A View From Riverside Drive

Commentary by Ed Hynes
July 2009

Dr. Lynn Ponton is a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco.  In her book, “The Sex Lives of Teenagers” (Dutton 2002), she says that the abusive treatment of women portrayed on most porn sites can become sexual triggers for teenagers who become addicted to cyber sex.  For them, she says, sexual arousal is impossible without that violent trigger.  Other researchers and clinicians have come to similar conclusions.

Hold that thought, now, as we take another look at an incident we discussed in April. 

The little girl who asked, “What’s a whore, Mommy?” had just come off a school bus where some boys were said to have been sexually harassing girls for some time.  The Pocono Record (Northeast Pennsylvania) said in an editorial April 1, “parents said their children reported that boys taunted their daughters with information about sex they had read on the Internet or gleaned from their parents' video collection.  The boys allegedly threatened to hold the girls down and have sex with them.  One young boy reportedly dropped his pants and underwear and said he wanted to take the girl home and ‘hump’ her.”

These boys had gotten the violence-is-sexy idea Dr. Ponton warned against.  They got it from the Internet and videos they found at home.  They got it, in other words, from the obscene products of Big Porn in California’s San Fernando Valley, and from Big Porn’s byproducts, which are the porn-like imagery and language spilling over into our pop culture.

For these boys, violence and sex go together.  Think what their attitude and behavior toward girls and women may become as they get older.  And not just these boys, but their contemporaries across the country and around the world.  The porn culture is taking us all to a dangerous new place. 

The need to do something about that is urgent. 

The Pocono Record said in its editorial, “we live in a modern society where people of any age can get access to hard-core porn at the touch of a button. If these boys have watched such material, someone should answer for it, and it's not school officials.”

Who then?  Big Porn, perhaps?  You would think so.  It is the source of hard-core porn at the touch of a button, after all.

But no.  The Pocono Record said it’s up to parents to fix the problem themselves by “monitoring their children's activities and protecting them from materials that are not appropriate.” 

Parents have a role to play, of course.  Keeping pornographic videos out of the house would be a start.  Parents can and should learn about dangerous places and people on the Internet and speak with their children about how to avoid them.  Parents can keep computers out of their children’s bedrooms or other closed-off spaces in the house.  Parents can and should install filters and monitoring software to keep track of where their children spend their time on the Internet, letting the children know they’re doing that, and why. 

But what we’re up against is a criminal enterprise that uses sophisticated technology to violate federal and state obscenity laws.  This problem goes way beyond what parents can do alone. 

No less an authority than the National Research Council said in May 2002 that there is no easy way to protect children from pornography on the Internet.  The Council recommended “aggressive enforcement of existing anti-obscenity laws.”  They were saying, in effect, this is a job for police and prosecutors. 

The NRC had the benefit of hindsight.  Obscenity law enforcement was shut down in the 1990s, when Attorney General Janet Reno ran the Justice Department under President Bill Clinton.  During those eight years (1992-1980), Big Porn took off on the power of the Internet and the benign neglect of people in the U.S. Justice Department who are charged under law not just with protecting children from online sexual predators but also with protecting both children and all Americans from online purveyors of illegal hardcore “adult” pornography.

In 1996, the Big Porn trade paper Adult Video News endorsed Mr. Clinton for re-election to a second term.  AVN liked what it called Mr. Clinton’s "hands-nearly-off porn policy."  In March 1998, AVN crowed, "The adult industry's numbers have increased nearly 100% in five years.”  The story ran under this headline: "IT'S A GREAT TIME TO BE AN ADULT RETAILER."

Big Porn was allowed to run amok in the 1990s and that has left us damaged and endangered.  The Internet today is full of the hardest of hardcore pornography, and popular culture has become sexually charged with porn-like imagery and language.  We also have more than 670,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, and an estimated 14,500 to 17,500 new “sex workers” each year, brought in by modern slave traders to meet the booming demand for commercial sex.  Philandering politicians, serial rapists, abductions and murder have become a commonplace of the evening news.

Because of all this, we know we can’t just leave the obscenity problem for parents to solve on their own.

Federal and state laws ban the distribution of obscene materials (whether individual photographs, video, or the written word) on the Internet and elsewhere.  If those laws were enforced there would be less pornography on the Internet, less erotica in our culture, fewer sexual assaults and a reduced demand for sex with trafficked and prostituted women and children.  A wholesome appreciation of the connection between human sexuality and the romantic love of marriage and child rearing would have a greater place in the minds of boys and young men, replacing the aberrant idea that dominating and abusing girls and women is appropriate behavior for boys and men. 

The Pocono Record said nothing about law enforcement.  Too bad.  Instead of putting the onus on parents the paper should go after the people who are paid to enforce the obscenity laws, beginning with the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, Mr. Martin Carlson in Scranton.

Mr. Carlson has a backlog of nearly 1,700 obscenity complaints filed by people in his district since 2002 through Morality in Media’s hotline, www.ObscenityCrimes.Org.  To our knowledge, no prosecutions have resulted from these complaints.  The question is, why not?  That needs to be put to him directly by all Pennsylvanians, beginning with the parents of those children on that school bus. 

Those parents and all their neighbors in northeast Pennsylvania can help if they contact Mr. Carlson and insist that he enforce the obscenity laws in response to the complaints he has on file.  They need to get after the Justice Department in Washington, too, beginning with Attorney General Eric Holder.  And they need to ask for help on this from their Washington delegation, including Senators Robert P. Casey Jr. and Arlen Specter.

Here is the contact information:

Mr. Martin C. Carlson

United States Attorney

235 N. Washington Avenue
P.O. Box 309, Suite 311
Scranton, PA 18501-0309
Phone: (570) 348-2800
Fax: (570) 348-2037 or  (570) 348-2830

Attorney General Eric Holder

U.S. Department of Justice

950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW

Washington, DC 20530-0001

Senator Robert P. Casey Jr.

393 Russell Senate Office Building

Washington, DC 20510

Phone: 202-224-3521

Senator Arlen Specter

711 Hart Senate Office Building

Washington DC 20510

Phone: 202-224-4254

Just tell them what happened on the school bus and say the obscenity laws must be enforced, beginning with the nearly 1,700 complaints from people in the middle district of Pennsylvania.

Please Support Morality in Media, Inc.

Forward this message to a friend

Morality in Media, Inc.
475 Riverside Drive, Suite 239
New York, NY 10115
1-212-870-3222 Phone
1-212-870-2765 Fax
mim@moralityinmedia.org
http://www.moralityinmedia.org