Levy said.

“But our acceptance of this won’t happen overnight. We’ll definitely need some time to get used to it.... But things that were regarded as being … immoral from a sexual point of view, nowadays are ordinary,” he argues. “As science develops rather quickly, so will our thinking and ethics.”

But what about love? It’s one thing to have deep feelings for the latest tech gadget, but can a human actually fall in love with a human-looking robot? And can that robot actually reciprocate those feelings?

It will take some time, Mr. Levy conceded, but it will happen.

“Falling in love [with a robot] will be much more difficult since it’ll need an advanced form of artificial intelligence,” Mr. Levy said, “But certainly by the end of the century, love and sex with robots will be very commonplace.”

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Instructing ‘Gen XXX’ (National Post, 080209)

Easy access to pornography online has forever altered sex-ed class

Alex McKay recalls being startled when the 13-year-old boys he was addressing in a Toronto sex-education class began peppering him with graphic questions.

“A lot of the questions, I soon realized, revolved around these young boys having looked at pornography,” said Mr. McKay, research director for the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada. The boys were preoccupied with how well-endowed the male porn stars were, not to mention their bizarre habit of ejaculating on their partners’ faces.

“What a lot of their questions boiled down to was, ‘Is what I’m seeing in the porn that I’m watching what sex is really supposed to be like? Is this how I am supposed to behave?’ “ Mr. Mc-Kay recalled.

The proliferation of online porn means the sorts of questions Mr. Mc-Kay first encountered at the dawn of the Internet age in the 1990s arise ever more frequently as teens and even preteens come into contact with sexually explicit images. Despite parents’ best efforts to shield their children, about 40% of those aged 10 to 17 are exposed to online pornography, one recent U.S. study found.

Porn has moved from dingy bookshops to the mainstream, a trend reflected in the opening scene of last year’s comedy hit Superbad, in which the high-school-age characters discuss the merits of various hard-core Web sites. To researchers at Brigham Young University, today’s youth are “Generation XXX.” Their study of students at six U.S. universities found that viewing porn has become as accepted an activity as having a few beers at the pub. “Results suggest that pornography is a prominent feature of the current emerging adulthood culture,” the authors wrote.

Less clear is how this growing pastime is affecting sexual relationships. Mr. McKay said parents and educators need to do a better job preparing children for the new age. “The Internet’s not going away, and pornography is certainly not going away, so the pertinent question is how are we teaching young people to deal with it, and that’s a question that most people don’t want to ask,” he said.

Kim Martyn does not shy away from the subject in her job promoting sexual health to youth for Toronto Public Health. She has worked in the field for 25 years and says there is nothing new about young guys learning from pornography; what has changed is that the images are so readily available, and they are “more raw, more hard-core.” Ms. Martyn worries about the detrimental effect such content has on young viewers lacking sexual experience and media awareness.

“I don’t think that serves them well in terms of their relationships and what they expect from themselves,” she said.

In her teaching, she introduces the subject of pornography to students as early as Grade 5, advising them how to deal with unwanted exposure to porn. “We talk about pop-ups and what to do with that,” she said. It is better they be prepared, she reasons, “than ashamed and scared to tell someone that this is on the computer.”

She is also troubled by the hateful nature of the pornography kids are most likely to stumble across in a cyber world where women are routinely referred to as sluts and bitches. “The cheap stuff is often the worst stuff in terms of misogyny, in terms of using images of really young girls,” she said. “None of that serves to inform young people, male or female, what healthy sexuality is about.”

Despite inhabiting a hyper-sexualized— some have called it “pornified” — world, today’s youth are not necessarily better informed, Ms. Martyn said. “They might know there’s something called anal sex. They might know something about oral sex.… They all know about transgender,” she said. “But they don’t know the basic stuff relevant to them. They don’t know how you can tell if someone likes you. They still have no clue in terms of when you know if you’re ready to have sex.”

Francine Duquet is a professor of sexology at Universite du Quebec a Montreal researching the hyper-sexualization of teenagers. It was not that long ago that magazines showing a little too much flesh were stopped at the border, and you had to be 18 to purchase the relatively tame likes of Playboy. Now she comes across children whose natural curiosity has led them to porn sites featuring bestiality and group sex. Children aged 13 and 14 ask whether sex necessarily involves three orifices, she said.

“What we have to make young people understand is that sexual relations are, above all, relations with another person. It is not a matter of genital acrobatics. I always tell young people that it’s not the Cirque du Soleil of sex. It’s a relationship with another person who has his modesty, history, desire and limits,” she said. “It’s not just a matter of orifices and appendages.”

Sylvain Boies, a psychologist in Victoria, was one of the first researchers to begin looking at the effect of Internet pornography. In a 2002 survey of Canadian university students, he found that more than 40% used the Internet for sexual entertainment, and that nearly half of those had started at age 16 or younger. He suspects those numbers have only gone up with the spread of the Internet.

“Adolescence is a period of exploration. That’s very normal,” he said. “At the same time, it creates the foundation for intimacy. It sets the tone for how they will create deeper affiliations with other people. Certainly, if the images of intimacy and sexuality that they see are pornographic versus even erotic, that creates for a lot of young men… the idea that women are always ready and available and want sex all the time. That’s what they see in the images.”

He witnesses this phenomenon among men in his practice. “There is a whole industry telling them what their sexuality is about,” he said. “Consumers of pornography start believing that’s what sex is about. What is removed is the intimacy.”

In a 2003 article in New York magazine, feminist writer Naomi Wolf described the effects of the new porn culture on young women. “Now you have to offer— or flirtatiously suggest — the lesbian scene, the ejaculate-in-the-face scene,” she wrote. “Being naked is not enough; you have to be buff, be tan with no tan lines, have the surgically hoisted breasts and the Brazilian bikini wax — just like porn stars.” She recounted conversations with college-age women who feel “that they can never have sexual relations,” they wrote.

Another study, of Swedish youth aged 15 to 18, found that those who had watched pornographic films were more likely to have engaged in oral and anal sex. Researchers in Taiwan have found that adolescents with a higher exposure to pornography are more accepting of premarital and extramarital sex and are more likely to engage in sexually permissive behaviour.

The authors of the Brigham Young University study, published in the Journal of Adolescent Research in December, were surprised by how widespread acceptance of pornography was among both male and female students. Two-thirds of the men and nearly half of the women said they considered viewing pornography to be an acceptable expression of sexuality; female students were much more accepting of porn than their fathers, the study found, even if they did not use it nearly as much as the young men in the study.

“These women are part of a rising generation that is deeming pornography as more acceptable and more mainstream,” said Jason Carroll, the study’s lead author. His Brigham Young colleague and co-author, Laura Padilla-Walker, said the people who used pornography were more likely to approve of premarital and extramarital sex.

“We don’t know whether pornography is causing these things, or whether people with more promiscuous sexual values are more likely to use pornography,” she said.

Those involved in sex education hope that the Internet’s potential to transmit positive information about sexual health will one day drown out the smut that appears when a child Googles “sex.” “There are a number of high-quality sex-information sites that are designed to meet the educational needs of youth,” Mr. McKay said, mentioning the Canadian site sexualityandu.ca and goaskalice.columbia.edu out of the United States.

“For better or worse, the world we live in is saturated with sexual imagery,” he said. “Every kid, as they are anticipating their first sexual experience, first and foremost on their minds is, ‘What am I supposed to do? What is expected of me?’ If they’re not getting that information from a credible source, they’re going to find it where they can get it, and Internet porn is there for them.”

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Asexuality: Indifferent and proud (National Post, 080209)

Asexuality is emerging as a fourth orientation

John is an asexual. He is 24 years old and a recent university graduate. He is also a self-described nerd, which is what he said helped him cover his lack of interest in sex while living in the most sexualized environment known to humanity: the university dorm.

“Being a nerd, it’s a little less unusual not to be in a relationship,” said John, who requested his last name not be used, during a recent interview at a Toronto cafe. “I think sex is nice in theory, but I’m not that interested in practice.”

But just to confuse things, John is interested in romantic relationships with women — “cuddling, sending silly notes to each other and going for long walks.” He has tried a few sexual things, including that thing “apparently every other male on the planet loves but I don’t really care about.”

When I ask him to describe what it would be like to be asexual, he tells me to imagine a picture of a scantily clad woman. “You might have a reaction to it; I would just see a girl in not much clothing. That’s the primary difference.”

David Jay, 25, who runs the Web site asexuality.org, has become the poster boy for the emerging asexuality movement. He has appeared on 20/20, Montel Williams and The View — where he endured the incredulous stares of the four female hosts and their all-female audience.

“I’ve never had a sexual relation with a man or a woman,” he said from San Francisco. “The reason I haven’t … is not because I’m averse to sex. I just think it’s boring. The scenario in which I’d explore it would be a scenario in which I had nothing better to do. But I don’t see that ever happening.”

It would be easy to see both men as broken, suffering from some hormonal imbalance or a psychological malady. A woman, in another time, would be called frigid; a man would be something less than a man. It might even be seen as slightly creepy. Just read Ian McEwan’s latest novel, On Chesil Beach. It describes what can only be called the most uncomfortable honeymoon night ever — when the husband discovers that his new bride is asexual.

But over the past few years, a small body of scientific research has emerged that supports the view that asexuality is a fourth orientation, which is as normal as being straight, gay or bi.

Dr. Cynthia Graham, a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute for Research, is co-author of a recent study on asexuality. It employed interviews and questionnaires to find out the attitudes of those who identify themselves as asexuals.

The main things that distinguish asexuals from the rest of the population are a lack of sexual desire and lower arousability, she said. But she also found asexuals did not suffer from sexual inhibitions and did not differ in a desire to masturbate. And, most important, they felt no distress from their asexuality, which is why, unlike some clinicians, she does not see it as abnormal.

“For the most part, they were not repulsed or afraid of sex,” she said from Oxford, England. “They could take it or leave it and they wanted to leave it. It isn’t something they experienced problems with; that’s not why they came to identify as asexual. They just did not have any desire to go for it.

“We know that it’s been very difficult in terms of sexual dysfunction to decide what levels of sexual desire are too high or too low. We know the continuum is very broad.”

Elizabeth Abbott, the author of A History of Celibacy, said the easiest way to think of that continuum is to put “Bill Clinton on one end, asexuals on the other, most of us in the middle.”

Ms. Abbott’s book was not about asexuality. Celibacy, she said, is the opposite: wrestling with sexual desire then suppressing it. Still, asexuals contacted her to share their stories.

“It was a subject, until very recently, people never mentioned, and so asexual people were ecstatic about seeing anything about them. These people have felt alone— that’s what they told me.”

Mr. Jay relates to that sentiment, calling growing up in a sexualized world as “scary.”

“I’d grown up having a difficult time coming to terms with my asexuality. I knew my friends were experiencing something that I wasn’t. I didn’t know if that meant I was broken. I didn’t know how to talk about that. Or what it meant about my life or how I would form close relationships with people.”

He said his parents were intimidated by it at first, but came to accept it. He also went to see his doctor. “She said if you don’t think it’s a problem, it’s not a problem — but if you wrote a book about it, no one would buy it.”

Since the Web site started, he said, 18,000 people have registered to take part in online forums. The Web site has T-shirts for sale with such slogans as “Asexuals Party Hardest,” “No Sex Please” and “Asexuals Have Other Things On Their Minds.” It has even attracted sexual people seeking help because they have discovered their partners are asexual.

John, who has worked as a moderator on the site, said it can be tragic for people who find out they are so incompatible. “But I think it’s causing more problems than it has to because [society] believes [sex is] an important part of the relationship.”

Dr. Anthony Bogaert, a professor of psychology at Brock University in St. Catharines, was one of the first to study asexuality. He estimates asexuals make up about 1% of the population — but believes it could be more because asexuals are likely to avoid sex surveys. He also thinks many take their orientation underground when they marry someone who is sexually active.

“I think there’s a lot of people who get into relationships and go through the motions to please their partners.”

Dr. Bogaert’s study did draw some rough conclusions, based on very early data, about who may be inclined toward asexuality: more females than males, later onset of puberty in women and shorter stature. He speculated that those who come from lower-or working-class homes also might be more likely to be asexual.

And he saw some evidence of greater religiosity in asexuals.

Even though he is not a clinical psychologist, he has had many asexuals seek him out. “When people come to see you, they often want to be validated. They want to know if they are a regular person, even though they are different this way.”

Mr. Jay and John said most asexuals they meet are happy just the way they are.

Said John: “The question always comes up that if there was a pill you could take that would … bing … make you sexual, would you take it? I would not.”

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Christian Psychologists: Internet Sex Addiction a ‘Global Epidemic’ (Christian Post, 090819)

Two Christian psychologists who have advised a number of churches and community groups on the sex-related problems that plague society have released a book that chronicles the problem of addiction to Internet pornography among Christians, including pastors, and describes problems that this type of addiction can create.

Behind Closed Doors, written by Drs. Robert. J. Baird and Ronald Vanderbeck, also provides solutions for how people can break the cycle of addiction.

“We see this as a global epidemic that is not going to go away,” says Baird. “We are trying to rally the faith community across denominational lines to work together and combat this dark side of things with useful and real information.”

According to Baird, more than 35% of the Protestant pastors he was able to include in a study for his Ph.D. thesis said they have used Internet pornography.

Other surveys have yielded similar results, including a 2002 survey by Pastors.com, which revealed that 54% of pastors said they viewed porn within the past year, and a 2000 survey by Christianity Today, which found that 37% of pastors said pornography is a “current struggle” of theirs.

“They (pastors) are not immune and are particularly at risk, since they often work on their computers and are unaccountable for their time,” notes Baird who based Behind Closed Doors on the real stories that he and Vanderbeck have come across in their counseling session.

Both Baird and Vanderbeck frequently do consulting work and offer advice to the courts, social service agencies, churches, and community organizations that are seeking solutions to the sexual difficulties that plague so many people in today’s society.

In each chapter of Behind Closed Doors, a story of a real situation that someone faced is presented followed by an analysis of the situation and biblical references that can inspire hope.

The authors also give advice, arising from their own experience and knowledge, and offer strategies on how a person can “renew and restore a healthy, Christian sexuality,” according to the book.

“We decided four or five years ago that we needed to bring awareness of this problem to the faith community,” says Vanderbeck.

“The Christian family is especially vulnerable,” he adds. “Often out of a strong sense of shame, parents aren’t willing or able to talk openly and lovingly and in a kind way about this problem to their children. Partly what we are doing is trying to open up a dialogue between parents and children.”

Topics addressed include the temptations of Internet pornography, confronting one’s sexual addiction, and repenting from it. It also looks at the problem of Internet chat rooms, the destructive cycle of sexual abuse, and how to protect children from Internet sexual predators.

“We live in a highly sexualized culture and are conditioned to believe that sexual potency should be a primary function of our lifestyle,” says Vanderbeck. “Sex on the Internet is like a drug. It is a very seductive process and people can become enslaved by it.”

“We believe that the Christian community should obtain all of the necessary information in order that it can fight back against this and learn to talk about it in a healthy way,” adds Baird.

Faith Alive, the publishing agency of the Christian Reformed Church and Reformed Church in America, is working with the authors to try to develop other materials that can be used in conjunction with the book, such as study guides and videos.

Another new book from Faith Alive, Preventing Child Abuse: Creating a Safe Place by Beth Swagman, director of the CRC’s Safe Church Office, also addresses some of the topics in Behind Closed Doors. Swagman’s book is especially geared to help churches and nonprofit organizations through the process of designing and implementing the policies and procedures they need to keep children safe.

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Porn to Purity: Christian Couple Bares All (Christian Post, 090611)

It’s a story many Christians can probably relate to or at least empathize with – a Christian couple serving in ministry together is suddenly thrown into a loop when the husband’s secret addiction to pornography is discovered.

For the past two years, Jeff and Marsha Fisher have been recovering and reconciling their marriage since the dreaded discovery was made by their denominational leaders.

They’ve relocated from Buffalo, N.Y., to Raleigh, N.C., and are currently working non-ministry jobs. The Fishers, married 11 years, are still in counseling and are attending separate SA groups – one for husbands and one for the wives of husbands with a sexual addiction.

Although the months have been tough, the couple says their marriage is the healthiest it has ever been.

“Even though it’s been the hardest period of our marriage, it’s really turned out to be the most fruitful as far as our intimacy and communication,” Marsha said in a podcast meant to provide hope for others struggling with or affected by sexual addiction.

While the Fishers have stepped out of ministry during this recovery period, they started their own personal ministry on the Web to encourage and help other Christian couples who may feel isolated as they grapple with what Jeff called “the silent sin” of pornography.

Just as the Fishers have discovered, they want to tell others that they are not alone.

“There are people all over – in our congregations, in our world – that have struggled with pornography,” said Jeff. “The more we’ve shared our story, the more we’ve seen how many people are dealing with this.”

Various surveys, including one by ChristaNet.com, have shown that half of Christian men, including pastors, admit to struggling with pornography. The addiction is also seen among Christian women.

Overall, there tens of millions of addicts in the United States and sexual addiction is the most prevalent, according to the International Bible Society.

“It’s just the silent sin and the thing people don’t want to talk about,” said Jeff.

Furthermore, he added, “It’s really a lie to believe you’re alone in this battle.”

To prevent Christian couples from experiencing the isolation, hopelessness and shame they experienced when their world fell apart, Jeff and Marsha share their experiences frankly and openly on their new website, porntopurity.com.

“[W]e always felt encouraged when we read about other couples who had been through a similar journey and had experienced victory. Yet there wasn’t a lot of those types of stories out there,” the Fishers told The Christian Post in an e-mail.

In their site, the Fishers recall how Jeff had assured Marsha – who was aware of Jeff’s struggles with pornography – that the Internet was no longer a temptation just weeks before he was caught.

When the day of reckoning came, Jeff was confronted by the director of the local denominational office and the pastor of the church that was helping to sponsor his new church plant.

“They had a folder full of questionable websites that I had searched while in the office alone,” he recalled. “It was an intervention.”

“When my mentors intervened and confronted me, I was thrown into a tremendous shock. I was numb. I was cut. The Truth of God exposed the nasty truth of what I really looked like on the inside.”

At that time Jeff was no longer working at the denominational office and was a full-time pastor leading a newly planted church, which was about to celebrate its one year anniversary. The Fishers did not disclose the name of the church in order to “protect the work they continue to do.”

After he was caught, Jeff was told that the state convention would no longer be able to continue funding their ministry and was asked to leave the ministry and also the area.

The Fishers were also asked not to reveal Jeff’s pornography addiction to their church and to instead request a leave of absence for “family issues” and then later report that they would not be returning.

“I think they were afraid that if this became public it would stigmatize Baptist churches in the area,” Jeff said.

They decided to reveal their entire story to the core leaders in the church but left details out when addressing the rest of the congregation, which was simply told that their marriage was in trouble.

“We didn’t want that church to be forever known as the one whose pastor was into porn,” Marsha wrote in a blog on the website. “We didn’t want to provide the skeptics in our community yet another example of a minister who had been caught in spiritual sin.”

Both Jeff and Marsha, who served in ministry together for ten years, reveal the slew of emotions and thoughts they had during that rocky patch, including leaving the marriage (Marsha) or even contemplating suicide (Jeff).

But in hindsight, the Fishers realize the experience was both the worst and best thing that happened to them.

“The worst because it was extremely painful and the consequences were intense ... but the best thing because we were finally living in truth,” said Marsha, who realized their marriage was shallow before this.

The Fishers currently attend a church in North Carolina, where pastors there have been supportive and encouraging. Since the launch of their blog in April and “Porn to Purity” website in May, the Fishers have received e-mails regularly from couples expressing their gratitude and asking questions.

“The people who visit our site are looking for help,” they said.

The Fishers don’t claim to be professionals, but just wanted to provide an avenue for discussions on the prevalent problem of pornography and to pass along resources.

“Think of this as a ‘one flesh’ problem,” Marsha tells listeners and readers. “The Lord in his loving kindness gave me the ability to see Jeff’s pornography problem as OUR marriage problem.”

“Without Christ, our situation would have been helpless,” she added. “But because we know the Great Physician, the Surgeon Healer who can make all things new, we had all the hope of Heaven.”

“And our One Flesh is now stronger than ever before,” she concluded.

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Neuroscientist Explores How Porn Hijacks Male Brain (Christian Post, 100115)

What is it about pornography that makes it so appealing to so many men?

Neuroscientist and researcher Dr. William M. Struthers explores that question in a new book, where he approaches the pervasive problem of pornography as not only a spiritual matter but also a physical one.

“Pornography is ... a physical matter, rooted in the biological intricacies of our sexual design,” Struthers, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College, writes in Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain. “In my opinion, nowhere is the complexity of our sexual nature seen more than in the wiring of the brain.”

While acknowledging that women are increasingly becoming consumers of pornography, the biopsychologist says there’s little doubt that it is primarily men who are hooked on it. Even among Christian men, surveys have found that half of them are struggling with pornography.

“Men seem to be wired in such a way that pornography hijacks the proper functioning of their brains and has a long-lasting effect on their thoughts and lives,” he states.

Struthers began writing the book after he taught an upper-division psychology class called Men and Addictions. One of the addictions he addressed was pornography. The Wheaton professor would soon find his office filled with college-aged men from the Christian college who confided their addiction and inability to stop consuming pornography.

“The simplest explanation for why men view pornography ... is they are driven to seek out sexual intimacy,” he writes. “Satisfying this drive is pleasurable. Sexual intercourse and the naked form of women are enjoyable, as designed by God to be.”

He notes that men are reflexively drawn to the content of pornographic material.

It’s like HD television. Just as standard television signals differ from HD signals, pornographic images are inherently different from other signals, Struthers explains.

“The male brain is built like an ideal pornography receiver, wired to be on the alert for these images of nakedness,” he lays out. “The male brain and our conscious visual experience is the internal monitor where we perceive them. The images of sexuality grab our attention, jumping out and hypnotizing a man like an HD television among a sea of standard televisions.”

Constant exposure to pornographic images, however, comes with major consequences, especially for men.

“The way that a male brain is organized in being one-track, goal-oriented and visuospatial (mentally manipulating objects) make it the perfect playground for sexual fantasy,” he cautions.

“As men fall deeper into the mental habit of fixating on these images, the exposure to them creates neural pathways,” the professor explains. “Neural paths become wider as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. ...They become the automatic pathway through which interactions with women are routed.

“Every woman they come into contact with is objectified, undressed and evaluated as a willing (or unwilling) mental sexual partner.”

Though acknowledging the biological nature of the male brain, Struthers says “my brain made me do it” is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. In other words, it’s not an excuse for sin.

Pornography, he says, dishonors the image of God in an individual by treating him or her as a sexual object to be consumed directly or indirectly.

A man with a properly oriented conscience and filled with the Spirit values the image of God in women and has trained his mind to take sexual thoughts captive, the author highlights. Meanwhile, pornography creates moral and emotional confusion that prevents the man from finding fulfillment in the manner he is created (by God) to find it.

Struthers encourages men to use knowledge of how a male’s brain is wired to rewire it and to move toward sanctification.

“The process of sanctification is an addiction to holiness, a compulsive fixation on Christ and an impulsive pattern of compassion, virtue and love. This is what we are wired for.”

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‘Footnote’ Delves into Truths, Raw Stories of Porn Industry (Christian Post, 100401)

Every second 28,258 Internet users are watching porn.

The public is familiar with the statistics and are well aware that pornography is the biggest industry in the world and the most consumed media worldwide.

But most never hear about the young girl who was curled up in a ball between takes in the production of a porn film, sucking her thumb because her mind was so blown by what she did.

It’s those personal stories – the “small things” in a big and otherwise nameless picture – that one crew of Christians is hoping to communicate.

For the last 18 months, a television show called “Footnote” has been in pre-production, capturing the funny, the sad and the raw stories of real people.

Donny Pauling, an ex-porn producer, recalls seeing young women get started in the porn industry. They would be paid $500 a day just for having some photos taken of them, which sounded better than a $200 paycheck every two weeks at Starbucks.

But the women would be led into “harder stuff” once they got used to the pay. And Pauling would eventually see “the lights go out in their eyes” and their lives fold.

“The industry breaks them,” he says in the first episode of “Footnote,” which premieres this fall on cable. “They’re just people who have bought into a lie and it’s so easy to get caught up in.”

One porn star, who identifies herself as Kyanna Lee, submits, “Pornography is my boyfriend. It actually hurts but we have to make it look good because we have to sell the product.”

Pornography is the first of a dozen modern and sensitive topics that “Footnote” addresses. Tyler Huckabee, head writer for the show, and Producer Jon Reisinger say they decided to kick off the television program with porn because it’s something everyone’s affected by but also very hard to get people to talk about.

“We knew if we wanted to be known as a show with no ‘off-limits,’ porn would be a good place to start,” they told The Christian Post.

And in the midst of big numbers and the supposed fun and glam of the porn industry, they wanted to delve deeper into the issue and reveal not only the small details but also the truths.

“This story (of the young girl curled up) speaks these earth-shattering truths about a lot more than just porn – it says something about who we are as humans,” they stressed. “That’s what we want the show to be about.”

“Footnote” is a project launched by Back to the Bible which is producing episodes in conjunction with Brad Knull and Cooke Pictures.

Huckabee and Reisinger hesitate to call “Footnote” a “ministry” because of some of the stigmas associated with the word and because of their desire to reach audiences that would never get involved with a ministry.

The show is also targeted to people like them who grew up in the church but went through and continue to go through times of “disillusionment and cynicism towards the usual idea of what a ‘Christian’ should be.”

They say their aim was to produce something that they themselves would want to see on TV and something that actually starts conversations.

Jamie Gaylor, media strategist for LightQuest Media, Inc., describes the program as an “on-the-street documentary rather than a religious teaching program.” But it is Bible-based, she noted.

The name of the show came out of their desire to convey the important things, which they found were in “the small stuff.”

The first season will feature 13 episodes.

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The Social Costs of Pornography (townhall.com, 100408)

by Maggie Gallagher

Are there social costs to pornography?

Libertarians rush to avoid the question by preemptively declaring that the law should not regulate pornography. OK, let’s take the question of outlawing porn off the table and ask again: Does porn hurt people?

The Witherspoon Institute recently gathered a groundbreaking conference of social scientists, psychiatrists, philosophers, neuroscientists and legal scholars to discuss that question, and the results have been released in a new book, “The Social Costs of Pornography” (available at socialcostsofpornography.org).

Professor Mary Anne Layden, director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania, submitted a paper for this conference reviewing the scientific evidence on porn use and sexual violence. The vast majority of men who use porn are not sex offenders. Yet, men viewing sexually violent porn are more likely to say that a “rape victim suffered less and that she enjoyed it, and that women in general enjoy rape. ... Those reporting higher exposure to violent pornography are six times more likely to report having raped than those reporting low exposure,” writes Layden. Ordinary men after viewing violent porn, urged sentences for rapists only half those of men shown other kinds of images.

Layden further states: “The large body of research on pornography reveals that it functions as a teacher of, a permission-giver for, and a trigger of many negative behaviors and attitudes that can severely damage not only the users but many others, including strangers.”

But to me the most important potential cost of porn is its effects on ordinary men and their ordinary relationships. According to Layden: “Exposure to pornography leads men to rate their female partners as less attractive than they would have had they not been exposed and to be less satisfied with their partners’ attractiveness, sexual performance, and level of affection, and expressed a greater desire for sex without emotional involvement.”

She concludes: “For males, more pornography use was associated with greater acceptance of sex outside of marriage for married individuals, greater acceptance of sex before marriage and less child-centeredness during marriage. The reduced desire for children is especially pronounced in a reduced desire for female children.”

Men who use porn do not want daughters. What does that tell you about the social costs of porn?

Over at National Review, one young man testified: “As a 20-year-old male college student, I am familiar with, first, the very high use of Internet pornography within my demographic (even on fairly conservative campuses), and, second, porn’s powerful effects after even light exposure.” One husband added: “Since I gave up porn my sex life with my wife has improved greatly. ... To make a long story short, I found myself working harder to woo my wife, and the result is we’ve been together more, and the times have been better, than (in) quite some time. I think she feels more loved, and that is what has translated into more physical loving. I wonder why I was never told this before. I’ve read a great deal about the harms of porn, but little about the benefits of giving it up.”

Indeed.

Porn disconnects the reward system of the male sex drive from the drive to master reality. Porn is nowhere near as satisfying as a real relationship with a woman, but it is a lot easier and much less fraught with the possibility of failure or humiliation. Porn use thus is an aid to sexual failure in men, and a contributor to our ongoing failure to create a culture that connects men and women, parents and children, sex and love.

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The Rise of Islamo-Erotica (Bangkok News, 100427)

by Betwa Sharma

Ignoring the prohibition of nudity, Muslim artists—many of them women—are now defying religious tenets by painting naked models in pinup poses. VIEW OUR GALLERY.

One of Hanan Tabbara’s most provocative sketches is a charcoal and pastel drawing of blood pouring out of a woman’s vagina. She made it after a close friend was raped, and later uploaded it as her Facebook profile picture. For two years now, the 20-year-old, political science student from Brooklyn has been drawing nudes. “I’m aware that it is prohibited but it doesn’t bother me,” Tabbara says.

While the Koran does not specifically ban nude art, the almost universal opinion of religious leaders is that Islam forbids it. However, a handful of Muslim artists have been daring to depict nudity. “This leads to moral consequences that are against Islam,” says Imam Shamsi Ali, the leader of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York. “There is no justification to say it is allowed in the name of art.”

The prohibition principally stems from the taboo against entertaining sexual thoughts that a naked figure might provoke. In this light, Imam Ali also explains that it is “not desirable” for Muslims to view nude paintings, even if they are considered masterpieces. “Islam sees the harms of such exposure outweighing its benefits,” he says. “An artist can have an important message in his work without drawing nudes.”

Tabbara, whose family is originally from Lebanon, balances God with her passion for painting. “There are so many rules, social and political, that it would be debilitating for any artist,” she says, admitting openly to have worked with naked models.

Many Muslim students take classes in art school that require them to draw naked models. Shiite religious scholar Muhsin Alidina advises against these courses since, under Islam, women can only show their face, wrists, hands and feet, while men need to keep the area between their waists and knees covered. “The idea is to prevent base desires from being aroused,” he says.

Nude modeling even in the West, however, is only a recent phenomenon. Anne Higonnet, an art historian at Barnard College, explains that the practice declined after the fall of the Roman Empire, reemerging briefly during the Renaissance and then being revived in 17th-century European art academies where most of the posing was done by working-class women or prostitutes. The debate of whether female artists could work with nude models persisted until the end of the 19th century.

Higonnet points out that the stigma against nudity even lasted into the 20th century as critics debated Picasso’s depiction of five prostitutes in his now-classic 1907 work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. “They’re supposed to signal the dangers of sexuality,” she says.

But Hala Shoukair, 53, had no hangups sketching from models at the Sorbonne in Paris, during the 1970s. “The only connection was between me and pencil… I was not thinking about whether God was looking down at me and saying ‘Hala don’t do this,’” she says.

The Lebanese-born artist, who now lives in New York, insists that the taboo stems from a conservative society and not the religion. “We live in the Dark Ages right now, where everything is forbidden but it was not always like this and it will change again.”

Nada Shabout, a professor of Islamic art at the University of North Texas, agrees that Islam never took a formal position on nudity in art, and what is perceived as a religious ban is actually a cultural taboo imposed by a conservative society. “Keep Islam out of this discourse; it’s different people saying different things at different times,” she says, warning that the guise of a holy prohibition has created a great deal of misunderstanding in society.

The professor explains that no explicit ban was really required because religious leaders, very early on, barred the painting of life-like human portraits, fearing idol-worship, and the present controversy surfaced only in the 20th century when European-styled art schools popped up in the Middle East.

A 40-year-old artist, Khalid Al Tahmazi, based in Bahrain, who has done a few semi-nude paintings, wants religious leaders to stop fixating on the subject of the painting and focus on its message. “We now don’t make those pictures to worship; we just make them as expressing our thoughts and feelings,” he says.

All the same, nude paintings have appeared throughout Islamic history, according to art historian Zainab Bahrani at Columbia University, especially in manuscript illumination. “It’s not common but it does exist,” she says, clarifying that nudity for the sake of nudity isn’t permitted. “In the context of a narrative or a story, it has been possible.”

Even now, the fewer instances of nude art and photography cause only a mild headache to the clergy, who are more preoccupied with Muslim youth’s exposure to pornography. Imam Ali doubts that the future will give way to any change in the rules. “Islam guards against going down the wrong path,” he says.

The reason for rejecting nudity in the West, for very long, was also more cultural than religious, according Higonnet. “It has primarily been a social unease tinged with a very old Christian discomfort with the pleasure of the body,” she says. “All cultures around the world for large parts of their history have felt very nervous about this. It’s not just Islam.”

Four years ago, the Indian artist Maqbool Fida Husain, a Muslim, was chased out of the country by death threats from Hindu fundamentalists and hundreds of legal cases that accused him of hurting public sentiments for drawing Hindu goddesses in the nude.

“Nudity, in Hindu culture, is a metaphor for purity,” Husain said in a recent interview with Tehelka, an Indian weekly. But public opinion in the country remains divided as the 95-year-old artist felt compelled to relinquish his Indian passport and become a citizen of Qatar.

Today, artists painting nudes expose themselves to threats and censure from the larger community, which causes their families a great deal of anxiety. Tabbara, who is planning her first public exhibition, has ignored her mother’s pleas to “modulate the nudity.” “She expects me not to do it, but she accepts it,” Tabbara says. “My father has always been supportive.”

On the other hand, 67-year-old Amir Normandie’s mother, back in Tehran, is adamantly against his nude photography. “You won’t be able to change the world so why do you create animosity and make enemies,” she berates her son.

This Chicago-based photographer had his exhibition closed due to intense protests from Muslim students at Harper College in Illinois. “You believe that your work is protected by the freedom of speech,” says Normandie. “But it is removed the same way it would be in Iran or in the Middle East.”

His series Hejab portrays Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, doing a tango with a veiled semi-nude figure. “The clerics in Iran forced Iran and the women of Iran to a tango,” says Normandie, who has used his work to criticize the Iranian regime for what he perceives as the complete subjugation of women.

Another Iranian artist, Makan Emdai, has used his work to ridicule the objectification of women both in the West and their repression in the East. A series called Islamo-erotica depicts women wearing long black dresses in revealing pinup poses. The paintings include a female exposing her bottom while sitting in a martini glass, one straddling a gun, and another with her skirt blowing up, a la Marilyn Monroe.

“It is about sexism everywhere,” says Emadi, who is based in Los Angeles. “On one side of the world sexuality is a common selling point and in another it is denied.”

Both Iranian-American artists have considered the possibility of a fatwa being issued against them but so far have only been inundated with hate mail.

Despite being in the Middle East, Al Tahmazi has managed to avoid the kind of wrath his American counterparts have faced. “In Bahrain, the audience who attends art exhibitions are kinda liberated and have no objections,” he says. “Religious leaders don’t see these paintings, and if they do, then they’ll probably make trouble.”

While Normandie has asked the Chicago police for protection, Emadi relies on his carefully guarded obscurity but still isn’t oblivious to the danger. “Do I want to be the next Salman Rushdie, of course not… so far so good,” he says.

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Neuroscientist Explores How Porn Hijacks Male Brain (Christian Post, 100115)

What is it about pornography that makes it so appealing to so many men?

“Pornography is ... a physical matter, rooted in the biological intricacies of our sexual design,” Struthers, associate professor of psychology at Wheaton College, writes in Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain. “In my opinion, nowhere is the complexity of our sexual nature seen more than in the wiring of the brain.”