One of those recent robo-spam-comment things called my attention to this piece I wrote almost six years ago. It seems to me to be rather soundly argued so I'll use it to answer a hate-comment-spam from an all too human, if all too infantile person named in it. Only I've removed his name to annoy him, he just hates to be deprived of attention. Hentoff was still alive when I wrote it and the Village Voice was too. Both have now gone the way of all flesh and ink on paper.
In
attacking me over the porn issue, the pop-music critic [Name of someone otherwise know as "Stupy" removed] ,
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.
---------
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[Name of someone otherwise know as "Stupy" removed] 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.
[Name of someone otherwise know as "Stupy" removed] 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 [Name of someone otherwise know as "Stupy" removed] 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.
Update 2019: I should have pointed out that the fact that the advertising industry, show-biz, TV, radio, magazine, print on paper and pixilated webloid media sell everything else with sex, claiming to their ad buyers they can change the non-sexual buying behavior or people with sex, getting their attention for other areas of life with sex makes the claim that presenting violent, abusive, involuntary sexual acts has no effect on the sexual behavior of those so appealed to an even more blatant long-standing lie of the porn advocates absolutely clear. The claim that you can't sell sexual behavior with the very thing they sell everything else with deserves to stand as the quintessential secular-pseudo-liberal-lefty lie of the post-war period. It is one of the essential pieces of evidence that such a definition of "liberalism" is not really any difference from right-wing ideology once the right-wingers on the Supreme Court decided that "free speech - free press" was more useful to them than old-fashioned opposition to porn. The more I look into the hypocrisy of that secular-pseudo-left as opposed to the traditional American form of liberalism, which is truly radical, the more I am convinced that secularism will always, in the end, work against the freedom and dignity of People and the possibility of sustained life in a decent world.
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