On November 10, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Property Rights held a hearing to address the government’s role in regulating pornography.
In a press release after the hearing, Chair Sam Brownback (R-KS) stated, “Most Americans know that pornography is bad. But most Americans don’t know how harmful pornography is to users and to their families. While sexually explicit material is often talked about in terms of ‘free speech,’ too little has been said about its devastating effects on families and children.”
The subcommittee heard testimony from Pamela Paul, who recently wrote a book entitled, “Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families.” In her book, she details the findings of her interviews with more than 100 heterosexual men and women on their feelings about pornography: “Countless men described how, while using porn, they have lost the ability to relate or be close to women. They have trouble being turned on by ‘real’ women, and their sex lives with their girlfriends or wives collapse…Many women try to write porn off as ‘a guy thing,’ but are profoundly disturbed when they are forced to come to terms with the way porn plays into their lives and the lives of their boyfriends or husbands today. They find themselves constantly trying to measure up to the bodies and sexual performance of the women their men watch online and onscreen. They fear that they’ve lost the ability to turn their men on anymore and quite often, they have.” Ms. Paul also addressed the effects of pornography on children, explaining that they “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 effect. 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.”
Leslie Harris, future executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, summarized studies issued by the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) Commission and the Thornburgh Committee that examined how best to protect children from obscene material on the Internet. She explained that both panels “reached the same basic conclusions, although the longer Thornburgh Report spelled out its conclusions in much greater detail. The most critical two conclusions are: a) in light of the global nature of the Internet, criminal laws and other direct regulations of content inappropriate for minors will be ineffective, and b) education and parental empowerment with filtering and other tools are far more effective than any criminal law. Both of those independent, non-political comprehensive evaluations concluded that protecting children online requires a three-part approach: public education, use of technologies, and parental involvement.” Ms. Harris further stated that the Thornburgh Committee “determined that approximately three-quarters of the commercial sites offering sexually explicit material are located outside the United States,” adding that “U.S. criminal statutes or censorship will be ineffectual in protecting minors from sexual content on the Internet. Simply put, even if it were possible (and constitutional) to somehow make all U.S.-based sites completely inaccessible to minors, minors would still have hundreds of thousands of overseas sexual sites available to them.” She said that the report found that “technology-based tools, such as filters, can provide parents and other responsible adults with additional choices as to how best fulfill their responsibilities. Though even the most enthusiastic technology vendors acknowledge that their technologies are not perfect and that supervision and education are necessary when technology fails, tools need not be perfect to be helpful.”
