The Case Against Porn
The concept of “human dignity” is introduced into the very first sentence of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which can be considered the founding document underpinning human rights legislation the world over.
In the aftermath of the horror that was the Holocaust, German legislatures took great pains to ensure the concept of dignity was prominently emphasized. The very first clause of the German Constitution states plainly “The dignity of man is inviolable”. Man in this context can for the purposes of law be taken to mean all beings.
Though cases in German court have never been ruled solely on dignity, it has been invoked in cases where any action would violate the human dignity of any person.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the German Government passed legislation that would grant the Secretary of Defence the right to use military grade weapons against aircraft that posed a threat to civilian life. One of the arguments used to overturn the legislation invoked the principle of human dignity to argue that passengers in the air did not have less right to life than the ones on the ground.
The pornography industry is one of the largest and most profitable of all the capitalist industries. It spins profit daily from the abuse of women, girls, boys, and men. Porn injures the bodies of the performers involved in making it, exposes children to harmful images and video via the ease with which it can be accessed on the internet, engenders addiction which has been scientifically proven to escalate, and causes a huge negative social impact to the class of human beings known as women.
The last symptom of pornography can be said to impinge on the dignity of all female adult humans.
In the German case, part of the argument against the legislation was that no goal could possibly justify the disrespect of a human being’s dignity. The Prosecution argued that the passengers were not to be treated as “mere objects of its rescue operation for the protection of others.”
In pornography, women are regularly depicted as exactly that, objects.
Unspeakable acts that are considered by international law to be methods of torture, such as waterboarding, are considered appropriate for use on females who appear in pornography. No thought is given to the message this sends to the millions of other women who may see or be exposed to this type of violent and degrading pornography. Nor is there any thought spared for the violation of human dignity these women and girls may suffer.
Furthermore, there is no consideration given to the serious societal harm pornography engenders, from the rise in bullying at school over sexting, where more young girls are feeling pressured to send naked images of themselves to male peers, to the increase in injuries women are suffering from being coerced by their (largely) male partners into degrading sex acts first seen in extreme pornography.
The German Case regarding the 9/11 legislation did not solely rest on the principle of human dignity to challenge the law, yet it did highlight an interesting point. The Court ruled that to use military weapons against aircraft containing civilians would never be permissible, but using them against a pilotless plane or a plane containing only hijackers was permissible.
One of the key reasons given as to why weapons could not be used against civilians was because the civilians could be said to have been “objectified” and could not change their fate, which meant using weapons against them would impinge on their dignity.
To use the Court’s own language, “the hijackers were not objectified” as they were able to change their course of action, therefore action against them would be permissible.
The passengers held to ransom however, were not able to choose.
Many women who actively take part in porn are not able to change their fate, whether due to economic circumstance, exploitative personal relationships, drug addiction, or criminal assault and coercion. It is not at all uncommon for girls and women to be held hostage and forced to participate in pornography that later appears on the internet or is live-streamed on cam.
Some women who feature on mainstream porn sites like Porn Hub will not even be women at all but trafficked or abused girl children, who are raped on cam for the amusement of all watching.
The defence of porn typically rests on the notion of consent, itself a false concept in a society which does not allow women to give their truly free consent to anything. Yet even if we were to assume all the performers participating in porn have given their free consent, the women who porn impacts, which is all women in our society, cannot and have not consented to the harms pornography engenders in society.
There can surely be no question that in the degrading pornography spreading like a virus throughout the present day internet, women are routinely objectified as par for the course. Women are regularly trussed up, bound, tortured, whipped, beaten, urinated upon, choked, bruised, slapped, punched, kicked and worse for the delectation of a mostly male audience.
A study conducted by a team of scholars at Princeton University entitled The Social Cost Of Pornography found men who were exposed to porn were more likely to support violence against women, and to believe that women enjoy being raped. It also found that men who watched porn regularly were more likely to be sexually aggressive in real life.
Not only is the violence this engenders contributing to a downright dangerous climate for women but porn has other noticeable effects on the female sex class that show up in culture. There is a notable rise in women being viewed as disposable objects for pleasure, an increasing demand on women to endure abusive sex acts, a lowering of respect for women’s bodily autonomy, and a spike in the shaming of women’s bodies when they fail to fit the porno ideal.
These effects impact on the entire female sex class, as they fundamentally impinge on as the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights states, women’s “inviolable human dignity”.
In Germany, one of the largest porn consumers and producers of extreme pornography, there might well be grounds for a test case against the pornographers who continue to flood the market with violent and degrading images of women.
There is already precedent in German law, but there might well be precedent elsewhere too, especially when one considers the set of criteria many scholars, doctors, lawyers, and academics sometimes use as a guideline to weigh up what might be ethically permissible, The Doctrine Of Double Effect. The Doctrine holds that in some contexts it is morally permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended consequence a bad effect that it would be morally wrong to bring about as a strictly intended consequence.
This may sound chock full of legalese and jargon but consider this.
This doctrine has previously been interpreted to rule against a person or body who foresees the negative impact to human dignity” and requires it to their benefit. Indeed, it was applied in this way when philosopher Warren Quinn considered two hypothetical cases, The Strategic Bomber versus The Terrorist Bomber.
In the case of The Strategic Bomber, a pilot blows up an munitions factory, foreseeing the deaths of those living in the vicinity as a consequence of his actions. He does not require the deaths of civilians, but they might come as a consequence of the action he must take.
In the case of The Terrorist Bomber, however, a terrorist kills innocent civilians to try and get a Government to submit to his will. Without their deaths he will not be as effective.
In the first instance, the actions of the Strategic Bomber could be deemed a permissible violation of human dignity, in the second they were not. The impermissibility of the second case rested on the fact it was necessary for the civilians to die, i.e. their dignity needed to be violated, for the terrorist to be effective. Those “being used are being used by someone to a purpose”, In porn, women’s degradation, their “objectification” is vital for the pornographers to turn a profit.
If women were not objectified, there would be no profit, therefore the pornographers do not merely profit from the objectification of women, they require women’s objectification.
This is but one way, the violation of women’s human dignity could be invoked to challenge the harmful, dignity impeding acts the pornographers commit. This could be challenged in the courts of law using the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights as a springboard for a possible case.
The core of the case against porn remains the same, no matter what country the law might be tested in. The fundamental violation of the inviolable dignity of human girls and women.
Since the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights stresses the importance of human dignity and since the document itself is such an important one in the drafting of all human rights legislation we enjoy in the modern era, it’s high time someone, or a body of someone's used it against the pornographers.
The harms caused by porn are immeasurable. From the degradation of intimacy between the sexes, to the injuries endured by those engaging in acts copied from extreme porn, to the rise of bullying in the playground, the erosion of body confidence in young girls, the spike in violent sexual assaults, and rapid climb in porn addiction, the areas where the slimy tentacles of porn reach are never-ending.
Overarching everything is the horrendous impact that porn has on the sex class of women. Porn lowers the status of women and girls in the eyes of society. That fundamentally impinges the human dignity of every woman and girl and it is for that reason it is mandatory one day the pornographers are called to a legal reckoning.
For women, for girls, and for the sake of our society, that day cannot come soon enough.
To learn more about the harmful effects of pornography visit www.fightthenewdrug.com
To join the organisation OBJECT’s campaign against porn in the UK visit www.objectnow.org
