What Harm Does Pornography Do?

When I arrived in Norway in 1980 I was shocked by the publicly omnipresent salacious and pornographic images. They were everywhere: billboards, magazines, posters, newspapers, storefronts, and TV. Even government sponsored media included such images. Public nudity was quite common. Many Norwegians chuckled at us “prudish Americans,” but others quietly agreed that public acceptance of pornography was out of control.

Mark Kasselman made headlines a couple of years ago with his book the Drug of the New Millennium, ISBN 1-930980-63-9, 2001 (no longer in print). He documented the huge increase in pornography addiction and demonstrated how this addiction causes chemical changes in the brain even more profound than cocaine abuse. He showed how addiction to porn destroys an individual’s ability to enjoy normal (especially intimate) human relationships.

Some took Kasselman’s book to be too alarmist and felt that his prognostications of societal devastation were overblown. I mean, if Western Europe hasn’t gone into the tank yet after they have had blatant public porn for decades, why should we think that the U.S. will go down the tube?

Are we so sure that Europe hasn’t gone down the tube or isn’t rapidly on its way there? Before making such blanket statements maybe we should see what is actually going on.

Researcher Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution has painstakingly documented the decline of the family in Western Europe, with specific emphasis on the Netherlands and Scandinavia. His masterful 2004 paper entitled the End of Marriage in Scandinavia documented the skyrocketing trends in unmarried cohabitation, homosexual relationships, and family dissolution. Within a generation the majority of children in Scandinavia will not live with both of their biological parents.

Moreover, European birthrates have declined to the point that the only way to maintain infrastructure is to import guest workers, mostly from Islamic populations. The result has been communities harboring terrorist cells and a dramatic increase in hate crimes against non-Islamists, especially Jews. At current rates Western Europe will be more than 50% Islamic within two generations. The positive and negative aspects of this shift remain to be seen.

The more porn has become accepted in Europe the more intimate relationships have dissolved. Has widespread public acceptance of porn played a role in the destruction of the family in Europe, or are liberal porn attitudes a symptom of a broader problem? That’s a difficult chicken-before-the-egg question. Regardless, it is clear that these perverted attitudes and polices have not been good.

What about the U.S.? Tawdry stuff that would only have been available inside a brown paper wrapper when I was young is now readily viewable by any child on TV just about any time of day. The more raw stuff, the junk that used to be available only from back alley adult shops, is now available 24x7 via the Internet without leaving the comfort of home.

An increasing number of women are becoming pornographers, with the result that more content is being tailored to attract females. Female addiction rates are increasing faster than male addiction rates. Purveyors of this mental sewage stand in feigned nobility behind the free speech provision of the First Amendment, and our judges side with them while working to ban the mention of God from pubic discourse.

We need to attack pornography on two levels. First we need to attack it in our homes. Second we need to attack it through public policy. I’ll offer some suggestions in a future article.