The media makes us do it: Dines and the pornography debate

…we understand that media shapes the way we think. It shapes our reality, it shapes our perceptions of the world. Pornography is one more form of media. It’s a specific genre which, by the way, is very powerful because it delivers messages to men’s brains via the penis, which is an extremely powerful delivery system. Gail Dines

For a professor of sociology, Dines is curiously coy in conversation about the thirty years of studies she claims prove the devastating long-term effects of pornography on the sexual development of young boys, who, she also claims, start viewing so-called Gonzo porn (which Dines describes as hard core, brutally body punishing and degrading sex) from the age of 11. As a result of this exposure, boys go on to have “ruined lives,” and to ruin the lives of the girls with whom they attempt to form sexual relationships with their aggressive demands for “hate” sex.

It isn’t that I don’t believe some boys and men are sexually aggressive. I’m just not ready to accept that this behaviour is due to an epidemic of internet Gonzo porn.

Is Dines talking about all boys, for example, or just some? And if it isn’t all boys, then what are the predictors? Are all boys affected in the same way after exposure to pornography? What are the wider social conditions in which the subjects live their lives? How old are they now, and have follow-up studies been done on their sexual habits? What period of their lives do these studies cover, and what other influences have they experienced apart from early exposure to Gonzo porn?

Just asking.

Along with this cautious author I wonder just what Dines Googled to gain access in seconds to Gonzo porn, and how many 11-year-old boys would use the same combination of words resulting in the same access to hard core porn.

A further consideration is, can I trust the claims of a woman who describes men who view pornography as “amoral life support systems for erect penises?”

To adapt one of Dines’ analogies between food and fast food, sex and pornography, food isn’t only McDonald’s. You don’t stop people eating everything because there’s nasty fast food in the world.

These questions and more fed into matters that I’ve been debating with various people for some time now, that is, the assumption that human beings are passive and servile media consumers, incapable of exercising discrimination and choice, and that anything activists deem “pornographic” is dangerous and morally contemptible, and we must be protected from it by those who know best.

Dines claims that the media shapes our reality and perceptions of the world, apparently to the exclusion of other influences around us. These claims are without empirical evidence, are specious, and deserve to be challenged every time they are made. They are used to justify censorship, and the proliferation of a narrow worldview that is symptomatic of fundamentalism, and calculated to invoke reactive fear. Cynics might claim that the purpose of invoking this fear is to create a unique position from which to offer protection from it.

None of this is helpful to people concerned with creating a cultural climate in which children are kept safe, and adults are capable of taking responsibility for their own governance.

The central justification for portraying as dangerous media product such as pornographic internet content, is that it allegedly provokes violent sexual behaviour in consumers, particularly children and adolescents. Dines makes no distinction between Gonzo and mainstream porn in terms of predicting catastrophic effects. Viewing all porn allegedly leads to an increase in undesirable attitudes and behaviours, and creates a climate of hyper-violence and hyper-sexuality that wouldn’t exist without these negative stimulants. In research circles, proponents of this theory have long used what is known as the media effects model for its justification, and the alleged evidence from research based on this model is frequently used to invoke moral panic.

In 1994, British academic David Gauntlett published a paper titled Ten things wrong with the media "effects" model in which he deconstructs widespread research claims that media consumption causes increased violence. Gauntlett’s conclusion that proof of any consistency between media and anti social behaviour remains elusive, still holds up.

Among other criticisms, Gauntlett points out that many researchers reveal attitudes of superiority to their subjects, that is, they position media audiences as “potential savages or actual fools,” and always as belonging to a class other than and inferior to that of the investigators. Researchers assume viewers are possessed of a compromised autonomy that leads to passive absorption, rather than seeing them as rational, critical subjects who are capable of interpreting and critiquing media product, and recognising genre norms.

Moral campaigners consistently fail to provide evidence for the prejudiced assumptions about the general population on which research results are based. They also fail to explain the processes through which viewing media, they consider violent and sexualised, inevitably translates into the acting out of those behaviours.

However, Gauntlett does refer to studies in which children as young as seven have been found to be capable of identifying and rejecting images that are offensive to them, and as having the capacity to differentiate between fiction and life.

He also points out that when criminologists, for example, look for explanations of violence they look first to social factors, such as family circumstances and values, poverty, unemployment, emotionally neglectful backgrounds, housing pressures, and structural relations of domination that affect the individual’s behaviours. In contrast, the media effects model doesn’t look at the bigger picture, and indeed works backwards, starting with media violence and then attempting to find corresponding behaviours in the real world to link with it.

As well, households that already have a high level of tolerance for aggressive and violent behaviour are more likely to permit heavy viewing of this behaviour than households whose tolerance for violence is low.

In 2009, researchers Dr Christopher Ferguson and Dr John Kilburn published a meta-analytic review of the public health risks of media violence, in the US Journal of Pediatrics They concluded: “Results from the current analysis do not support the conclusion that media violence leads to aggressive behaviour. It cannot be concluded at this time that media violence presents a significant public health risk”.

The presence of violent and degrading pornography on the internet is extremely disturbing. Children ought to be protected from accessing it, and this is primarily the responsibility of parents. Parents need support, in the form of education and software. Nothing is going to make this stuff go away, it’s a question of managing life around it, and all of us with responsibilities for children need to know how best to do this. This is where governments could do something useful and educative, instead of wasting time and money on proposed internet filters.

Finally, the following quote from Dines is a fine example of the kind of pseudo sociological misinformation on which much of her argument is based:

Another one is what I call pseudo-child pornography, (PCP) which is women who are 18 — I’m pretty sure of that — but they look younger, and they behave in a younger way. So what you have are men who are bored with adult women looking out for these pseudo-child porn sites. And I’ve interviewed child rapists, and some of them actually started looking… They didn’t want to go to illegal child pornography, so they started with the legal so-called child pornography, and then basically matured into child pornography. And for some of them, the distance between looking at child pornography and raping a child was six months. What they said to me was they got bored with ‘regular’ porn and wanted something fresh. They were horrified at the idea of sex with a prepubescent child initially but within six months they had all raped a child.

In her efforts to co-opt us to her cause, Professor Dines offers this bizarre chain of events as her unique process analysis of child sexual abuse:

1. Men who are “bored with adult women” will rape children.

2. Mainstream legal pornography depicting adult women as younger than they are causes men to progress to raping children.

3. Convicted paedophiles Dines interviewed were “horrified” at the idea of raping a prepubescent child until watching pseudo child pornography made them do it.

Whatever our difficulties with the media, and they are many, the only way to address them is from a rational and varied research-based position. Moral panics and self-interested, agenda-driven propaganda bring only fear, and a sense of powerlessness that undermines our collective ability to think and act in ways that will actually achieve a result.