In the late Seventies, America became shocked and outraged by the rape, mutilation, and murder of over a dozen young, beautiful girls. The man who committed these murders, Ted Bundy, was later apprehended and executed. During his detention in various penitentiaries, he was mentally probed and prodded by psychologist and psychoanalysts hoping to discover the root of his violent actions and sexual frustrations. Many theories arose in attempts to explain the motivational factors behind his murderous escapades.
However, the strongest and most feasible of these theories came not from the psychologists, but from the man himself, “as a teenager, my buddies and I would all sneak around and watch porn. As I grew older, I became more and more interested and involved in it, [pornography] became an obsession. I got so involved in it, I wanted to incorporate [porn] into my life, but I couldn’t behave like that and maintain the success I had worked so hard for. I generated an alter ego to fulfill my fantasies under-cover.
Pornography was a means of unlocking the evil I had buried inside myself” (Leidholdt 47). Is it possible that pornography is acting as the key to unlocking the evil in more unstable minds? According to Edward Donnerstein, a leading researcher in the pornography field, “the relationship between sexually violent images in the media and subsequent aggression and . . . callous attitudes towards women is much stronger statistically than the relationship between smoking and cancer” (Itzin 22).
After considering the increase in rape and molestation, sexual harassment, and other sex crimes over the last few decades, and also the corresponding increase of business in the pornography industry, the link between violence and pornography needs considerable study and examination. Once the evidence you will encounter in this paper is evaluated and quantified, it will be hard not come away with the realization that habitual use of pornographic material promotes unrealistic and unattainable desires in men that can lead to violent behavior toward women.
In order to properly discuss pornography, and be able to link it to violence, we must first come to a basic and agreeable understanding of what the word pornography means. The term pornography originates from two Greek words, porne, which means harlot, and graphein, which means to write (Webster’s 286). My belief is that the combination of the two words was originally meant to describe, in literature, the sexual escapades of women deemed to be whores. As time has passed, this definition of pornography has grown to include any and all obscene literature and pictures.
At the present date, the term is basically a blanket which covers all types of material such as explicit literature, photography, films, and video tapes with varying degrees of sexual content. For Catherine Itzin’s research purposes pornography has been divided into three categories: The sexually explicit and violent; the sexually explicit and nonviolent, but subordinating and dehumanizing; and the sexually explicit, nonviolent, and no subordinating that is based upon mutuality.
The sexually explicit and violent is graphic, showing penetration and ejaculation. Also, it shows the violent act toward a woman. The second example shows the graphic sexual act and climax, but not a violent act. This example shows the woman being dressed is a costume or being ‘talked down’ to in order to reduce her to something not human; such as a body part or just something to have sex with, a body opening or an orifice. Not only does ‘erotica’ show the entire graphic sexual act, it also depicts an attraction between two people.
Her research consistently shows that harmful effects are associated with the first two, but that the third ‘erotica’, is harmless (22). These three categories basically exist as tools of discerning content. Although sometimes they overlap without a true distinction, as in when the film is graphic in the sexual act and also in violence, but shows the act as being a mutual activity between the people participating. In my view, to further divide pornography, it is possible to break it down into even simpler categories: soft and hard-core pornography.
Hard core pornography is a combination of the sexually explicit and violent and the sexually explicit and nonviolent, but subordinating and dehumanizing categories, previously discussed. Soft-core pornography is thought to be harmless and falls into the category known as ‘erotica’; which is the category based on mutuality. In hard-core pornography, commonly rated XXX, you can see graphic depictions of violent sexual acts usually with a man or group of men, deriving sexual gratification from the degradation of a woman.
You can also see women participating in demoralizing sexual behavior among themselves for the gratification of men. In a triple-X movie all physical aspects are shown, such as extreme close-ups of genitalia, oral, vaginal, and anal penetration, and also ejaculation. Much of the time emphasis is put on the painful and humiliating experience of the woman, for the sole satisfaction of the male. Soft-core pornography, or X-rated pornography, is less explicit in terms of what is shown and the sexual act is usually put in the light of mutual enjoyment for both the male and female parties (Cameron and Frazer 23).
Triple-X pornography is manufactured and sold legally in the United States. Deborah Cameron and Elizabeth Frazer point out that other forms of hard-core pornography that have to be kept under wraps, made and sold illegally in underground ‘black’ markets. These are ultra violent, ‘snuff’, and child pornography. Ultraviolet tapes or videos show the actual torture, rape, and sometime mutilation of a woman. ‘Snuff’ films go even future to depict the actual death of a victim, and child pornography reveals the use of under-age or pre-pubescent children for sexual purposes (17-18).
These types of pornography cross over the boundaries of entertainment and are definitely hard-core. Now that pornography has been defined in a fashion mirroring its content, it is now possible to touch upon the more complex ways a community, as a society, views or defines it. Some have said it is impossible for a group of individuals to form a concrete opinion as to what pornography means. A U. S. Supreme Court judge is quoted as saying, “I can’t define pornography, but I know it when I see it” (Itzin 20).
This statement can be heard at community meetings in every state, city, and county across the nation. Community standards are hazy due to the fact that when asked what pornography is to them, most individuals cannot express or explain in words what pornography is, therefore creating confusion among themselves. Communities are left somewhat helpless in this matter since the federal courts passed legislation to keep pornography available to adults.
The courts assess that to ban or censor the material would be infringing on the public’s First Amendment Right (Carol 28). Maureen O’Brien quotes critics of a congressionally terminated bill, the Pornography Victim’s Compensation Act, as saying “That if it had passed, it would have had severely chilling effects on the First Amendment, allowing victims of sexual crimes to file suit against producers and distributors of any work that was proven to have had ’caused’ the attack, such as graphic material in books, magazines, videos, films, and records” (7).
People in a community debating over pornography often have different views as to whether or not it should even be made available period, and some could even argue this point against the types of women used in pornography: “A far greater variety of female types are shown as desirable in pornography than mainstream films and network television have ever recognized: fat women, flat women, hairy women, aggressive women, older women, you name it” (Carol 25).
If we could all decide on just exactly what pornography is and what is acceptable, there wouldn’t be so much debate over the issue of censoring it. The bounds of community standards have been stretched by mainstreaming movies, opening the way even further for the legalization of more explicit fare (Jenish 53). In most contemporary communities explicit sex that is without violent or dehumanizing acts is acceptable in American society today.
These community standards have not been around very long. When movies were first brought out, they were heavily restricted and not protected by the First Amendment, because films then were looked upon only as diversionary entertainment and business. Even though sexual images were highly monitored, the movie industry was hit so hard during the Great Depression that film-makers found themselves sneaking in as much sexual content as possible, even then they saw that ‘sex sells’ (Clark 1029).
