by Marty Klein
The introduction of broadband Internet porn into American homes created what scientists call a “natural experiment.” This is the rare chance to empirically observe and study the effects of a specific intervention on a group of people selected by circumstances—the equivalent of being selected at random, making the results very, very informative.
To make it even more interesting, this natural experiment has been replicated in many other countries—with virtually identical results to America’s.
So what would happen if America were flooded with free, high-quality pornography?
Now we know. So rather than speculate, we can examine the actual results. By doing so, we could learn quite a bit about human beings, sexuality, and other things. This book is about America’s refusal to do so—and precisely how this refusal to look at the facts about pornography is hurting marriages, families, kids, and individuals.
We’ll also look at the social and political forces at play here. Exactly who has driven this rejection of the facts? As it turns out, there’s a lot of money and power to be gained from scaring the hell out of Americans about sexuality in general, and pornography in particular.
* * *
For thousands of years—from pottery to Gutenberg, from rubber to nylon1—every new technology has been adapted to sexual purposes. This provokes even more anxiety about the strange new technology, and so these cycles of technological innovation and sexual adaptation are almost always followed by public outrage and fear.
In 1844, for example, Charles Goodyear patented a process for vulcanizing rubber. A few years later the first rubber condoms were produced, and a few years after that, Congress criminalized the mailing of condoms and of condom advertising. They were even condemned by Elizabeth Blackwell, America’s first female physician, who predicted they would increase prostitution.
A few years after that, new printing technologies led to a dramatic drop in the price (and therefore to a dramatic increase in availability) of low-brow novels; with the slogan “Would you want your servant or wife reading this?” proper urbanites tried to get the books banned or limited.2 In the 1920s, the mass spread of cinema soon led to heretofore hidden stories with sexual themes (like prostitution, infidelity, and rape), followed by predictions of moral and sexual disaster that led to the repressive Production Code, under which American movies (and movie-goers) were censored until 1968.
Each time, the outcry generally subsides, and in retrospect usually seems quaint and overblown. If the fear is later vindicated (the birth control pill did lead to an increase in non-marital sex), change is ultimately called “inevitable,” and eventually dismissed as “progress.”
In our own lifetimes we’ve seen the demonization of then-new erotic commodities and services such as adult bookstores, hotel room porn rentals, thong swimsuits, swingers’ clubs, mass-marketed sex toys, and sexting. You might be surprised at how many of these are still criminalized in some states—despite the fact that millions of ordinary people use them regularly. I’ve testified in several court cases related to these, including the case that attempted to decriminalize the sale of sex toys in Alabama (which failed—it’s still illegal).
The pornography industry’s early adoption and promotion of the Internet is just the latest example of this 2,000-year-long historical trend. In fact, most people don’t realize that it was the pornography industry that built the Internet. The high download speeds, clear resolution, shopping capacity, and synchronized audio-and-video that we take for granted were all pioneered by the pornography industry. Think of that the next time you shop on Amazon for Grandma’s birthday gift.
Like all previous technology/sex developments, the public has responded to pornography’s development and use of the Internet with massive anxiety and resentment.3 I now see that concern every week in my therapy office, as spouses, parents, and porn consumers struggle with a dreadful sense that technology has unleashed yet more opportunities for unpredictable, uncontrollable sexual behavior.
The Internet has had a transformative effect on the viewing of pornography. Instead of sullenly trudging to a dingy downtown theater, or being embarrassed at a neighborhood video rental store, people can now consume porn in complete privacy—not only from strangers and neighbors, but even within their own home. And they can do so whenever they like, without having to purchase or rent something in advance.
However the lack of privacy (and availability) limited porn-watching in the past, the Internet has blown those limits away. Now people can watch as much as they like, whenever they like, choosing whatever niche genres they want. This radically enhanced availability is a much bigger change than the fact that porn depictions are now more varied and intense than they were before the Internet.
The result of super-availability? Huge numbers of men watch. More women watch than ever before. Teens and pre-teens watch—on their smartphones. People watch at work, even (or especially) when their workplace is the military.4 A few people now watch in public—on airplanes, in libraries, and in moving cars. Scientists in Montreal recently tried to do a study of porn consumption using a control group—but they couldn’t find enough college-age men who had never looked at porn.5
Some might surmise that all this porn was welcomed as a great addition to Americans’ sexual expression. But all this broadband porn was not dropped into a society eagerly waiting for it. Or ready for it. In fact, it was dropped into a society that had significant difficulties regarding sexuality. One could have easily predicted that it would have an explosive, and not entirely welcome, impact.
PART I
Context
Chapter One
PORN EXPLODES INTO AMERICA’S HOMES—WHERE PEOPLE ARE VERY, VERY UNPREPARED
In and before the 1950s, pornography had historically been attacked as “immoral.” During the Cold War years, some members of Congress even declared it was part of a Communist plot to weaken the character of America’s youth and husbands.1
Religious figures like Billy Graham and Fulton Sheen had enormous national followings, enjoying regular audiences with sitting presidents. Their portfolio was protecting America’s morals, and pornography was a key battleground.
This immorality crusade defined pornography as broadly as possible; in 1956, for example, the influential Legion of Decency condemned the film Baby Doll (“a steamy tale of two Southern rivals and a sensuous virgin”) for its “carnal suggestiveness.” Francis Cardinal Spellman denounced the film from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral before it opened, saying it had been “responsibly judged to be evil in concept” and would “exert an immoral and corrupting influence on those who see it”; he called for all Catholics to refrain from seeing the film “under pain of sin.” And this was a high-concept film, written by Tennessee Williams, directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Karl Malden.
But morals change; even more important, the role of morals changes as well. In the 1960s, recreational drugs, rock music, and films imported from Europe, along with the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, challenged the landscape of American morality. The birth control pill changed the definition of what “good” girls do. A president was eventually impeached as madly lustful—although not convicted.
Political battles about abortion raged, with anti-choice activists justifying the eventual murder of 11 physicians and other clinic personnel (and the attempted murder of 26 others2) as moral. A battle also raged about an alleged “homosexual agenda,”3 and whether “morality” precluded or required withholding a variety of common rights (family hospital visits, tax breaks, adoption, etc.) from gay people.
Planes were hijacked and flown into American buildings, and a new kind of “them” enacted their morality by targeting American lives in Boston, Chattanooga, and elsewhere. Catholic priests—seen by millions as the last bastion of rock-solid, old-fashioned morality—were exposed as having coerced thousands of children into sexual activity.4
Finally, in 2003, the Supreme Court decided Lawrence v. Texas.5 In addition to d
ecriminalizing same-gender sexual behavior, the majority wrote that an alleged majoritarian morality was not a sufficient basis for a law regulating private behavior.6 The Court had turned 180 degrees in only 17 years, when it had ruled that morality was a legitimate basis for depriving citizens of their rights to privacy and sexual choices in their own homes.7 Clearly, the place of “morality” in American public life—however “morality” was defined—had changed forever.
People and organizations attempting to control American sexual expression, used to doing it through the time-honored vehicle of promoting “morality” and preventing “immorality,” were stuck. To maintain their political power, social prestige, and financial standing, what were they to do?
* * *
Recall that before broadband Internet became freely available in 2000, pornography was only semi-legal. Playboy and Penthouse could not be openly displayed in many outlets, such as 7-Elevens; adult bookstores operated in a twilight zone, just one zealous prosecutor away from financially ruinous arrests and years of imprisonment.8 Sending “obscene” videos through the mail was illegal, and if a prosecutor could simply find 12 jurors willing to say a video was worthless trash, its makers and marketers lost all protection of the First Amendment. I have testified in such cases as an expert witness, looking on helplessly when defendants were jailed.
Although millions of people were using adult porn on the eve of broadband’s introduction, the federal government had spent decades pursuing, prosecuting, and jailing Americans for creating adult porn or for selling it to other adults.
The high point of this campaign was when born-again Christian President George W. Bush directed the Department of Justice to create a new task force to go after those in the adult pornography industry. For such victimless crimes, hundreds of people languished in jail for many years.
If we understand what happened when broadband Internet brought porn into everyone’s home less than 20 years ago, it’s easier to understand why we’re at such a complete standstill in our ability to deal with it now—and why there’s so much anxiety, resentment, secrecy, and confusion about porn today.
DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
By definition, no society is ever ready for disruptive technologies, and the environment into which an innovation arrives shapes the way it will be received. (Of course, history doesn’t say much about innovations that don’t get accepted, and simply die quietly—you know, like cashmere dental floss.)
For example, when photography was invented around the time of the Civil War, most soldiers were away from home for the very first time. Similarly, most wives were without their husbands for the first time. Women used the new technology to create and send erotic postcards to encourage their sweethearts to be careful (so they would return), which men treasured while trying to survive an overwhelming new kind of industrialized slaughter.9
A century later, the birth control pill arrived at a time of great social ferment, when sexual mores were changing and college dorm rules were being liberalized. In 1968, I myself lived in one of America’s first co-ed dorms, at one of the first universities whose health service dispensed these magic pills that suddenly made sex a lot safer.
The social context into which broadband pornography entered tens of millions of American homes in the first years of the 21st century? The United States was an enormous tangle of sex problems. If it had been a person, it would have needed medication; if it had been a couple, it would have required marriage counseling; if it had been a teenager, it would have been grounded, sent to its room without dessert.
But it was a country. And this country had an array of sex problems bigger than Seinfeld’s George at his most neurotic:
School sex education was driven by the abstinence model—its federally mandated goal was preventing kids from having sex, not educating them about it, or teaching them how to make good decisions about it. Congress specifically refused to require that sex education be medically accurate. The policy, not surprisingly, was a dismal failure.10
The country was reeling from a frightening HIV/AIDS epidemic. Often treated as a disease caused by promiscuity or perversion rather than by a virus, many religious and political leaders said HIV proved that sex is dangerous. Many communities such as the Catholic Church simply refused to discuss it, or to discuss prevention strategies involving condoms.11
Congress and Presidents Bush I and Clinton had been trying to censor the Internet since its commercialization in the 1990s; states including New York, Michigan, and Arizona tried, but were defeated in federal court. The reaction to the scary new Internet included calls for mandatory filters on computers in libraries, schools, airports, universities, state offices, and elsewhere.
For example, students and staff using University of Arkansas computers cannot access my website because of automatic filtering software. The reason is presumably because the content is about sexuality. I say “presumably” because filtering software is proprietary; even when the public pays for it, companies are under no obligation to reveal what’s in it, or how it works, or how users are protected from arbitrary or political decisions made by the filtering companies.12
America had the highest rate of unintended pregnancy in the industrialized world. This was especially true of teenagers.
By many accounts, America was the land of sexual dissatisfaction. Books, TV shows, and magazines continually documented Americans’ low rates of marital sex and sexual satisfaction. At the same time, half of marriages experienced infidelity.
As the most religious country in the industrialized world, there were many taboos against talking about sex honestly, or even acknowledging one’s true sexuality to oneself. Most organized religion was actively encouraging people to feel guilty about their sexuality—their desires, arousal patterns, preferences, fantasies. The Catholic Church had reaffirmed its opposition to all effective methods of contraception. Mainstream Christianity led the opposition to effective sex education. It still presented premarital virginity as an ideal for all women—demanding that millions of women second-guess their own sexual decision-making.
The disease of “sex addiction” had been invented 15 years prior. Despite its lack of recognition by professional organizations like the American Psychiatric Association, it was accepted as a legitimate disease by much of the lay public, religious leaders, and moral entrepreneurs. Well-known celebrity sex addicts like Michael Douglas were popular in the news, and media “therapists” like TV’s Dr. Phil and radio’s Dr. Laura shamed them—and their audiences.
Fear of homosexuality had reached a boiling point. President Bill Clinton had recently signed the Defense of Marriage Act, putting the federal government’s full weight into the battle to prevent gays from supposedly destroying heterosexual marriage. At the very same time, gay people were being dishonorably discharged from the military every month, for fear that they would use shower time to seduce straight soldiers (recorded instances of this: 0).
President Bill Clinton was impeached—impeached!—for perjury and obstruction of justice related to his sexual indiscretions (a trial that was arguably America’s first reality show). The impeachment failed, despite Independent Prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s 1998 investigation. The Starr Report mentioned oral sex exactly 92 times, a phrase that everyone in America soon had on their lips—usually with a perfectly American blend of disdain and titillation.13
In short, when broadband brought unlimited free, high-quality pornography to America, the country was obsessed with sex—both with controlling it, and, ironically, with experiencing it in various forms (for example, via voyeurism, sex work, porn, and infidelity). And here was a new technology that facilitated virtual sexual experiences with few limits. Depending on one’s perspective, it was either a dream or a nightmare—the classic American agonized struggle over sexuality.
Introducing the option of unlimited, free, high-quality, highly varied pornography into this volatile mix of ignorance, fear, anger, sexual dissatisfaction, curiosity, and sexual craving
s led to some absolutely predictable results. These included:
Tens of millions of people used porn the second it was easy.
Many people got overinvolved with it—and couldn’t speak with anyone about this. Most recovered and stabilized their viewing, the same way that most people eventually recover from HBO bingeing after they get accustomed to having access to so many great shows. A small number of people continue watching in unhealthy amounts or in unhealthy ways.
Because porn use was pathologized (and porn was demonized), lots of reasonable consumers felt isolated, ashamed, and confused. Whatever the impact of porn-watching on consumers, the impact of this marginalization is larger.
Few couples had the communication skills they needed to deal with hurt or conflict about porn. To avoid this, many consumers hid or lied about their porn use, which had worse effects on their relationship than the porn use itself.
Most parents refused to talk with their kids about it. Kids certainly weren’t going to bring it up, so kids were left to deal with this on their own.
Lacking both sex education and adult discussions of sex, young people turned hungrily to porn to learn about sex. Consuming an adult product without adult guidance, many young people became confused about their experience. Much of what they thought they learned was inaccurate.
Almost overnight, couples and families found themselves dealing with anxiety or conflict about pornography. As both people and their devices became more creative, usage increased; within months of broadband’s introducing porn into every home, new patients came to my office focused on problems with porn. Similarly, the therapists I trained were suddenly clamoring for advice on how to deal with the porn-related problems they were seeing.
