For some time now, the media has been noting an increased societal concern about the overwhelming amount of porn available and being distributed in Canada.
At one point, while working as a law student, I had to do research on sentencing in Canada for child pornography. It was both an eye-opener and horrifying. Just reading several judgments that summarized the facts of the abuse or the pornographic materials seized was disturbing. It took some time to get the descriptions out of my mind.
Yesterday, the National Post published an excellent excerpt from Chris Hedge’s new book, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. This book is now on my “must read” list. Here are a few sections of the excerpt that caught my attention:
The Pink Cross booth has a table of anti-porn tracts and is set up in the far corner of the Sands Expo convention centre in Las Vegas. It is an unlikely participant at the annual Adult Video News (AVN) expo. Pink Cross is a Christian outreach program for women in the porn industry, run by ex-porn star Shelley Lubben.
[…]
“I was addicted to porn for two years,” says Scott Smith, 29, from Cleveland, Tenn., who is at the Pink Cross booth. He first watched Internet porn as a college student.
“I started out once a day, usually at night, when my roommate wasn’t there,” Smith says. “You try and hide it. Then I started watching it several times a day. I would only watch it long enough to masturbate. I never got why they make these long features since I would always turn it off when I was done.”
Smith says the images crippled his ability to be intimate. He could not distinguish between the fantasy of porn and the reality of relationships. “Porn messes with the way you think of women,” he says. “You want the women you are with to be like the women in porn. I was scared to get involved in a relationship. I did not know how extensive the damage was. I did not want to hurt anyone. I kept away from women.”
[…]
As she talks of her career in porn, her eyes take on a dead, faraway look. Her breathing becomes more rapid. She slips into a flat, numbing monotone. The symptoms are ones I know well from interviewing victims of atrocities in war who battle posttraumatic stress disorder.
“What you are describing is trauma,” I say.
“Yes,” she answers quietly.
Want to know more?
UPDATE:
Charles Lewis on the link between child and adult (over 18) porn:
The pornography industry is a vacuum that sucks up the youngest looking models, who meet the minimum legal requirement of being 18 years old. There is also the constant demand in pornography for a new crop of young actresses. Think about what that means: The industry wants recruits who are at least 18 but can give off the impression of being a sophisticated 15-year-old or 14-year-old.
[…]
But perhaps it is time to think about why so many people are willing to watch a young adult burn up her youth for the sexual pleasure of others. Maybe tucked inside that adult film are more than a few 16-year-old models, children according to the law, who faked their way in with phony IDs.