Page 62 - AVN October 2016

In other words, use the spectre of human trafficking and child
exploitation (none of whose victims show up in adult industry
porn) to basically gut the First Amendment when it comes to
sexual speech.
And NCOSE members have been busy little beavers (!) ever
since then, having been the authors of Utah’s “Continuing
Resolution 9,” signed into law on March 10, that made Utah the
only legislature in the country to declare pornography to be a
“public health crisis.”
And so a new meme was born: Porn was no longer simply
immoral and sinful to view (let alone to actually make and
sell), because that doesn’t fly anymore with today’s media-
savvy, mostly non-church-going millennials. Instead, according
to the Resolution, porn “perpetuates a sexually toxic
environment” because it contributes to a host of ills from “the
hypersexualization of teens” to objectifying women and equating
“violence towards women” with sex. And what’s more, they deem
it “potentially biologically addictive.”
Let’s take a moment and talk about some of the things porn
actually does:
1) It shows people—straight men and women, gay men
and women, transgender men and women, and combinations
thereof—not being ashamed of their naked bodies, having sex
without feeling guilt, most often with the lights on, and often in
places other than a bedroom.
2) It shows that vanilla man-on-woman sex is hardly the
only type of sexual satisfaction available to adults. Porn also
embraces purely oral sex (which disgusts many conservatives),
anal sex, choking fantasies, passion-inspired slaps on the ass and
elsewhere, bondage, domination and even sado-masochism as
long as it’s consensual between the participants.
FEATURE
Religions flourish in large part
due to the number of
adherents they can draw—and
people who have sex for
enjoyment rather than
procreation defeat that goal
by not adding to the
potential pool of followers. So
the notion that “God” only
condones sex in the context of
making babies clearly benefits
the church leadership,
not the flock.
62 | AVN.com | 10.16
3) While the vast majority of porn is not intended to educate anyone about sex, many couples
watch it to learn new positions to try, and sadly, what with the abominable state of sex education
in many states (like Utah), and the abject fear some parents feel about broaching the subject with
their kids, porn has become the de facto sex educator of far too many teens and tweens.
4) Porn allows people to see their own sexual fantasies, some of which they would not want to
experience in their personal lives, depicted by actors in a safe environment.
5) And perhaps most important of all, sex/porn often is the primary indicator of many people’s—
conservatives’ and liberals’—hypocrisy, whether it’s a political candidate sneaking looks at porn
on his office computer, a sitting congressional legislator frequenting a dominatrix or regularly
patronizing a prostitute. Or perhaps a presidential candidate, one of whose wives has appeared on
the cover of Penthouse; who himself has appeared on the cover of Playboy and been interviewed by
them; whose current wife appeared nude and in girl/girl action in 1996 in the French magazine
Max—and who actually made his penis size a campaign issue!
As most people have observed, Donald Trump has no particular love for the Religious Right, and
his early campaign (not to mention his lifestyle in general) made that pretty clear. But then, after
he won enough delegates to assure his becoming the Republican presidential nominee, he started
paying a bit more attention to religious conservatives—and the plank of the Republican Party
platform which mirrors NCOSE’s Utah resolution.
“The internet must not become a safe haven for predators,” the platform states. “Pornography,
with its harmful effects, especially on children, has become a public health crisis that is destroying
the lives of millions. We encourage states to continue to fight this public menace and pledge our
commitment to children’s safety and well-being. We applaud the social networking sites that bar
sex offenders from participation. We urge energetic prosecution of child pornography, which is
closely linked to human trafficking.”
Note that the platform itself doesn’t call for a new “war on porn,” but just about every
conservative politician and activist views it as calling for such anyway.
“We know how big of a problem it is,” said Mary Frances Forrester, wife of North Caroline State
Sen. James Forrester, who wrote that platform section with help from the religio-conservative
Concerned Women for America. “It is an insidious epidemic, and everyone knows that and that is
not a controversy.”
The latest right-wing claims about porn, aside from it supposedly being addictive, is that it
creates erectile dysfunction and causes divorce, neither of which position has any peer-reviewed
scientific research to back it up—but that’s never stopped a religious anti-porn group with a
mission!
“Porn’s highly addictive nature is just one of many detrimental effects that give it the deserved
description as a public health crisis,” claimed Arina Grossu of the ultra-conservative Family
Research Council. “In MRI and other brain scans, the brains of compulsive pornography users
look just like the brains of alcoholics and drug addicts, showing the same reward centers (ventral
striatum) lighting up ... those who choose to ignore the actual science, evidenced by MRI and
other brain scans, want to trade out reality for a ‘porn-defending’ ideology, because the reality is
inconvenient.”
What’s “inconvenient” is the fact that those “reward centers” light up pretty much any time a
human being does something pleasurable, from eating a hearty meal to watching their favorite
sports team win a game.
And then there’s Enough Is Enough, the anti-porn group founded by former party girl Donna
Rice Hughes, which created the Children’s Internet Safety Presidential Pledge just in time to goose
Trump’s Q-rating among the religious anti-porn crowd by having him publicly sign it. Among other
censorious actions, the Pledge would have the Trump administration “aggressively enforce existing
federal laws to prevent the sexual exploitation of children online, including the federal obscenity
laws, child pornography laws, sexual predation laws and the sex trafficking laws” by appointing an
Attorney General who’ll make such prosecutions a “top priority” and by making plenty of federal
money available to “the intelligence community and law enforcement” for future sting operations
like those that targeted Max Hardcore, John Stagliano and Rob Black.
Also, in what must seem like a throwback to the Reagan administration’s Ed Meese, the Enough
Is Enough pledge would have Trump “give serious consideration to appointing a Presidential
Commission to examine the harmful public health impact of Internet pornography on youth,
families and the American culture” and to fund anti-porn groups by “establish[ing] public-
private partnerships with Corporate America to step up voluntary efforts to reduce the threat