In attacking me over the porn issue, the pop-music critic Steve Simels, formerly with Stereo Review magazine, quoted a pro-porn alicublog post by the Village Voice columnist Roy Edroso. As pointed out Thursday, the old claim was made by both that pornography is harmless, that it has no effect on the behavior of those who consume it.
"No one can prove that oceans of internet porn have done anything worse to humanity than give Goldberg another opportunity to embarrass himself..."
The Goldberg in the quote is that blight on humanity and the same to their profession, journalism, Jonah Goldberg, one of the numerous legacy hires of opinion journalism, someone for whom I have no respect and with whom I agree on little to nothing. Even our opposition to pornography is from an entirely different perspective. On the other hand I agree with much of what Edroso has said in those columns of his I've looked at, even as I really believe his political orientation is fundamentally based on different and quite flawed foundations. On the porn issue those different foundations make a complete difference in the end.
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I can't remember where I first heard the ever repeated claim that pornography is harmless, that it has no effect on the behavior of those who consume it but I am certain of one thing, I certainly read it being said in either a newspaper or a magazine. It may have been Nat Hentoff, it may have been some other now ex-liberal columnist. I certainly have heard it and its variations most often from journalists, especially what later were sold as "opinion journalists". The claim being that repeated exposures to descriptions and images of sex, of sexual practices have no influence on behavior. And that is about the most obvious lie told by journalists who would have to know it is a lie even as they say it, if they thought about what they were saying even in the absence of survey figures or other fictoids usually fluffing out the discourse on this issue.
Porn isn't a non-participatory entertainment like watching a half-hour sit-com, its consumption is a participatory act, probably most often, the act is one that is harmless enough, solo masturbation. So even in its most typical use, porn has psychological and physiological effects on the person using it. Masturbation, in itself, isn't any more harmful than the person doing it to themselves is willing to make it. Whether the things presented by pornography which the person finds will most effectively elicit those psychological and physical gratifications of arousal and eventual orgasm will be extended into what its consumer does to other people is less clear and harder to "prove" but the claim that pornography has no influence on that, made by journalists, is hypocritical. Given the business end of the media that Hentoff, Edroso and Simels work in, the idea that repeated media messages have no further effects on behavior is obviously self-serving and entirely undeserving of belief.
This morning, looking at alicublog to get that quote, I saw an advertisement in the sidebar, for a moving company on this page view. I'd expect if I refresh the page some other ad will appear. So Edroso's blog posts advertising. Advertisments are media messages sold by media companies with the claim that they will effect peoples' decisions and change their behavior, leading to them buying things. It would be the rarest of American adults who have not been subjected to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of ads in their lifetime. And anyone with something more than a vestigial brain would have to have noticed one of the commonest advertising strategies, selling it with sex appeal. The oil industry hired the once alleged journalist Brook Alexander on the basis of her sexy, cool blonde appearance and voice in order to sell their lies about the extraction industry. Those ads are placed in news programs for the purpose of using her to change beliefs and how people vote in order to change laws. You can't avoid them on the liberal ghetto hours on TV, the nighttime lineup on MSNBC, on programs where you will also hear the line that porography has no important effects on behavior.
I'll emphasize that point, even as their advertisers are using sex to effect political behavior, journalists claim that sexual messaging has no effect on sexual behavior.
They say that even as their advertisers are using sex appeal in order to elicit a rather complex and important action, of using sex to cause a political behavior. And, if you know that ad campaign, you'll have seen scores of thousands of other ad campaigns using sex to have the same effect, using images of sexy women and men and, disgustingly, children to effect buying behavior. The very same media companies that have major departments to convince corporations that they can use sex to change behavior, are then in the business of claiming that even stronger and more targeted use of sex in the media will have no effect on behavior. And if you don't see a conflict of logic, not to mention total hypocrisy in that, you may have a future in "opinon journalism"
Roy Edroso's newspaper, The Village Voice, used to be the home of the annoyingly self-appointed biggest champion of free speech-free press in the world, Nat Hentoff. It has been one of the more influential voices promoting the idea that pornography should be freely available. That it also had one of the early and more infamous personal ad sections in which ads for commercial sex figured rather obviously, everything from non-commercial hookups to rather openly and formerly, slyly phrased ads for prostitution or "escorts" made money for the company. The contention that those media messages had no effect in the real world are absurd.
A couple of years back there was a lawsuit brought by a teenage victim, trafficked by a convicted pimp who advertised for business in the Village Voice. While the Village Voice got the lawsuit thrown out by a federal judge and they dispute some of the allegations on rather technical issues, the fact that people are pimped by pimps in The Village Voice doesn't seem to be in dispute, some of whom like Latasha Jewell McFarland are in the business of prostituting minor children,.
But there is an even more basic hypocrisy on the part of those who have endlessly recited the unfounded claim that pornography doesn't influence the behavior of those who consume it. Edroso is an "opinion journalist" who is in the business of changing minds and behaviors, that is the basic reason for the existence of his profession. For him to sell his writing on the basis of its ability to change hearts and minds, political choice and voting on one hand and then to claim that media messages have no effect in line with its content is absolutely hypocritical. As he is the one who insisted that there is no proof that pornography, the act of turning women, men, children, into objects to be used has no harmful effects based in its content, he should be required to prove that there is a difference in effect between what he gets paid for and what pornographers get paid for.
Steve Simels was paid for writing about pop-music for a magazine that those of us who worked in music often regarded as an advertising vehicle. Music reviews, especially of recordings, are written to effect opinions of the readers but they are also published to effect behavior, the purchase of records and concert tickets. If they don't have that purpose the same magazines and other media that pay people to write them wouldn't be able to sell advertising space and time to the very companies their journalism covers in its content. Well, they might be able to sell it but it would be an act of fraud, their claims of being able to produce those effects on behavior, fraudulent. That many people who have worked in music have considered the kind of commercial music Simels specialized in a form of musical prostitution is for another post.
So, even before getting into the distractions of dubious to improbable to ridiculous surveys and psychological claims, it's a closed case that journalists making the claim that pornography has no effect on behavior are hypocrites with no leg to stand on. If they never got paid for influencing behavior they might have at least personal integrity to make those improbable claims but, then, no one would ever hear them through the barrage of commercial media that is in the business of selling the eyes and ears and minds and actions of their readers and watchers to people trying to sell you something. Or, more to the point, to get you to do something, probably more often than not, something you shouldn't be doing, something that will do you, those around you and the entire ecosystem, no good at all.
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