Should Pornography Be Restricted by Law - Term Paper Example

PORNOGRAPHY Pornography and its censorship is an issue that tends to polarize arguments, and although there is an expansive middle ground, the issuetends to divide sides in terms of polemics in unique ways. “There is only one issue on which radical feminists find themselves aligned with Reverend Jerry Falwell and civil libertarians with Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler Magazine. The issue is pornography” (Andre and Velasquez, 1988). This paper will examine the issue from several perspectives, including the one which emphasizes the need for societal controls not on sexual pornography, necessarily, but on violence. Links between X-rated pornography and violence will be discussed, and the paper will primarily examine the issue from several factorial perspectives. In terms of history, pornography is venerable, and has different functions in different cultures and societies (some of them religious). Taking a narrowed view of pornography as being against Christian principles is a fairly common and relatively culturally obtuse perspective that is nonetheless particularly present in America, land of religious freedom under God. Naïve skepticism aside, the domestic history of pornography can mainly be traced through different types of media and rates of domestic consumption, as well as a gradual loosening of the definitions of pornography, leading to a present in which it is inherently accessible within established moral limitations that also serve a political function. What the issue apparently boils down to is one of freedom: whether it is ore important in the domestic society for individuals to pursue actions that don’t harm anyone else with freedom, or whether it is more important for society to be protected from pornography; this report supports freedom. Pornography should be supported because it is in an industry that is no longer illegal. The porn industry really took off during the eighties, and perhaps the sole reason for this is another change in media. No longer did consumers of pornography have to wind 20-minute film-reels or sneak around in theatres: the promulgation of the Video Cassette Recorder had caused a revolution in privacy and accessibility that increased consumption exponentially. VCR porn consumers did not have to worry about traveling to a seedy part of town or sitting in something at a gloomy movie-house: they could consume pornography at their leisure, at home, and relatively inexpensively and easily in comparison with projector films, to say nothing of picture quality. The promulgation of pornography during this decade caused one of its series of publicly acknowledged and still supported political measures of extreme ineffectuality: the Meese commission and the Reagan-inspired return to conventional morality sparked a war on porn that was just as expensive and utterly useless as the war on drugs. Perhaps capitalizing on a bored public’s need for more and more domestic Vietnams, “the U.S. government launched a ‘war on pornography’ in the 1980s. This crackdown included enforcement of some of the toughest restrictions on sexually explicit materials in the Western industrialized world. Despite those actions, domestic consumption of sexually explicit materials increased dramatically” (Censoring Pornography, 2001). As stated, advances in the medium outstripped all moral adversaries. In the present, history continues in terms of media-shifts that focus on pornography on the internet. The web has a reputation for being an uncontrolled and chaotic mass of information that scares some people as much as it intrigues others. Pornography has also carved out a substantial niche in this new media environment, proving that, perhaps, whether one likes it or not, pornography is not stopping, and is everywhere, especially in terms of dominating new media applications such as the web and the home video business (and now DVDs). This is a very profitable industry worldwide in a free market. Pornography should also be supported because it has an omnipresence that affects society and is of interest, especially in terms of contradictory studies linking violence and pornography which provoke thought and supply answers which are mutually exclusive in a coded and polarized argument. On a societal level, pornography has positive and negative effects, but within the polarized and polemical arguments of advocates and censors, there tends to be more of a one-sided perspective. The objectification of women is one issue that centers a societal treatment of pornography, but again, in speaking (and asking questions) in a societal form, once misses out on the crux of the issue: is the individual to be free to pursue pornography, or is the society to be protected from it? Most women are objectified in pornography, but does this necessarily mean that they have to be objectified by it as consumers of it? Again, the issue is more one of the society and the individual being seen to be at odds in terms of representative and respective freedom (individual) and protection (society). Studies have contested that in none of the behavioral studies on pornography and violence “‘has a measure of motivation such as likelihood to rape ever changed as a result of exposure to pornography.’ Men who are already predisposed to violent attitudes toward women may be more sexually aroused by violent materials, ‘but there is no reason to think that exposure to violent pornography is the cause of these predispositions’” (qtd. in Edwards, 1992). This shows a clinical polarization that is almost as wide as the political gulf, and tends to obscure the search for an answer in terms of presenting nothing but polar contradictions where clarity is needed most. It is this way with many moral and political issues. Pornography can also be supported by an individual reckoning of the issue on individual terms. One could say, therefore, that pornography is sometimes funny, and mostly harmless. It is slightly misleading, and may offend some people. It is misleading because if it is viewed, as it most often is, as a virgin, it tends to lead to the suspicion that someone has played a cruel joke on one when the actual act is consummated. Women are objectified in pornography, but there seems to be little room for non-objectification in the medium as a whole, or the sum of its parts, or the allowance by some critics for a sense of humor. It may be driven by denial of female identity as active and aggressive, but without a lot of context being common, it’s hard to say for sure, or whether or not the same thing could be said of some other less marginalized medium. Many couples watch pornography together and find that it enriches their sex-life and makes them enjoy each other more. Overall, the only thing that seems to be certain in the face of statistical polemics is that pornography is a fine impetus for people who enjoy banning things. Politically, as mentioned, the main question regarding the censorship of pornography focuses on freedom- the freedom to the individual to pursue what they want and the freedom of the society from things which harm it. Harm is a basic concept of the domestic political understanding of what one can and cannot do in society. Generally, “A liberal democracy is a representative democracy where a large part of what the citizens do or don’t do is believed as being none of the government’s business” (General Arguments, 2001). But the factors that determine when it does become the government’s business almost always revolve around the harm that is done to society and the individual. So the question becomes one of determining if and to what extent pornography is harmful to the society and individual. From a point of support, there is no real demonstrable harm in pornography. Overall, pornography can be supported because clinical studies linking violence to pornography seem rather overshadowed by the fact that very violent R-rated movies eclipse the scale of sexually explicit X-rated movies by a large margin from a behavioral perspective. And also as mentioned, there are as many studies questioning the nature of the behavioral argument as there are supporting it. Is the harm, then, in the offense that pornography causes to many people in society? “Granted, some porn may be offensive to some people. But to ban pornography because it is merely offensive to some is to jeopardize everyones freedom of expression, opening the door to wholesale censorship of any novel or nonconforming ideas or opinions” (Andre and Velasquez, 1988). Not surprisingly, though, in the powerful world of politics, this exact sort of enforced conformity provides one side of the argument with much of its platform, which is basically poised to function on the basis of a sort of assumed universal Christian system of morality. And feminist critics of pornography find themselves on the level with this argument politically, and also have demonstrated some amount of clout in the system. People are still going to think of pornography as being the insidious cause of innocents’ destruction rather than a link in the chain that, despite cries of objectification and risk of AIDS (while paramedics and cops in daily contact with dirty needles are still heroes), is basically just another job that people take when they want money, albeit one that carries no modicum of respect in mainstream society. BIBLIOGRAPHY Andre, Claire and Manuel Velasquez. “Pornography: Personal vs. Public Preference.” Issues in Ethics, 1(2), 1998. http://www.scu.edu/ethics/publications/iie/v1n2/pornography.html. Edwards, David M. “Politics and Pornography.” Created 1992 from http://home.earthlink.net/~durangodave/html/writing/Censorship.htm. “Censoring Pornography is Counterproductive” Created 2001. http://www.humanismbyjoe.com/Censoring_Porn.htm. “General Arguments For and Against the Censorship of Pornography” Created 1999. http://www.slais.ubc.ca/courses/libr500/fall1999/www_presentations/c_hogg/argue.htm. “Get the FAQs Straight.” Maryland Coalition Against Pornography. from http://www.mcap1.com/faq.html. Read More