Is This Another Porn Panic?

I see a new moral panic evolving all over something we all knew anyway! There is a report out saying the obvious: teens watch porn.

As they put in the panic: teens are exposed to erotica. Well, by exposed they mean actively go looking for it! This panic is so well established that search engine Bing will NOT allow you to look up the CNN article on teens watching porn. They falsely claim there are “no results.” It’s a news article, not a porn trilogy!

Media outlets are falsely claiming this is a“groundbreaking study” because it shows teens watch porn — like multiple other studies before it. Nothing new here, hell, even the panic has been done to death.

The report was done by some outfit called Common Sense whose CEO hypes it by calling the results “mind boggling.” I’m sorry his mind is boggled but really, where has he been for the last half century or so.

When I was a kid NO ONE talked about sex except the other boys at school. Honest questions to adults were ignored, if they didn’t get you in trouble for daring to ask. I remember all the boys — there were only boys in the school — were gathered into the auditorium as the principal expressed anger over how “pornography” was being found on campus. I had seen porn that others boys had I just didn’t know what it was called. So I sat through the lecture thinking it must be some sort of drugs and wondering who would do something like that.

I also learned very quickly how such denunciations are often rooted in projection. The principal had to be hospitalized for having inserted something in places where the sun “don’t shine” and not being able to get it out. The associate dean had no problem molesting kids, or raping them if they didn’t cooperate — and the school covered it up when he was caught. The coach was obsessed with watching boys shower after gym and insisted all swimming be done in the nude. What was going on between boys was widely known and far more civilized and non-coercive than what adults were doing. Yet they worried about the boys seeing erotica — and I should point out this was the 60s when we had to rely on print media.

Today’s panic is about the third or fourth I’ve seen since then.

One “treatment center” warned, “A study from 2014 estimated that nearly 70% of boys and 40% of girls have seen a pornographic image online by the age of 13. By 18 years old, these figures jump to 90% of boys and more than 60% of girls.” They warn “watch a ton of porn, your brain will change.” In other words, there is nothing path-breaking about the Common Sense report at all.

One teacher cited in the current panic demanded parents, schools, law enforcement, the local circus and random raccoons be involved in a concerted effort to prevent this. The Common Sense porn Pope demanded, “quite frankly, the industry has got to be held accountable for the fact that they are the gateway platforms for all of this pornography to young people.”

How uninformed is he? Records show teens are quite willing and able to produce erotica of their own with selfies and videos. The porn police are happy to arrest those teens, incarcerate them, have them listed as sex offenders for life — without revealing why they are “offenders” — and basically destroying their lives. It is truly a situation where the cure is 100 times worse than the problem.

While there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth the typical panic-monger never quite explains why there is a problem. I’ve heard “porn gives unrealistic portrayals” to viewers.

It does, so does the Bible, science fiction, comic books, and most Republicans.

I wrote about anti-gay activist Jennifer Morse and her crusades in 2011 for Huffington Post. She claimed most young people “are just drifting in the cultural soup of casual sex.

The problem is while teens have become more tolerant in general they have become more conservative in their personal behavior. Jenny’s generation was far more sexually active than those generations coming after them. The Centers for Disease Control reported in 2010, “The percent sexually experienced has, however, declined steadily since 1988, when it was 51%. (This was a statistically significant decline.)” Ten years later they reported that trend continued: “The percentage of teenagers who have ever had sexual intercourse declined between 1988 and 2017, paralleling the declines in the teen birth and pregnancy rates.”

Some 27 years ago I debated an evangelical politician, Horace van Rensburg, on national television in South Africa. He was obsessed claiming anyone who owned erotica would be raping and sodomizing — he always said the two in unison — two-year-olds.

He claimed he had evidence that erotica was responsible for every social ill along the way and then continually failed to produce it. The wannabe censors insisted a plethora of perversions were just around the corner unless we criminalized erotica and locked up anyone who owns or views it.

Note: You can read my testimony before the South African Parliament on censorship here.

In the 70's a federal Commission on Obscenity and Pornography looking at the panic claims of the day concluded: “Empirical research designed to clairify the question has found no reliable evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of deliquent or criminal sexual behavior among youths or adults.”

Robert Geiser, in Hidden Victims, said the evidence indicated erotica, as opposed to encouraging predatory or violent sexuality “serves as a release value for many people, reducing the tendency to act out.” He wrote:

The availability of explicit sexual materials has lead to a decrease in the incidence of sexual crimes of all types. Of particular interst is the that fact that offenses against children in Denmark also dropped sharply. The 1969 figure was only 42.6 percent of the 1958–1969 average of these crimes. This was during a time when porno was widely available in Denmark, and the year that the obscenity statute was formally repealed. Free access to pornography appeared to be related to a reduction in sex crimes.

It is absolutely true porn has become more accessible and you can find plenty of it free of charge — solving the problem teens had when I was a kid where they had it to steal it from a parent, shoplift at the local newsstand, or stumble upon it accidentally. Like so many other things in a “consumerist” society erotica has become more abundant and virtually free. It is now a cottage industry with individuals and couples selling erotic images on line. So what has happened as erotica has become more abundant from the 60s on?

Outside the confines of the Southern Baptist Convention there was no epidemic of molestations, rapes and assaults.

The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network reported that sexual violence is down by more that 50% since the 90s. The Justice Department reported in 2015 that data showed sexual assaults “substantially declined over the past 10 to 20 years.”

According to the FBI, the number of forcible rapes reported to the police fell 14 percent between 1990 and 2009, from 102,555 to 88,097. The number of rapes reported to police per 100,000 U.S. residents also fell during that time (from 41.1 to 28.7), a decline of 30 percent (FBI, 2009). Data on sexual assault victimization surveys follow a similar pattern. According to NCVS, the number of rape/sexual assault victimizations for those aged 12 and older in the United States fell by more than 30 percent between 2002 and 2011, dropping from 349,810 to 243,800 over the nine-year period. Overall, the estimated number of rape/sexual assault victimizations fell by more than one-third in 2011 (from about 383,000 in 1990 to 243,800) (Rennison, 2000; Truman & Planty, 2012). It should be noted that the number of rape/sexual assault victimizations increased to 300,170 in 2013, and then decreased by 5.3 percent to 284,350 in 2014 (Truman & Langton, 2015). Finally, data from NCANDS indicate that substantiated cases of child sexual assault in the United States have also fallen in recent years, dropping by 53 percent between 1992 and 2006 (Finkelhor, Hammer & Sedlak, 2008).

During the waves of porn panics in the 60 through to today, predictions of dire consequences have always been present but during that same period actual data showed a decline in the number of consequences predicted. As is normal rates of offending fluctuate but the general trend has been downward even as porn became more available.

SUPPORT THIS PAGE AT PATREON

Your support to fund these columns is important, visit our page at Patreon.

Follow our daily comments at Twitter. If you wish to subscribe, free of charge, to this page you can have all new essays emailed to you. Just sign up here. If you wish to leave a one time tip see the link below.