by Marty Klein
Psychologists, physicians, and pastoral counselors were unprepared to deal with the enormous volume of porn use.
Within this chaotic, anxious environment, no politician or civic leader was willing to suggest a rational, fact-based public policy discussion. The result was a set of laws and policies that still damage Americans—for example, by criminalizing teen sexting.
Yes, introducing an enormous new range of sexual options into an environment of fear, anxiety, shame, and ignorance led to a huge psychological, cultural, and political mess. And while consumers and non-consumers dealt with it in their own personal ways, moral entrepreneurs promoted a damaging moral panic—a PornPanic—that was absolutely predictable.
That mess—that PornPanic—is still with us, stronger than ever. It drives public policy, influences parenting, supplies the media’s narratives, and encourages millions of marital quarrels every year. That’s why understanding it matters.
Chapter Two
MORAL PANICS, SEX PANICS, AND PORNPANIC
Today’s PornPanic is part of a long, troubling American tradition of moral panics about sexuality. Like clockwork, every few years we can see the public’s ongoing sexual obsession with degeneracy, pollution, profligacy, debauchery, and inversions of social order.1
For starters, what are moral panics?
Moral panics are symbolic crusades against artificial threats inflated by the media and other public figures. They are a response to perceived threats to social order and to future generations (like the panic over the “homosexual agenda”). Moral entrepreneurs whip up fear and outrage disproportionate to any actual danger, with lurid stories of depravity and innocent victimhood (like the 2015 panic over the videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood “harvesting” fetus parts). The result is a volatile emotional climate in which people energize into constituencies united to defeat a common social threat (the way anti-porn feminists are now working with the anti-women’s-rights religious right). Facts and logic become incidental to the “real” story of deviance, conspiracy, or betrayal (as with today’s anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists), and anyone challenging the crowd’s panic response is punished publicly (as with scathing attacks on lifelong gender rights activists Dan Savage and Germaine Greer, for not being sufficiently “transgender-friendly”).
“Moral panics,” says social psychologist Gil Herdt, “are the natural disasters of human society, like tsunamis and hurricanes. They present a crisis … that threatens the well-being of individuals and communities.”2
An example of a moral panic is the 1950s hysteria about the damaging effects of comic books on children. In Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, his amateurish “research” concluded that comic books led to antisocial behavior among young readers.3 His solution? Make them illegal for kids under 15. In response, parents dragged their children to public burnings of comic books; censorship and other restrictions gutted the comics industry, while the Senate convened hearings about juvenile delinquency and comic books.4 Fearing government suppression, the industry created the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which enforced “modest” dress codes on characters; enforced bans on words like zombie and on characters like vampires; and insisted that police had to be portrayed positively, and divorce negatively.
Other contemporary moral panics include the marijuana scare of the 1960s (“reefer madness”); the persistent rumors of snuff films in the 1970s following the gruesome Charles Manson murders; the backward masking scare (that playing rock albums backwards would yield messages encouraging devil worship) in the early 1980s; the Dungeons & Dragons scare soon after, as evangelical Christians claimed role-playing games led to suicide or mental illness; and today’s anti-vaccination movement, which claims childhood vaccinations cause autism, regardless of nearly unanimous scientific opinion to the contrary.
Let’s look back over the last one-and-a-half centuries of sexually-oriented moral panics.
Only a few years ago, gay people were ostracized as mentally ill, predatory, and profoundly Other. They were blamed for AIDS (for example, by the Westboro Baptist Church) and for undermining heterosexual marriage (remember state after state passing Defense of Marriage legislation?). As would-be presidential candidate Michele Bachmann put it in 2014 and again in 2015, gays “want to abolish age of consent laws, so adults could freely prey on little children.”5,6
A decade before that, America went through convulsions about children at risk of being kidnapped, raped, and killed (exceedingly rare, according to the FBI)7; in response, Congress passed Megan’s Law in 1996, which created the world’s largest database of registered sex offenders, whose definition expands every year.8
Before that, Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders had commented that teaching students about masturbation was acceptable in school sex education; by the time her opponents finished indoctrinating the media, her comments were reported as “young children should be taught how to masturbate,” for which she quickly lost her job.
Before that, it was a panic about satanic ritual abuse, a supposed conspiracy that kidnapped children for black magic ceremonies, prostitution, pornography, forced incest, and rape.
Before that, it was the new rock ‘n’ roll music; frightened communities lit bonfires of records, “suggestive” songs were banned from radio, and Ed Sullivan censored Elvis Presley’s historic live television appearance from the waist down.9 Before that, it was the first publication of Kinsey’s data on human sexual behavior,10 which was accused of promoting moral depravity.
Before that, Congress held hearings about the sexual dangers posed by comic books, and before that, people feared the sexual seditiousness of the new medium of radio. Before that, people feared Irish, Italian, and other (mostly Catholic and Jewish) immigrant groups’ irrational, barely-controlled lust.
Before that, it was the masturbation panic during the turn of the 20th century, when loving, terrified, middle-class parents actually chained their children’s hands at bedtime to prevent “self-abuse.” Before that, those same middle-class people were solemnly instructed that the new (and criminalized) contraceptive devices would hurt their bodies, marriages, and souls.
Before that, it was supposedly oversexed black men who had to be lynched before they preyed on white Southern women (who, it was feared, secretly desired these oversexed and overendowed men).
Today’s panic about broadband porn (what I call PornPanic)—complete with “modern” ideas about brain imaging, the biology of addiction, lab studies of rape ideology, and rumors of the overwhelmingly violent, homogenous content of Internet porn—is just the latest turn of the moral panic wheel. In the foreseeable future, we will see these ideas judged silly and old fashioned, much as we think of leeches, blood-letting, exorcisms, insulin shock therapy, and gay conversion therapy today.
When it comes to sexuality, America seems to always be sliding into, recovering from, or gripped by one moral panic or another. Going back to the Salem Witch Trials, our centuries-long tradition of conceptualizing sexuality as a profound danger requiring vigilance and regulation11 was the fertile consciousness on which the seeds of broadband Internet pornography began to fall in 2000. It launched the current moral panic that demonizes porn, marginalizes its consumers, lies about its content, speculates wildly about its effects, invents new diseases it causes, willfully misinterprets its spirit and artistic conventions, and uses it as the stand-in for everything scary and confusing about the digital age.
This tradition made the new pornography a sitting duck for those who patrol our social order. It has remained so to this day—even as the country has shifted from an immorality critique of pornography to a public health critique of pornography.
Today, the Internet is used by at least 87 percent of the entire American population, including children.12 It’s hard to recall that in 1999 only a third of U.S. adults were Internet users—typically spending very little time on it, using slow dial-up modems to connect.
That is, in the year 2000, most of A
merica knew nothing about the Internet of the 1990s, when people started wrestling with the astounding new Internet of the future—and broadband porn flooded the country at the very same time. It was as if a small number of people were learning how to swim, and then every home was given a speedboat.
In fact, here’s a similar story of intertwined technological and social change. On my first trip to China in 2011, I noticed that many Chinese drivers were extremely nervous, and they didn’t know how to use all the knobs and features on their car’s dashboard. I was puzzled until I realized that a majority of China’s drivers had grown up in a home where no one owned or even drove a car. Rather abruptly, life had been completely reorganized in a way that no one could predict or control.
Because the new Chinese middle class had bought luxuries like cars only recently, there were of course plenty of accidents. More important, however, was the amount of anxiety and confusion that developed from the sudden introduction of private cars and private driving: Is it safe to drive in the rain or at night? Are other drivers looking at me while I drive? Does driving cause cancer? Is it high status or low status if my wife drives? Should I wash my car every time I drive it? Is it better to live near a highway, or away from it? Is it OK to litter while I drive? If I can take the bus somewhere, how do I decide whether to drive instead? If I drive, should I pick up strangers at bus stops along the way?
Unlike Americans, most Chinese adults have no childhood memories of riding in their parents’ car, talking with their parents about driving, or talking with their friends about riding in their parents’ cars. In 2011 (and still true in much of the country), people in China were simultaneously learning how to drive and how to integrate cars and highways into their lives.
Today, we cannot minimize the fact that in 2000 the American public was confronted with round-the-clock free porn at the same time they were learning about the most profound technological innovation of the last 5,000 years. Clearly, dealing with anything new while learning how to integrate the new high-speed Internet into our lives would be complicated—all the more so with something taboo like porn.13
So while the country didn’t exactly come to a standstill in 2000, it did rather quickly plunge into a PornPanic. The people and organizations who led the way did so because of money, power, personal agonies, or because they were true believers. Or some of each.
* * *
As America awoke to the 21st century and broadband Internet, it had all the ingredients needed for a moral panic about pornography. It still does, involving many of the same people and organizations riding the PornPanic gravy train. Most important was the confusion, anxiety, and sense of overwhelm that high-speed Internet brought. Pornography was only a part of that—a significant one, but part of a larger sense of cultural overwhelm that still affects us as we continue wrestling with this increasingly powerful new Internet.
This sudden PornPain was (and continues to be) masterfully exploited. It continues to be nourished by existing morality groups that leaped at the chance to renew their relevance. Groups like Morality in Media (rebranded with a new title focusing on danger, not morality) and Citizens for Community Values gave themselves new missions, such as eliminating pay-per-view pornography in hotel rooms (they succeeded dramatically in Ohio, and helped change the corporate policies of Omni and Marriott). Without any data whatsoever, radically anti-sex, self-proclaimed “feminists” like Andrea Dworkin and Patrick Trueman linked adult pornography to sexual violence and sex trafficking. Those myths are stronger today than ever.
President George W. Bush himself added to the panic, unleashing the Department of Justice to go after “hard-core pornographers” to—of course—“protect our children.” He urged the DOJ to go after pornography because it was allegedly dangerous, not merely distasteful or immoral. The Attorney General encouraged people to believe that Internet porn was somehow related to Internet predators, thus directly endangering kids; he made few distinctions between adult porn and child porn, which frightened parents and communities even more.
Several idiosyncratic features of American society help(ed) fan the flames of PornPanic.
1. An aggressive Internet filtering software industry
In a perfect example of capitalism at work (every entrepreneur’s mission: create or exaggerate a need, then sell a product to address it), an industry quickly arose in the late 1990s to address parents’ confusion about their kids using the Internet. It fanned their anxiety to a fever pitch, describing the Internet as a jungle of deviant pornography and a haven for predators—essentially an open sewer of toxic material. At the same time, the industry described their products as perfect solutions that would create that blessed, oft-pursued and rarely-achieved state—safety. Here’s a typical marketing line for one company: “An open Internet is unsafe for children, and parenting in this digital age is difficult. We provide tools for parents to control unwanted content and [to] provide a safe Internet for your family.”14
Whether they bought these products or not, parents, legislators, educators, and workplace decision-makers got the message: The Internet is a dangerous source of sexual material and lust.
Not at all paradoxically, in keeping with basic capitalist strategies, these companies selling safety and security fanned the public’s fear and anxiety—the PornPanic.15
2. Lack of training of therapists, social workers, clergy, or physicians, who were suddenly asked to deal with this new issue.
Historically, clinicians dealing with concerns like mental health, relationships, and parenting get almost no training in human sexuality. You can be trained as a marriage counselor without ever hearing the words vibrator or kissing. You can do pastoral counseling for 20 years without uttering the words clitoris or fantasy. And almost no doctor hears the word masturbation during their training or subsequent continuing education. While there are of course exceptions, this group of professionals has historically been poorly informed and rather conservative about sexuality.
So when laypeople had questions about the new pornography and the challenges it presented to them as consumers, couples, and parents, their traditional sources of professional advice and comfort were mostly clueless. They fell back on their old paradigms regarding gender, intimacy, and sexuality, which weren’t necessarily helpful. To make things worse, the clinical professions are historically slow to adopt new non-clinical technologies (such as fax machines and mobile phones), and they were slow to become familiar with the digital world and the Internet.
To this day, clinicians know very little about the actual ecology of people’s porn use (indeed, about people’s sex lives), and they don’t usually feel comfortable discussing it. They rely on the same PornPanic tropes as the general public: porn addiction, porn as violent and demeaning to women, porn as harmful to kids, porn as undermining otherwise good marriages, and selfish husbands with victimized wives.
When the mass media want expert voices in their articles, interviews, or panels, these are the professionals to whom they turn. They reinforce, rather than allay, the PornPanic.
3. Misuses of porn
There are always people who misuse every technology, old or new. Cars have been with us way over a century, and people still drive drunk. We’ve had a dozen kinds of contraception available for years, and people still get pregnant unintentionally. We’ve had radio for generations, and people still listen to Rush Limbaugh. Commercial flight eventually led to 9/11, as well as to hellholes like Newark and Heathrow airports.
And so of course many people misused the new Internet, surfing endlessly, buying pointless stuff on eBay, communicating compulsively with everyone they’d ever met, playing round after round of Tetris, World of Warcraft, and games on Xbox (apparently not infrequently at work).
Predictably, some people misused the new porn. Teens with smartphones emulated it by creating porn of themselves, sharing it with boyfriends, girlfriends, or others they wanted to impress. Some people distributed photos they’d received in private, as a form of
revenge when relationships went bad. Others even posted them on websites and demanded payment for taking them down.16 Most disturbingly, some people used the Internet to circulate pictures of adult-child sex. One hears of the Deep Web, filled with illegal sites involving child pornography and sex trafficking.
With the new Internet and the new porn paired with such activities—impulsive teens flaunting their sexuality, psychopaths getting revenge on former lovers, child porn producers peddling their forbidden wares—of course people were judgmental and scared. It served to validate the warnings of the moral entrepreneurs. And of course the media played up these stories to make them seem far more common than they actually were.
So that’s how America got here, and that’s what keeps us here: gripped by a PornPanic, complete with exaggerated dangers, new diseases and social pollutants, willful denial of fact, identified scapegoat, multiple cheerleaders with media access feeding the fear and anger, guilt by invented association (“porn creates demand for trafficking” is the latest), and moral entrepreneurs demanding political, legal, fiscal, and cultural action (everything except research) on the alleged threat.
Chapter Three
UPDATING THE PANIC—THE PUBLIC HEALTH/DANGER MODEL
How, then, could moral entrepreneurs like Morality in Media, Concerned Women for America, Parents Television Council, and Family Research Council continue to oppose pornography in a world in which the public consensus on “morality” and “immorality” was unraveling, and the concepts themselves had become less relevant, less motivational, and less discussed by the public?
How could such groups express moral disapproval, and demand social policy based on morality without basing this on opposition to immorality? And how could they energize and expand the base of the anti-porn movement just as pornography (carried by broadband Internet) was arriving in everyone’s home, looking as if it might become as American as apple pie?
