by Ben Shapiro
Portrayal of sexual activity onscreen is not simply about telling a story or enlightening viewers—it’s about legitimizing the behavior. When increasingly younger teens are exposed to soft-core pornography on the big screen, there is a cultural result. When the hottest actors in Hollywood are making out with other guys, when the hottest actresses are claiming to be attracted to other girls, when tough guys onscreen are portrayed as macho jerks and heroes are portrayed as feminized, homosexual fantasies, those who back Judeo-Christian morality are in serious trouble. It’s no wonder that in a 1996 poll, 62 percent of children aged ten to sixteen said that sex on TV shows and movies influences kids to have sex when they are too young.68
Here we stand, almost forty years into the new era of filmmaking. We traded the old morality for a new, more permissive, more open, and more arbitrary ethic. Sexual activity and homosexuality in the movies gets more and more prominent with each passing year. By promoting the idea that anyone—anyone!—could be gay, Hollywood hopes to force acceptance of a homosexual lifestyle. By pushing warped views of sexual activity into the mainstream of pop culture, kids begin experimenting with their sexuality at earlier and earlier ages.
In the early pre-teen or teenage years, sexuality is a new phenomenon, and as such, tends to be rather undirected. By forcing homosexuality onto the table and claiming equal legitimacy with heterosexuality, kids are forced to confront their sexuality before they have had a chance to come to grips with it.
The Hays Code stated: “When right standards are consistently presented, the motion picture exercises the most powerful influences. It builds character, develops right ideals, inculcates correct principles, and all this in attractive story form. If motion pictures consistently hold up for admiration high types of characters and present stories that will affect lives for the better, they can become the most powerful force for the improvement of mankind.”
When, as a society, we decided that standards in movies no longer mattered, we sacrificed something great—the popular requirement that filmmakers strive to enrich society and uphold traditions of American morality. We sacrificed the idea that there’s any kind of responsibility by our cultural authorities to think about the effect of their work, not just cater to the lowest common denominator. It’s a sad commentary that we sold that goal for a few feet of dirty film.
CHAPTER TEN
THE LOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY
“Jim Haynes and Germaine Greer had just published the first issue of a newspaper that All London was talking about. It was called ‘Suck.’ . . . [Jim Haynes] went on with a discourse about the aims of ‘Suck.’ To put it in a few words, the aim was sexual liberation, the liberation of the spirit of man. If you were listening to this speech and had read ‘Suck,’ or even if you hadn’t you were likely to be watching Jim Haynes’s face for the beginnings of a campy grin, a smirk, a wink, a roll of the eyeballs—something to indicate that he was just having his little joke. But it soon became clear that he was one of those people who exist on a plane quite . . . Beyond Irony. Whatever it had been for him once, sex had now become a religion, and he had developed a theology in which the orgasm had become a form of spiritual ecstasy.”
—TOM WOLFE, NEW YORK MAGAZINE, AUGUST 23, 19761
He could have been the boy next door. Smart, handsome, outgoing, Ted Bundy was the picture of a man on the way up. But Bundy was no ordinary young man on the make. He was a serial killer, and he murdered dozens of young women, sexually assaulting many of them as well.
Dr. James Dobson interviewed Bundy just hours before his execution. The man with nothing to lose opened his dark soul before Dobson. The day after Bundy was electrocuted, Dobson released the tape of his talk with the mass murderer. The transcript is chilling—and the insight of the killer is far too matter-of-fact to be ignored.
Bundy insisted that his home life in early childhood was normal. “[T]hat’s part of the tragedy of this whole situation,” he explained. “Because I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of five brothers and sisters, a home where we as children were the focus of my parents’ lives, where we regularly attended church, two Christian parents who did not drink, they did not smoke, there was no gambling, no physical abuse, no fighting in the home.”
So when did the young man with a future become a man with brutal rape and murder on his mind? “This is the message I want to get across,” he said, “that as a young boy. . . I encountered, outside the home again, in the local grocery store, in a local drug store, the soft-core pornography that people called soft core . . . And from time to time we would come across pornographic books of a harder nature than . . . of a more graphic, explicit nature than we would encounter at the local grocery store. And this also included such things as detective magazines.”
Bundy described the pornography he encountered: “this is something I think I want to emphasize is that the most damaging kinds of pornography, and again I’m talking from personal experience... are those that involve violence and sexual violence. Because the wedding of those two forces, as I know only too well, brings out the hatred that is just, just too terrible to describe.”
Like most addicts, after a certain point, the dosage needs to be raised in order to achieve the same effect. When the effect of hard core porn is minimized, the addict needs to do more to get the same thrill—and when that thrill can no longer be attained from paper filth, the addict must move on to higher forms of perversion.
“[I]t happened in stages, gradually,” Bundy related. “My experience with pornography generally, but with pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it—and I look at this as a kind of addiction like other kinds of addiction—I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material.
“Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far, you reach that jumping off point where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give you that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it.”
And then Bundy snapped. “It’s a very difficult thing to describe, the sensation of reaching that point where I knew that, that something had say, snapped.” Bundy described it as “a compulsion . . . a building up of this destructive energy. What alcohol did in conjunction with exposure to pornography is alcohol reduced my inhibitions at the same time the fantasy life that was fuelled by pornography eroded them further.”2
So Ted Bundy raped and murdered. Other sources—particularly porn industry sources—would later question whether indeed Bundy had been a boy-next-door type turned maniacal killer. Al Goldstein, a contributing editor for Penthouse magazine and publisher of Screw, wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times in which he claimed that the anti-porn cause would lead to the repeal of the First Amendment: “The implicit message of the Dobson-Bundy interview is that we should censor adult material. But censorship, once embarked on, has a way of growing out of control. Look to Iran, or the Soviet Union, to see about that.”3
Playboy repeatedly attempted to blame Bundy’s evil on sexual repression rather than sexual excess. A piece by “anti-repression” crusader Philip Nobile, co-author of The United States of America vs. Sex, appeared in the July 1989 issue of Playboy; Nobile quotes Meese commission member Dr. Park Dietz praising soft-core Playboy erotica as “among the healthiest sexual images in America.”4
In July 1990, Playboy reiterated its pro-porn propaganda in an interview with Dr. John Money of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The interview reads like a direct transcript of Tom Wolfe’s conversation with Jim Haynes. “In the sixties,” Money says, “America experienced what the media called a sexual revolution. However, if we wanted to be accurate, we would call it a reformation. Like all reformations, it was spontaneous rather than planned . . . Historically, all reformations are followed by a backlash, a counter-reformation. We are currently in a sexual counter-reformation.
Money continued: “Essentially, some people are taking everything that is sex
-positive and labeling it sex-negative. Today’s witch-hunt goes after women’s liberation, gay liberation, sex education, contraception, teenage pregnancy, abortion and pornography... When you criminalize pornography, you criminalize sex.”
According to Money, not only is pornography not immoral—pornography actually prevents sex crimes. Noting that he sees “many” positive benefits of pornography, Money stated: “I have one patient who, when he is exposed to normal erotic images such as you find in Playboy, has normal sexual fantasies. In the absence of healthy erotica, he has sadistic, brutal fantasies about bondage, rape and death.” Nods the interviewer: “Close a newsstand, create a killer.”5
No wonder Hugh Hefner expressly requested that Playboy interview Dr. Money.6
The hard, cold truth of the matter is that pornography is addictive. It’s addictive because the male mind is hard-wired to crave sexual imagery. Where pornography differs from “checking out” a woman is the extent shown. Soft-core pornography and cheesecake photos are all less dangerous by degrees than harder stuff. And the Ted Bundy-like progression from soft-core to hard-core to obscenely violent porn to murder is extremely rare.
All the same, the idea that sex fiends become sex fiends because of lack of sexual knowledge or exposure to sex is a self-serving lie. A Los Angeles Police Department study spanning ten years found that pornography was a factor in 62 percent of child molestation cases. An FBI study of serial killers found that 81 percent reported hard-core porn to be their “highest sexual interest.”7 As Dr. Dobson explains, “You don’t have to be a psychopath to become desensitized to violence and harm to other people. You can show statistically that exposing young boys to certain kinds of sexual experience in early adolescence produces a rather high probability of sexual problems later on.”8
Dr. Kelly Hollowell, founder of Science Ministries, Inc., explains that there is a biological predilection toward pornography. Once the switch is turned too many times, it’s tough to turn off. Writes Hollowell:Simply said, the more pornography is viewed the more distorted one’s views of sex become. This is called desensitization. For example, when one study group was exposed to as little as five hours of non-violent pornography, they began to think pornography was not offensive and that rapists deserved milder punishments. They also became more callous and negative toward women and developed an appetite for more deviant or violent types of pornography... Researchers now link this change in behavior to the startling discovery that when people indulge in pornography, they release powerful chemicals that actually change the structure of the brain and body creating a physical and chemical addiction. This addiction is so powerful it is being likened to cocaine, alcohol, and heroin. And like any drug addiction, once hooked, addicts need harder and more perverse images to achieve the same “high.”9
Even in the most “innocent” cases, pornography is still, in Dr. Dobson’s words, “damnable.” It implicitly teaches men—and I speak here almost exclusively about men because the market for porn is overwhelmingly male—that women have no dignity.
The feminists are right when they say that pornography debases women. It provides a false standard for female sexuality, because it teaches that women are as sexually driven as men. It provides a false standard for female beauty, because normal women don’t have boob jobs and liposuction (unless you’re in Los Angeles). It’s no wonder, as Professor James B. Weaver of Virginia Tech explains, that the use of pornography leads to “sexual callousness, the erosion of family values and diminished sexual satisfaction.”10 And the sexual imagery doesn’t simply dissipate once men stop looking at it—it sticks in their memory. As Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the University of Pennsylvania, testified before Congress, pornography is the “most concerning thing to psychological health that I know of existing today.”11
There is a connection between mainstream porn and kiddie porn as well. Much of what passes for soft-core pornography is schoolgirl porn, passing models off as high school cheerleaders ready for some action. Vincent Golphin of the Syracuse Post-Standard explains: “One of the students—I won’t use her name—was shown fully clothed with an armful of books, leaning against a tree with the college’s Ivy League-looking, Hall of Languages in the background. Next to that shot was a photo of the same girl wearing only tennis shoes, sitting legs wide open in what looked like a dorm room.... In one photo the young woman looked like a bobby-soxer. Virginal. Innocent. Is that reality? In the nude photo she sat brazenly, hair swept back, looking too worldly. Is that reality? Maybe that’s why Bundy said the person hooked on pornography looses [sic] grip on reality.”12 Is it any wonder that virgin-slut characters like Britney Spears are the most-downloaded figures on the Internet?
Yet we’re told that to pass laws against porn means infringing upon basic American freedoms. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled against Internet pornography laws. The ACLU routinely stands with the pornographers in their fight against morality—under the guise of free speech, of course.13 Labeling obscenity a right that the Founding Fathers sought to protect is, in and of itself, an obscenity.
In the end, it’s all so indescribably selfish. One of the most sickening aspects of pornography is its narcissism, a narcissism so deep and broad that it approaches theology of the self. Because looking at naked people in the sexual act is really about getting your rocks off. It’s about leaving the real world and entering a sick fantasy world where everything revolves around the penis, the vagina, the breasts, and the anus—and all of those sexual organs revolve around you. As Tom Wolfe puts it, “It is merely an example of how people in even the most secular manifestation of the Me decade—free-lance spread-’em ziggy-zig rutting—are likely to go through the usual states . . . Let’s talk about Me . . . Let’s find the Real Me . . . Let’s get rid of all the hypocrisies and impediments and false modesties that obscure the Real Me . . . Ah! At the apex of my soul is a spark of the Divine . . . which I perceive in the pure moment of ecstasy (which your textbooks call ‘the orgasm,’ but which I know to be heaven).”14
The biz
Jaz McKay is a conservative/libertarian talk show host from Fresno, California. His show, broadcast from six to nine p.m. every weeknight on 580 AM, covers politics and pop culture. I met Jaz after he invited me on his show to promote my first book. We’ve been friends ever since, and I participate in his radio program each Thursday night and discuss the issues of the day.
Jaz is an interesting fellow. A staunch fiscal conservative, a foreign policy hawk, and a social libertarian, he’s been in radio all his life. But for a few years, he had a side career as well: Jaz started as a DJ for the “gentlemen’s club” chain Déjà Vu, and worked his way up to management of several of the Midwest clubs. Déjà Vu has dozens of outlets around the country; they’re famous for their dancing strippers and their no-alcohol policy.
Déjà Vu is known in the porn community for its responsible business practices (in the rest of the community, of course, they’re known only for their porn). The front page of their website carries only a bikini-clad blonde and a disclaimer: “The materials which are available within this site may include graphic visual depictions and descriptions of nudity and sexual activity and should NOT be accessed by anyone who is younger than eighteen years old or who does not wish to be exposed to such materials.”15 It also includes a link away from the site, which directs you to a search engine.
Jaz is no whistle-blower. He enjoyed working at Déjà Vu. “It was a very professional organization. When they started, they made most of their money off of book and tape sales and sex toys. Now, most of their business is made in the gentlemen’s club. A typical Déjà Vu has three sections. There’s the real moneymaking section—the dancers with the stage and all that. There’s the porn shop. And then there’s the booths, where the customers go in, put some money in the slot, the curtain goes up, and they get a private show.”
According to Jaz, he once took a group of Christian protesters through one
of his clubs (after first “telling the girls to tone down the raunchy stuff”), and they gave it a clean bill of health. His typical ploy with community protesters was to kill them with kindness, bringing them coffee in the snow, bringing out the girls to meet the protesters. “It worked like a charm,” he told me.
Jaz is an open porn advocate. “There’s nothing wrong with adult entertainment. Look, you and I, we believe that there’s something more to sex than just the physical act. There’s emotion there too. But the physical isn’t bad either. It may not be something you are into but others are. And I believe it’s harmless. There have been countless studies done and I don’t know of any that can prove any harm to anyone. And let me tell you, sexual experimentation can really be good thing. My first marriage, my wife and I were swingers. The first time we swung, we took home this guy named Jon my wife had known most of her life. It was a fantasy my wife wanted. I loved her, I wanted to give her that fantasy, so I said okay to it. It was one of the most moving nights of my life. After the two of us had pleasured her several times, I turned over to go to sleep; I wasn’t really out yet, but they thought I was. I heard Jon tell my wife, ‘I’ve always loved you,’ and then—and this still makes me cry—she said to him: ‘I love you too, but I’m in love with Jaz, now go to sleep.’” When I ask him why he broke up with his wife, Jaz tells me that that’s a long story. He had had an affair several years after the swinging days had ended.
I ask Jaz whether he thought the porn and swinging led to the marriage’s breakup. “Not in the least, it was because of a long series of events that had absolutely nothing to do with the swinging, or porn. Hell, porn wasn’t even something either of us watched in those days,” he says. I explain that from a Jewish perspective, sex within the confines of marriage should have an intensely spiritual element; if a man is even thinking of another woman, he is forbidden from sleeping with his wife. The respect for the woman is tremendous, and the idea of opening a marriage to the slings and arrows of an oversexed society, let alone to a third party, is abhorrent. Jaz disagrees. “Porn has never once had any negative effects on any of my relationships,” Jaz states.
