"Because negative effects of pornography were demonstrated so definitively in Zillmann and Bryant’s study, researchers have had a difficult time getting new studies past academic boards monitoring the use of human subjects. If a study’s effects are known to be detrimental – and there is no proof the damage can be permanently reversed – ethics boards will refuse to allow a similar study to go forward…thus subsequent researchers were unable to get new projects approved."
 

"What we need is a mind-set shift, one that moves us from viewing porn as hip and fun and sexy to one that recognizes pornography as harmful, pathetic, and decidedly unsexy.  Once pornography becomes discredited and derided by both men and women, consumption will become less brazen, and will eventually decline."

"Imagine if women were to speak out about their discomfort and dislike of pornography, about how their partners become distant, disconnected, and lonely, rather than pretend to be game and go along.  Imagine if women who pursued pornography themselves because it was deemed hip and sexy and fun decided instead that it was hipper and sexier and more fun to actually have sex with another live, completely engaged individual."

"One of the more insidious attacks against women who oppose pornography accuses them of being prudish and uncomfortable with their own sexuality, "insecure," and "jealous."  Terrified of being labeled "anti-sex," "humorless," or "feminists," many women have neglected to stand up to pornography.  Yet to be opposed to porn in no way means a person is opposed to sexuality in all of its healthy and positive forms.  Women who are the most secure and confident, who have the temerity to stand up to such fallacious claims, are surely stronger than the women held in sway by the pornified culture's myths.  Moreover, the idea that a woman can't "own" or "explore" her own sexuality without incorporating pornography into her life (as "sex positive" pro-porn feminists would have it) is insulting, and an extraordinarily narrow and limiting view of sexuality."

"It is tempting to acquiesce to the defensive cries of, "But it's just naked women!  It's just sex!"  For there is nothing wrong with naked women or sex.  But pornography is not just naked women, and it is not just sex.  The sexual acts depicted in pornography are more about shame, humiliation, solitude, coldness, and degradation than they are about pleasure, intimacy, and love. The word pornography comes from the Greek porne, which means prostitute or whore, and graphos, which means depiction or writing.   Pornography is, at its core, the commercialization of women, turning men into consumers and women into a product to be used and discarded. If pornography were truly just about sex and naked bodies, there'd be nothing to get upset over, but those who know better, those who bother to think while they gaze for who stop averting their eyes for a moment and address what's onscreen in the cubicle behind them, should -- and can -- no longer be ignored"

"The longer we ignore the problem of pornography, the worse it becomes.  The dissemination and availability of pornography inevitably bring about increased individual and societal acceptance.  Research shows that the more pornography one is exposed to, the more tolerant of pornography and indeed in favor of pornography one becomes.  What was once softcore pornography has become mainstream; magazines that were once considered pornographic are now filed under "men's lifestyle"; men's lifestyle magazines have in turn aspired toward the pornographic.  As porn creeps into the mainstream press and into popular culture, it crowds out other, more positive forms of sexual expression.  It also keeps raising the bar higher for "real" pornography, which stretches to surpass every imaginable ethical, humanistic, and societal limit.  Pregnant women become pornified, their naked torsos wresled from personal Web sites into "pregnant porn" Web sites, incest becomes fetishized, child pornography blends with adult pornography into an ageless "teen porn" middle ground.  Any sense of taboo dissipates into a free-for-all porn world."

"Not only does pornography viewing indulge and abet a pornographic culture, it also has policy implications.  Studies have shown that those who view heavy doses of pornography are less likely to believe there's a need for restrictions on pornography for minors and are less likely to favor restrictions in broadcasting.  Passively accepting life in a pornified culture is helping pornography flourish, a fact of which the industry is well aware.  Our eyes become blinded by porn."

"Pornography is a moving target and it's time we catch up with it.  For years, the pornography industry and the pornified culture have told both men and women who oppose pornography to shut up or turn a blind eye.  They have accused anti-pornography activists, or even those who have dared question their profit equation, of being anti-sex and anti-freedom.  They have done so while creating a forcefully anti-sex product that limits the freedom of men, women, and children.  They have sold America on the idea of fantasy while inciting us to ignore reality.  Those who have been silenced have only served to further legitimize pornography with their lack of censure.  Those who are now quiet must speak out."

"Today, the number of people looking at pornography is staggering. Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs (about one in five of all rented flicks is porn), and porn) far outpaces Hollywood’s yearly slate of 400 movies with 11,000 porn films shot each year. Four billion dollars a year is spent on video pornography in the United States, more than on football, baseball or basketball. One in four Internet users look at a pornography website in any given month. Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66% of 18-to-34 year old men visit a pornographic site every month."

"But particularly on the Internet, where much of pornography today is consumed, the type of sexuality depicted often has more to do with violence, extreme fetishes and mutual degradation than with sexual or emotional connection. For those who haven’t double-clicked: These aren’t airbrushed photos of the girl next door or images of coupling; they are vivid scenes of crying women enduring aggressive multiple penetration. These are images created by pornographers for a singular purpose: To help men masturbate and get them to pay for it. Sex, in pornography, is a commercialized product, devoid of emotion, stripped of humanity, an essentially empty experience."

"Men who watch a lot of porn seem to focus more intensely on the visual, even when in bed with a woman, asking her to emulate the look and moves of porn stars. Women have distorted body images and feel the need to remodel their appearances – no matter how they personally feel about pornography. Though pressured to accept pornography as a sign of being sexy and hip, many women admit that in practice, their boyfriend’s porn hurts."

"Pornography’s effects have slinked out of the bedroom and infiltrated couples’ overall sense of wellbeing. Men say they are losing the ability to relate to, be close to, and achieve orgasm with real women."

"Men told me they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography – on their televisions and DVD players, and especially online. They looked at things they would have once considered appalling – bestiality, group sex, hardcore S&M, genital torture, child pornography. They found the way they looked at women in real life warping to fit the pornography fantasies they consumed on screen. Their daily interactions with women became pornified. Their relationships soured. They had trouble relating to women as individual human beings. They worried about the way they saw their daughters, and girls their daughters’ age. It wasn’t only their sex lives that suffered – pornography’s effects rippled out, touching all aspects of their existence. Their work days became interrupted, their hobbies tossed aside, their family lives disrupted. Some men even lost their jobs, their wives and their children. The sacrifice is enormous."

"Nor is it only the most violent hardcore pornography that wreaks damage. According to a large-scale 1994 report summarizing 81 peer-reviewed research studies, most studies (70 percent) on non-aggressive pornography find that exposure to pornography has clear negative effects.
Because pornography involves looking at women but not interacting with them, it elevates the physical while ignoring or trivializing all other aspects of the woman. A woman is literally reduced to her body parts and sexual behavior. Not surprisingly, half of Americans say pornography is demeaning towards women, according to the Pornified/Harris poll. Women are far more likely to believe this – 58 percent compared with 37 percent of men. Only 20 percent of women – and 34 percent of men – think pornography isn’t demeaning. Of course, with increased Gary Brooks, a psychologist who studies pornography at Texas A&M University, explains that “soft-core pornography has a very negative effect on men as well. The problem with soft-core pornography is that it’s voyeurism – it teaches men to view women as objects rather than to be in relationships with women as human beings.”"

"Particularly on the Internet, men find themselves veering off into pornographic arenas they never thought they could find appealing. Those who start off with soft-core develop a taste for harder core pornography. Men who view a lot of pornography talk about their disgust the first time they chanced upon an unpleasant image or unsolicited child porn. But with experience, it doesn’t bother them as much – shock wears thin quickly, especially given the frequent image assault they encounter on the Internet. They learn to ignore or navigate around unwanted imagery, and the third time they see an unpleasant image, it’s merely an annoyance and a delay. At the same time that such upsetting imagery becomes less unpleasant, arousing imagery becomes less interesting, leading the online user to ratchet up the kind of pornography he seeks, seeking more shocking material than he started out with."

"In recent years, women’s magazines have regularly featured a discussion of pornography from a new perspective: how women can introduce it into their own lives. While many women continue to have mixed or negative feelings towards pornography, they are told to be realistic, to be “open-minded.” Porn, they are told, is sexy, and if you want to be a sexually attractive and forward-thinking woman, you’ve got to catch on. Today, the pornography industry has convinced women that wearing a thong is a form of emancipation, learning to pole dance means embracing your sexuality and taking your boyfriend for a lap dance is what every sexy and supportive girlfriend should do."

"Despite appearances, pornography isn’t precisely a solo activity. As interviews with men and women attest, it plays into how people approach and function in relationships. Whether a couple watches together, or one or both partners uses it alone, pornography plays a significant role not only in sex but in a couple’s sense of trust, security, and fidelity. As Mark Schwartz, clinical director of the Masters and Johnson Clinic in St. Louis, Missouri, says, “Pornography is having a dramatic effect on relationships at many different levels and in many different ways – and nobody outside the sexual behavior field and the psychiatric community is talking about it.”"

"The fact is, (Marcia Maddox, a Vienna, Virginia-based attorney) says, “Using pornography is like adultery. It’s not legally adultery, which requires penetration. But there are many ways of cheating. It’s often effectively desertion – men abandoning their family to spend time with porn.” Often the judges find that even if children aren’t directly exposed to a father’s pornography, they are indirectly impacted because their fathers ignore them in favor of porn. Visitation in such cases may be limited."

"Statistics show that about half – if not all – teenagers are exposed to pornography one way or another. A 2004 study by Columbia University found that 11.5 million teenagers (45 percent) have friends who regularly view Internet pornography and download it."

"Psychotherapists and family counselors across the country attest to the popularity of pornography among pre-adolescents. “I’ve had my own therapy practice for over 25 years,” says Judith Coché, a clinical psychologist who runs The Coché Center in Philadelphia and teaches psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “I feel like I’ve seen everything.” She pauses and says almost apologetically, “I’m going to say something really strong. I’ve been walking around my practice saying, ‘We have an epidemic on our hands.’ The growth of pornography and its impact on young people is really, really dangerous. And the most dangerous part is that we don’t even realize what’s happening.”

"According to Judith Coché, a clinical psychologist who runs The Coché Center in Philadelphia and teaches psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, the effects on such ever-present pornography on kids who are still developing sexually – or who haven’t hit puberty – has yet to be fully understood. Coché has talked to parents who have witnessed their sons playing computer games when pornographic pop-ups come onto the screen. “Pornography is so often tied into video game culture and insinuates itself even into non-pornographic areas of the Web. It’s very hard for a 12-year-old boy to avoid.” As a result, boys are learning to sexually cue to a computer, rather than to human beings. “This is where they’re learning what turns them on. And what are they supposed to do about that? Whereas once boys would kiss a girl they had a crush on behind the school, we don’t know how boys who become trained to cue sexually to computer-generated porn stars are going to behave, especially as they get older.”"

"Like all good marketers, pornographers know it’s important to reel consumers in while they’re young. MTV recently announced the launch of a Stan Lee/Hugh Hefner collaboration, Hef’s Superbunnies, an “edgy, sexy animated series” from the creator of the Spider-Man comic book series featuring a buxom team of specially trained Playboy bunnies.xi Marketers have extended the porn brand to everything from sporting equipment to clothing. Two snowboarding companies, Burton Snowboards and Sims, now offer boards emblazoned with images of Playboy bunnies and Vivid porn stars. Sims boasts that their so-called “Fader” boards, which feature photographs of Jenna Jameson and Brianna Banks, are their bestsellers. Such boards are clearly marketed to teenagers, which form the backbone of the snowboarding market."

"Kids also absorb pornography very differently from the way adults do. Not only are kids like sponges, they are also quite literal. Even young teenagers are generally not sophisticated enough consumers to differentiate between fantasy and reality. What they learn from pornography are direct lessons, with no filter, and with no concept of exaggeration, irony, or affect. They learn what women supposedly look like, how they should act, and what they’re supposed to do. They learn what women “want” and how men can give it to them. They absorb these lessons avidly, emulating their role models."

"Watching pornography, kids learn that women always want sex and that sex is divorced from relationships. They learn that men can have whomever they want and that women will respond the way men want them to. They learn that anal sex is the norm and instant female orgasm is to be expected."

"A recent study of 101 sexually abusive children in Australia documented increased aggressiveness in boys who use pornography. Almost all had Internet access and 90 percent admitted to seeing pornography online. One-fourth said an older sibling or friend had shown them how to access pornography online, sometimes against their will; another fourth said that using pornography was their primary reason for going online. When questioned separately, nearly all of their parents said they doubted their child would access any pornography via the Internet."

"For girls especially, Zoldbrod believes pornography, particularly online, is a “brutal way to be introduced to sexuality,” since much of it she deems “rape-like” in its use of violence." (Aline Zoldbrod, is a Lexington, Massachusetts-based psychologist and sex therapist.)

"No matter what kind of pornography they look at, spending one’s pre-pubescence and puberty on porn can have lifelong implications. Masters and Johnson’s clinical director Mark Schwartz has seen 14- and 15-year-old boys who are addicted to pornography. “It’s awful to see the effect it has on them,” he says. “At such a young age, to have that kind of sexual problem.” Schwartz isn’t surprised about the growing number of young addicts in the Internet age. “Your brain is much more susceptible,” he explains. “Many of these boys are very smart and academically successful; a lot of computer geeks are the ones who get drawn in. It affects how they develop sexually."

"A day’s worth of nationwide headlines inevitably brings up stories of children encountering pornography at the local library, child pornography arrests, and school incidents in which teachers are caught looking at pornography on school computers during school hours. It is terrible enough that adults are suffering the consequences of a pornified culture. But we must think about the kind of world are we introducing to our children. Certainly everyone – liberals and conservatives – can agree with the statement, “It wasn’t like this when we were kids.” And I can’t imagine anyone would have that thought without simultaneously experiencing a profound sense of fear and loss."

"Back in 1979, Jennings Bryant, a professor of communications at the University of Alabama, conducted one of the most powerful peer-reviewed lab studies of the effects of porn viewing on men. Summary of results: not good. Men who consumed large amounts of pornography were less likely to want daughters, less likely to support women's equality and more forgiving of criminal rape. They also grossly overestimated Americans' likelihood to engage in group sex and bestiality."

"An entire generation is being kept in the dark about pornography's effects because previous generations can't grapple with the new reality. Whether by approaching me (at the risk of peer scorn) after I've spoken at a university or via anonymous e-mails, young people continue to pass along an unpopular message: Growing up on porn is terrible. One 17-year-old who had given up his habit told me that reading about porn addicts "was like reading a horrifying old diary, symptoms, downward spirals, guilt, hypocrisy, lack of control, and the constant question of to what degree fantasy is really so different from reality. I felt like a criminal, or at the very least, a person who would objectively disgust me."

Let's not ignore people like him, even if it's tempting to say, as one headline did, "All men watch porn, and it is not bad for them: study."

That's just one more fantasy warping how we live our real lives"

"Sometimes pornography tears couples apart. At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said the Internet played a significant role in divorces in the past year, with excessive interest in online porn contributing to more than half of such cases. "This is clearly related to the Internet," says Richard Barry, president of the association. "Pornography had an almost nonexistent role in divorce just seven or eight years ago.""

"Porn doesn't just give men bad ideas; it can give kids the wrong idea at a formative age. Whereas children used to supplement sex education by tearing through National Geographic in search of naked aboriginals and leafing through the occasional Penthouse they stumbled across in the garage, today many are confronted by pornographic images on a daily basis."

"Because children learn sexual cues early, boys may train themselves to respond only to images shaped by porn stars, while girls may learn that submission and Brazilian bikini waxes are the keys to pleasing men. Recent studies show a correlation between increased aggressiveness in boys and exposure to pornography, and a link between childhood use of porn and sexually abusive behavior in adulthood. "It's not easy to shock me," says Judith Coche, a therapist in Philadelphia who has been in practice for 25 years. "But one 11-year-old girl's parents discovered their daughter creating her own pornographic website because it's 'cool' among her friends." As such incidents multiply, more Americans--parents especially--may come to (the) conclusion: We have to turn off the porn."

"I was absolutely shocked by what I found. I talked to people whose lives were really destroyed by pornography. Even the people who didn't bottom out--total porn addiction, marriages breaking up, people losing their jobs, which did happen--even the people who didn't go to that extreme were profoundly affected by porn. Sometimes they realized they were, but often they didn't realize the effects pornography had on them."

"I wrote a chapter about how pornography affects men and I went through the steps for how it affects casual users: it desensitizes them, then it escalates into more extreme and excessive interest. And then I did a chapter on men who had completely bottomed out and were addicted to pornography. And I went through the same steps. It's scary--the casual user was showing the same effects, just to a lesser degree than the addict was."

"I spoke with probably two-dozen people who were addicted to pornography. They talk about the denial going on for years. I spoke to men who said they weren't addicted but who spent hours online, staying up till one or two o'clock in the morning looking at porn. It's like alcoholism in a lot of ways--sometimes it takes a disaster to realize it, other times something triggers a reaction akin to shame or guilt."

"With addicts, often, pornography crosses over to their real lives. They may start going to prostitutes, hanging out in strip clubs, meeting women from sex chat rooms. There were quite a few who found that their interest in adult pornography trickled down to an interest in looking at teens, and soon they found they were looking at child pornography. For several of the men I talked to, that was a trigger for recovery."

"If pornography involved blacks or Jews or any other minority or group, I think that liberals would respond with outrage. But it's women and there's been no response."

"We have spent so much time protecting the rights of people to look at pornography. But we have spent no time protecting the right of people to speak out against pornography."

"This is big business. They have lawyers, they have advertising, they have lobbyists. Pornography is a product, and there are billions of dollars at stake, and they have done an effective job at creating a message that says, "If you are open-minded, if you're a patriot, if you believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, then you've got to defend pornography whether you like it or not.""

"It's very important to remember that pornography is a kind of media and it's also a product--and both of those things are regulated. Media are regulated all the time--the FCC regulates media, there are certain things that can't be shown to children, certain movies that can only be shown at certain times. The only media that's not regulated is pornography. Pornography is also a product, like cigarettes are a product, alcohol is a product, aspirin is a product. All of these things have zoning regulations, laws about how you can sell it, who you can sell it to. But when it comes to pornography, we say, "No, no, no, you've got to have unregulated pornography, otherwise you're interfering." The idea that pornography shouldn't be regulated is ludicrous."

"People need to know that pornography is not  harmless entertainment. They need to hear that from the people who know it best--the people who use pornography. Cigarettes were once extolled by doctors and glamorized in the movies. Cigarette smoking was something to aspire to. We've gotten to that point with pornography. But once people know that cigarette smoking isn't very good for you, the consumption started to decline. My hope would be that that would happen with pornography."

"We can lament what's happened to our pornified culture – in which the values, aesthetics and standards of pornography have trickled down into mainstream music, television and movies – but what's truly worrisome is how pornography has affected the lives of individuals. Despite the claim that porn is harmless entertainment, the use of pornography has serious, negative effects."

 "Men told me they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography – on their televisions and DVD players, and especially online. They looked at things they would have once considered appalling – bestiality, group sex, hardcore S&M, genital torture, child pornography. They found the way they looked at women in real life warping to fit the pornography fantasies they consumed on screen. Their daily interactions with women became pornified. Their relationships soured. They had trouble relating to women as individual human beings. They worried about the way they saw their daughters, and girls their daughters' age. It wasn't only their sex lives that suffered – pornography's effects rippled out, touching all aspects of their existence. Their work days became interrupted, their hobbies tossed aside, their family lives disrupted. Some men even lost their jobs, their wives and their children. The sacrifice is enormous."

"While some polls show that up to half of all women go online for sexual reasons, the percentage of women who say they do are likely exaggerated by the inclusion of erotica, dating, and informational sites in the definition of "adult" Internet content, areas to which women are disproportionately drawn compared with men. Many women who are tracked through filtering sites are linked to pornography by accident, visit out of curiosity, or are tracking down their male partner's usage."

"That so many men consider pornography a private matter, one hidden or downplayed, necessarily creates distance with their girlfriends and wives. According to Mark Schwartz of the Masters and Johnson Clinic, no matter how you look at it, pornography is always a sign of disconnection; those who seek it out often do so because of boredom or dissatisfaction elsewhere in their lives. In his research he's seen a "whole new epidemic," largely related to the Internet, of people using pornography to disconnect from their wives. "If porn is increasing involvement with your partner – you're getting turned on and then running to be with your wife, that's one thing," he says. "But we're seeing more men and women with an intimacy disorder, having trouble connecting with their spouse.""

"Pornography in all its permutations affects developing sexuality; the younger the age of exposure and the more hardcore the material, the more intense the effects. Boys who look at pornography excessively become men who connect arousal purely with the physical, losing the ability to become attracted by the particular features of a given partner. Instead, they recreate images from pornography in their brain while they're with a real person."

"Watching pornography, kids learn that women always want sex and that sex is divorced from relationships. They learn that men can have whomever they want and that women will respond the way men want them to. They learn that anal sex is the norm and instant female orgasm is to be expected. "Kids today are going to run into pornography online, not erotica," explains Aline Zoldbrod, the Lexington, Massachusetts-based psychologist and sex therapist. "They're getting a very bad model. Pornography doesn't show how a real couple negotiates conflict or creates intimacy.""

"A day's worth of nationwide headlines inevitably brings up stories of children encountering pornography at the local library, child pornography arrests, and school incidents in which teachers are caught looking at pornography on school computers during school hours. It is terrible enough that adults are suffering the consequences of a pornified culture. But we must think about the kind of world are we introducing to our children. Certainly everyone – liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans – can agree with the statement, "It wasn't like this when we were kids." And I can't imagine anyone would have that thought without simultaneously experiencing a profound sense of fear and loss."