Pornography and Its Connection with Social Deviance

Introduction

Pornography refers to the viewing or consumption of any piece of writing, movie, or picture that either show or describe sexual behavior the main purpose of which is to sexually excite people. This behavior is now accepted as normal in our society but there is a significant impact of it on the sexual health and quality of relationships of its consumers who have reported suffering from dire health issues such as anxiety and depression. It’s even found related to grave criminal activities and social evils such as rape, women abuse, and human trafficking (Gentry, 1991). Marketers of porn claim that it is a means of harmless entertainment or a healthy sexual outlet. It has been proved in scientific research that watching porn can affect the wiring of consumers’ brains. Not only does watch porn affect an individual’s sex life and relationship with a spouse but it even impacts negatively the relationships he has with his friends, family, and his own self (Perry & Hayward, 2017). This essay seeks to discuss what porn exactly is, the various forms in which it exists in our society, the way it affects the lives of its consumers, and how it can be checked. Several researchers have discussed how porn has given birth to crimes.

The History of Porn

Dr. Alfred Kinsey is partially responsible for the most recent view of porn and sexuality that we get to see in society presently. Its beginning is attributable to the founder of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. A zoologist by profession, Kinsey published a book in 1953 titled “Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female”. That book was believed by several people in society to be among the most significant and triumphant scientific publications of the 20th century. In that book, it had been proved that all those sexual practices that had been labeled as ‘taboo’ and ‘deviant’ by society had the majority of people engaging in those, but it still is unknown how the said book had been produced. How those experiments had been conducted is still questionable for obvious reasons. Dr. Kinsey in his research not only interviewed pedophiles but had overpopulated it with people in the field of prostitution and prisoners too ('The Evolution of Porn: Where It Started, and How It Became So Normalized', 2017). The investigation on sex by Dr. Kinsey was under controversy for going way beyond interviewing. This was so because the researcher even filmed his co-workers engaging in sexual activity for which he encouraged them. Documents from Kinsey have several reports with information about young children belonging to the age group of five months to fourteen-year-olds.

Progression of Porn in Society

Society is full of several misconceptions and misinformed attitudes about sexuality and Kinsey, through his research, helped to normalize some of those thus paving way for the emergence and growth of the business of pornography. In December 1953, Playboy released its first issue which featured Hollywood starlet Marilyn Monroe that later turned out to be the most recognized porn brand around the world. Hugh Hefner founded the porn magazine the stage for the booming business which had already been set by the warped research from Dr. Kinsey. Through his magazine, Hefner tried to capitalize on the trend but in order to maximize the sales it was required that he changed porn’s image to one that was a gentleman’s pursuit and not of a pervert. He did so by publishing essays and articles from well-known and respected authors with pornographic photos next to those, which made porn look legit and classy in Playboy. In the 1980s the next big shift took place when Video Cassette Recorders (VCR) came into the market when it became possible for people to watch movies at home at their own convenience and privacy. This was way easier for porn consumers to simply look for the videos instead of going to adult theatres with numerous other people thus making it easily accessible and reach expanded (Grubbs, Grant & Engelman, 2018).

The next major change came with the introduction of the internet which made it accessible to almost everyone. The consumers did not need to do anything more than simply have a personal computer with an internet connection and everything was available at their fingertips. The sheer availability of the most graphic sexual material both imaginable and unimaginable was accessible anytime, any day, and anywhere to almost everyone without any barriers or restrictions (Klein & Cooper, 2018). This gave a major boom to the porn industry that started flourishing and a growth of 1800% was noted in the number of pornographic websites between 1998 and 2007. In May 2004, an Internet traffic study was conducted in which it was revealed that visits to porn sites were three times higher than to popular search engines like Yahoo, Google, and MSN together.

Porn’s Effect on Society

As discussed earlier the porn industry is flourishing and is easily accessible due to easy availability through the internet and numerous websites. For this reason, it is also affecting individuals, their families, friends, and mental health, and giving birth to several crimes such as rape and human trafficking. Porn has several negative effects all of which are affecting not just the individuals consuming those but also their friends, family, and society overall. Pornography is majorly responsible for causing women abuse that can take several forms such as sexual, physical, and psychological abuse either by her former or current male partner (Kutchinsky, 1991)). Male violence experienced by women in private places has pornography as a major factor, but this unsettling truth is hardly ever discussed by either feminist anti-violence activists or practitioners. Porn is responsible for youth violence against women and some scholars even refer to porn as a training manual for abuse. The average age at which children begin to watch porn is just 11 years of age which means that the preparation for becoming women abusers starts at a young age and a large number of those viewers turn into women abusers at the altar stages of life (Becker & Stein, 1991). Porn doesn’t represent real life but presents perceived realism that majorly affects the adolescents who lack sexual experiences in real-life with women with whom they can contextualize the sex images of pornographic nature.

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There are different shapes and forms taken by the pornification of girls and women that is of violent nature. One such form is the ‘revenge porn’ blogs and websites with the bulk of the perpetrators being male. The images and video recordings made by men with the consent of their female intimate partners while they are in a relationship with each other are later shared online on such websites as porn material following their breakup (Dodge, 2019). The extent of this problem cannot be determined with accuracy, but the damage done by it is of irreparable nature since anything posted online in cyberspace never ever goes away. The same applies to sexting as well which involves sharing images, videos, and written content of a compromising nature with other people through textual and electronic modes. Most or almost all of the victims of these crimes are female adolescents. Watching porn gives rise to deviant sexual fantasies in its viewers most of whom are youth and adolescents. Any sexual identities and behaviors that are considered as deviant as per the norms and beliefs of a society are referred to as sexual deviant behaviors. It is very much possible that any sexual behavior will be considered a criminal offense or a forbidden act in some cultures and societies.

For instance, prostitution, pornography, and pre-marital sex have all been defined as deviant acts of criminal nature and all have been considered normative as well by the same society. This means that sexual deviance is a social construct created through both the perceptions of the people and through social interactions. Deviant sexual fantasies are considered responsible for promoting sexual deviant behaviors which is a matter of serious concern (Williams, Cooper, Howell, Yuille & Paulhus, 2008). The authors of the study found the validity of this concern in non-offender samples for which the authors made the comparison between nine deviant sexual fantasies and behaviors with two samples of male undergraduates. At least one experience of sexually deviant fantasy had been reported by 95% of respondents in study 1 and 74% committed to engaging in at least one sexually deviant behavior. All positive correlations were there with an average of 0.44. However, acting out of fantasies was reported by merely 38% of the respondents belonging to the high-fantasy group. It was observed that the effect that pornography had on deviant behaviors was partially due to the rise in deviant fantasies.

Study 2 was conducted with the purpose of investigating what those possible moderators could be in which eight personality variables had been included. Those respondents who had been high on self-reported psychopathy had shown evidence of an association between fantasy and behavior. Additionally, there was evidence of an association between deviant sexual behavior and the use of pornography by people who were high in psychopathy (Becker & Stein, 1991). Overall, it was found that the relationship between sexually deviant behaviors and fantasies and between deviant behaviors and pornography use had been moderated by individual difference variables that were theoretically relevant. Despite all this information available about the negative effects of porn on the users and society, his family, and friends there is still constant discussion in society that insists that porn has plenty of benefits to offer and is a healthy, liberating, and natural pursuit. This needs to be checked with the help of new policy directions.

New policy directions should be such that they criminalize pornography then only positive changes can be seen in society. This problem can be dealt with with some effective solutions from critical criminology. One way to deal with this problem is for critical criminologists should come together and work on news-making criminology. The activists and scholars would research and write articles for newspapers, magazines, and social media websites detailing the destructive nature of porn. It has been observed that some porn stars such as Jena Jameson speak in favor of porn and their voices are heard as well. This calls for the formation of an anti-porn community that should actively work against this culture targeting the mainstream media and challenging the hegemony.

A website has been launched for stopping porn culture with the title Stop Porn Culture (SPC) at http://stoppornculture.org/. the SPC has a mission, as stated on its website, to pose a serious challenge to the pornographic industry and check the pornographic pop culture that is ever increasing. Their mission states that the organization aims at ending industries of sexual exploitation. The organization performed a feminist analysis of racist, sexist and economic oppression. An innovative suggestion from David Kauzlarich (in press) states that music is played and listened to through technology and pornography can be challenged with the use of various oppositional variants of that form of art. It can also be used to contain state or government crimes committed by people in power. Music has benefited various groups of people such as civil rights groups, labor organizations, and other such organizations and hence it is highly possible that anti-porn activists can benefit too. There is also a need for changing the kind of education imparted at the school level and initiatives must be undertaken for creating awareness. Introduction of sex education classes that teach more than just the mechanics of reproduction.

Conclusion

Pornography is about the viewing of any sexually explicit content. There are several modes in which pornography is served to the people – through magazines, websites, videos, etc. this is accessible by almost everyone – even children as young as 11 years old – who can access it on their computers at home meant for educational purposes. These adolescents’ minds are too immature to understand and differentiate right from wrong and end up taking the wrong steps in the future. It has been found that there are strong links between pornography and sexually deviant behavior among the youth especially males. Several social evils are on the rise due to the free availability of pornographic content almost everywhere and to anyone. Crimes such as rape, human trafficking, women abuse, violence against women, etc. are on the rise due to this. Revenge porn is a new tool adopted by young men who record sexual videos with their intimate partners with consent but later on after the relationship ends upload those on the internet in an attempt to defame or completely ruin the lives of their past female partners. Hence this should be checked with appropriate laws in place and also with sufficient efforts from the female activists for curbing this evil practice altogether this saving lives of millions of youth and saving them from falling prone to mental health issues like anxiety and depression while saving their relationship with their spouse, family, and friends.

References

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2. Dodge, A. (2019). Nudes are Forever: Judicial Interpretations of Digital Technology’s Impact on “Revenge Porn”. Canadian Journal of Law & Society/La Revue Canadienne Droit et Société, 34(1), 121-143.
3. Gentry, C. (1991). Pornography and rape: An empirical analysis. Deviant Behaviour, 12(3), 277-288. doi: 10.1080/01639625.1991.9967879
4. Grubbs, J., Grant, J., & Engelman, J. (2018). Self-identification as a pornography addict: examining the roles of pornography use, religiousness, and moral incongruence. Sexual Addiction & Compulsivity, 25(4), 269-292. doi: 10.1080/10720162.2019.1565848
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6. Kutchinsky, B. (1991). Pornography and rape: Theory and practice? International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 14(1-2), 47-64. doi: 10.1016/0160-2527(91)90024-h
7. Perry, S., & Hayward, G. (2017). Seeing is (Not) Believing: How Viewing Pornography Shapes the Religious Lives of Young Americans. Social Forces. doi: 10.1093/SF/sow106
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9. The Evolution of Porn: Where It Started, and How It Became So Normalized. (2017). Retrieved 27 November 2019, from https://fightthenewdrug.org/how-we-got-here-the-spread-of-porn/
10. Williams, K., Cooper, B., Howell, T., Yuille, J., & Paulhus, D. (2008). Inferring Sexually Deviant Behaviour from Corresponding Fantasies. Criminal Justice and Behaviour, 36(2), 198-222. doi: 10.1177/0093854808327277