Is Pornography Bad for Its Consumers?

Catharine MacKinnon led a movement arguing that a class of sexually oriented material was harmful to women: it led to sexual assaults and sexual discrimination. Wendy Maltz persuasively argues in the Psychotherapy Networker (a respected professional journal) that porn is bad for its consumers as well. Maltz decades ago used to recommend pornography to her clients. She now, together with many other analysts, has concluded that pornography distorts human relationships in very serious ways. It is a major cause of divorce and relationship difficulties. Maltz describes it as a cousin to sexual abuse.

She says: "Added to my pile of concerns about porn, the realization that porn could be used as weapon against vulnerable children and women was the last straw. The clearer I became about conditions necessary for experiencing healthy sexuality—consent, equality, respect, trust, safety—the more doubt I had about advocating pornography as a sexual-enhancement product. How can I support something that portrays sex as a commodity, people as objects, and violence, humiliation, and recklessness as exciting? What am I doing encouraging people to condition their arousal to self-centered, sensually blunted, loveless sex? Do I really want to be advocating a product that's associated with causing sexual harm and relationship problems?

"My primary concern about porn wasn't that it was sexually graphic, explicit, or hot: it was that porn conveyed harmful ideas about sex and could lead to hurtful and ultimately unrewarding sexual behaviors." Porn leads to sexual addiction and unhealthy obsessions. According to Maltz, pornography has grown from a side issue to a central issue in sexual counselling. I suppose this is not surprising. Pornography, according to Malz, is a $13 billion dollar industry in the U.S. and $100 billion worldwide. It accounts for 1/3 of all downloads. It is not surprising that psychotherapists see a rise in sexual disfunction.

Comments

[Robert Hockett]

Alas, there is much truth in what Jimbino says. Many sacred texts chronicle, and some apparently purport to justify, disgusting treatments of human and other creatures as no more than objects that privileged persons may do with as they will. Intriguingly, however, many sacred texts -- especially a good many penned in India, but also, notably, the Song of Songs -- wonderfully evoke the beauteous, wondrous miracle that is love as well. The latter are those upon which I think we do best to dwell.

[Jimbino]

It seems from the argument that the Bible and the Koran should be considered pornography as well, since they treat "sex as a commodity, people as objects, and violence, humiliation" if not exciting, commanded by God.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Cf.: http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/living_in_a_porn_culture/

[Robert Hockett]

Thanks, Steve,

I'm by and large sympathetic with the tenor of Dr. Maltz's comments. I'd add two doubtless familiar caveats, though. The first is that the portrayal of extreme violence in various media - especially, these days, video games - surely ought to count as 'pornographic' in the sense that Dr. Maltz apparently has in mind, in view of how radically it 'objectifies' human and other living beings, and dysfunctional relations par excellence between parties in which it trades. The second caveat is that many great works of art, including cinematic art, can be very 'graphic' indeed while falling far short of '*porno*-graphic,' precisely by dint of their portraying passionately loving people who surely would rather die than do harm to or subordinate anyone. As ever, the difficulty seems to be that of where best to draw the boundary in ambiguous cases.

Thanks again,
Bob