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Psychological and Social Effects of Pornography
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20069 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
4,416 Words |
| Author
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Victor B. Cline
Victor B. Cline, a psychotherapist specializing in sexual
addiction and marital relations, is professor emeritus of
psychology at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. He is
also president of Marriage and Family Enrichment, a
nationwide seminar group, and is author of Where Do You draw
the Line? Explorations in Media Violence, Pornography, and
Censorship. |
Two centuries after the start of the American Revolution, the United States finds itself in the midst of another revolution, this time a revolution of values--religious, social, and sexual. In the past ten years, we have witnessed a new erotic permissiveness in the arts and media that goes considerably beyond anything ever tolerated previously.
It seems that many educated Americans do not regard this with disfavor but appear to relish it as adding an additional spice to our cultural life. It would probably be fair to say that, in much of the popular press as well as in intellectual journals, there now exists a kind of benevolent tolerance, if not outright pleasure, in seeing the emergence of this increased explicitness in the depiction of sex.
To many, this represents a kind of liberation from an era of repressive guilt about sex and one's body that seemed to stifle men and women in their relations with one another.
Other observers, however, have become increasingly concerned that the unrestricted dissemination of pornography in books, magazines, television, movies, and videos may present, especially for younger people, a number of serious problems. And their concern mounts over media productions in which sex and graphic violence are fused.
These concerns have received little or no rational discussion in our more thoughtful newspapers, journals, and television and radio talk shows.
The fact today is that, despite city, county, state, and federal laws to the contrary, almost any kind of pornography can be purchased or rented over the counter in almost any part of the nation.
Irving Kristol, a professor of urban values at New York University, has commented,
Being frustrated is disagreeable, but the real disasters in life begin when you get what you want. For almost a century now, a great many intelligent, well-meaning, and articulate people--of a kind generally called liberal or intellectual or both--have argued eloquently against any kind of censorship of art and/or entertainment. Today in the U.S., censorship has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. Is there a sense of triumphant exhilaration in the land? Hardly. There is, on the contrary, a rapidly growing unease and disquiet. They've got a world in which homosexual rape takes
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