Last Month's ERWA column

ALL WORKED UP ABOUT THE PORN MENACE
By J.T. Benjamin
Copr. 2006

Not even they knew how bad it truly is.

Pornography is one of the favorite bug-a-boos of the
Holy Terrors. Porn, they argue, is a “cancerous
infection” which corrodes family relationships, leads
to sexual addictions, and desensitizes and corrupts
sexuality itself.

One of the most insidious things about porn is how
it’s so pervasive. Nobody is safe from exposure and
corruption.

ChristiaNet.com, which calls itself the world’s most
visited Christian portal, last month announced the
results of a survey the website conducted in
partnership with Second Glance Ministries. According
to ChristiaNet’s news release “no one is immunized against the vice-grip clutches of
sexual addictive behaviors. The people who struggle
with the repeated pursuit of sexual gratification
include church members, deacons, staff, and yes, even
clergy. And, to the surprise of many, a large number
of women in the church have become victim to this
widespread problem.”

‘The poll results indicate that 50% of all Christian
men and 20% of all Christian women are addicted to
pornography,’ said Clay Jones, founder and President
of Second Glance Ministries…60% of the women who
answered the survey admitted to having significant
struggles with lust, 40% admitted to being involved in
sexual sin in the past year, and 20% of the
church-going female participants struggle with looking
at pornography on an ongoing basis.”

No wonder the Holy Terrors are up in arms. If this
many true believers are in the sway of porn’s
insidious clutches, we must be in the grip of a porn
pandemic.

But wait a minute. Don’t saddle up the Four Horsemen
just yet.

A closer look at the press release reveals the study
and its conclusions may not be all they’re cracked up
to be. In the first place, it appears no attempt was
made to ensure that the survey’s participants were a
random sampling, either of evangelicals or even of
visitors to the website. Visitors to the website were
invited to participate, and if they had five minutes
to kill, they did it. That makes the survey about as
scientific as a Ouija board.

Secondly, the survey consisted only of eleven
questions. The conclusions that ChristiaNet and
Second Glance Ministries drew from the answers
are….creative.

Question #7: Is looking at pornography a sin in God’s
eyes? Of 970 surveyed, 901 said yes. No surprise.
Question #8: Have you ever struggled with
pornography? 100 women said “yes” of 507 questioned,
and 229 men of 463 questioned also said “yes.” By
answering “yes,” the survey-takers were concluded to
be addicted to pornography, according to ChristiaNet
and Second Glance Ministries. No questions about how
much money was spent annually on porn, no questions
about how many times a week a participant looked at
porn, nothing.

But wait. It gets better.

Question #3. Is masturbation a sin in God’s eyes?
744 of 970 participants (male and female) said yes.
Question #4: Is masturbation a part of your life?
127 women of 507 surveyed said “yes,” and 190 men of
463 surveyed said, “yes.” (One of the things this
response told me is that 273 of the men surveyed were
lying on this question).

Then we get to Question #6. “Have you ever taken part
in a sexual activity that is sin?” 263 women, more
than half, and 304 men, about two thirds, answered
“yes” to that question. Sounds like most of those
polled have serious problems, right? Hide your
daughters and your barnyard animals, America.

But wait a minute. The overwhelming majority of those
polled consider masturbation and pornography to be a
sin, so it’s possible that simply jacking (or jilling)
off to a dirty magazine is all it takes to condemn all
these people to Hell, right?

Right?

The ultimate point of ChristiaNet’s dingy little rest
stop on the information superhighway is to drive home
one all-pervading, familiar theme.

Pornography is bad.

Never mind all the evidence to the contrary.

From the time the first Cro-magnon man painted
something on the walls of the cave and the first
Cro-magnon self-appointed moral arbiter looked over
his shoulder and said, “Hey! Those look like boobs,”
the Powers That Be have been trying to abolish porn as
the cause of all evil in the world.

And yet, despite their efforts, the evidence that porn
is actually harmful is surprisingly slim.

In 1970, the “Nixon” Commission, first appointed by
Lyndon Johnson and then carried on by the Nixon
Administration, announced the results of a two-year
study of the possible harmful effects of pornography.
The commission’s conclusion? "In sum, empirical
research designed to clarify the question has found no
evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual
materials plays a significant role in the causation of
delinquent or criminal behavior among youth or adults.
The Commission cannot conclude that exposure to erotic
materials is a factor in the causation of sex crime or
sex delinquency (pp. 27)."

As soon as the report came out, President Nixon
denounced its findings and launched plans to crack
down on the immoral scourge.

Sixteen years later, President Ronald Reagan put
together another commission on pornography, dubbed the
“Meese Commission,” after then-Attorney General Edwin
Meese, who chaired it. Six of the commission’s eleven
members had been known as anti-porn advocates. The
best thing that can be said about the commission is
that they knew which side their bread was buttered on.
According to the Meese Commission, exposure to
pornographic images had a clear causal relationship to
sexual violence. What made the Meese Commission’s
scientific conclusions so profound is that the
Commission drew those conclusions without eliciting
scientific testimony or examining scientific evidence.
They might as well have surveyed people on an
internet website.

So, despite all the political spinning of wheels, what
adverse effects might porn generate? In 1995, Berl
Kuchinsky of the University of Copenhagen published
the results of his study of the effects of pornography
on the crime rates of four industrialized nations.
Three of those nations had liberal laws regarding
access to porn, and the fourth was the United States.

Dr. Kuchinsky’s findings are startling. In the three nations with liberal
porn laws, the Federal Republic of Germany, Denmark,
and Sweden, after ruling out all other potential
factors, over time there were dramatic DECREASES in
the rates of sex crimes over the course of more than
two deceades. In the U.S., with relatively strict
anti-porn laws, the rate of sex crimes was
substantially higher.

Similar conclusions were drawn by comparing the
porn-and-sex-crime rates between the U.S. and Japan, a
nation known for easy access to extremely graphic and
sometimes cruelly misogynistic porn.
Just for kicks, I “googled” the terms “pornography”
and “harmful effects” and got more than two and a half
million hits. I reviewed some of the available online
literature, being as carefully scientific as
ChristiaNet’s survey had been.

My conclusion? The evidence of porn’s harmful effects
appears to be virtually entirely anecdotal. People
tell stories about how porn ruined their lives, and
the stories are accepted as valid evidence.

Okay, I can play that game. My own conclusions?
After having spent most of my adult life watching,
reviewing, critiquing and studying porn, not to
mention sharing it with my Lovely Wife, it’s turned us
both into adventurous, enthusiastic, passionate,
slightly kinky sex-crazed maniacs.

But I consider that a good thing.

Yay, porn!