You've probably heard the old joke about masturbation: "Studies show that 95 percent of men do it and 5 percent lie." If you are alive and at all conscious of the spirit of the times, I think you will agree with me that these statistics can be applied to Internet pornography as well. Almost everyone in college has looked at it -- or made looking at it into something of a habit. Porn is as common and frequently consumed as peanut butter and jelly. Yet, despite its ubiquity, there is something extremely disturbing about the kind of pornography found on the Internet.
The age of female porn stars is frequently touted as "barely legal." Pornographers are eager to make one aware that the subject of a particular video has just turned 18. In some cases, filmmakers make the claim that, if their video had been filmed the day before, it would have been highly illegal. The younger the subject of the pornography, the more she is supposed to possess some sort of allure. This is deeply creepy, and goes straight to the perverse heart of one of the greatest problems with the Internet: the burgeoning child porn industry, and the despicable sexualization of children in general.
I do not object to topless Playboy pictures (rather tame by today's standards), but on the Internet, hardcore pornography is a slippery slope into a rank cesspool. Yet even hardcore pornography, accessible to one and all on the Internet, only hints at the depraved depths lying in secret beneath. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children estimates that 20 percent of all pornography on the Internet (most of it being traded in secret) involves children. The NCMEC received 21,603 reports of child pornography in 2001, and 106,176 reports in 2004 -- a 491-percent increase.
When your typical college student sits down to enjoy a hardcore video, he probably doesn't think that he is, in some way, facilitating the work of the pedophiles and child-pornographers who abuse children in horrific ways. However, I believe that when someone looks at pornography depicting teenage girls (in however legal a sexual situation), it ultimately plays into the hands of those who are exploiting children.
I read about the prior histories of porn stars and found that many of them suffered from sexual abuse in their childhoods. Famed porn stars Jenna Jameson and Traci Lords are two examples of this trend. Jameson was brutally gang-raped, beaten and left for dead as a teenager, while Lords was raped in high school and repeatedly molested by one of her mother's boyfriends -- she was also only 15 when she appeared in her first porn film. In an article written for Rolling Stone, a male porn star, Ian Gittler, estimated that all of the women he knew who were working in pornography were sexually abused as children. So much of the porn on the Internet comes directly out of these childhood experiences of great suffering and pain.
When someone watches pornography -- thereby providing a demand for it -- they might think that they are not supporting the exploitation of women, or at least that their actions don't have consequences. But who can guarantee that the teenage girls on the screen are really 18? Who has certified this? What of the many amateur videos made at home and easily found on the Internet? And, when the women are technically over 18, so what? Does this make such a difference? If it was exploitation the day before her 18th birthday, is it not exploitation the day after?
Sexual desire is the most difficult thing, I think, for the vast majority of us to keep in check. But there is no need to use the degrading experiences of hardcore pornography to satisfy these urges. Many of the women involved in porn come from horrifying backgrounds, and were, at one point, missing and exploited children. And so they have become missing and exploited adults -- missing in the sense that they lost their chance at a normal childhood, and hence at having a normal adulthood.
The vogue argument that pornography "empowers" sex workers is pure ivory-tower nonsense. Porn merely channels women into lives of humiliation and shame, tossed around in our thoughtless search for pleasure and amusement. We should ask ourselves: "Where is the person behind the porn star? What forces caused them to appear on this screen, in this place, at this moment?" Once these question are answered, I believe that no one will, in good conscience, be able to view hardcore pornography.
