Sex Online: A Panel

Presented February 14, 2006, at Pacific University

Panelists:

Patricia Barrera, M.A., Clackamas County Department of Community Corrections
Jerald J. Block, M.D.
George Heuston, Hillsboro Police Department
Matt Leady, student at Pacific University
Cameron Bardwell, student at Pacific University

Jeffrey Barlow
Hi, I am Jeffrey Barlow, director of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University. Welcome to today’s roundtable series, the topic is Sex Online; a panel discussion, in which outside experts and Pacific University students will discuss the ethical, legal, and health implications of online pornography. A question and answer session will follow the presentation. Today’s roundtable was sponsored by the division of Student Life at Pacific University and the Center for Woman and Gender Equity. Thank you for joining us.

Martha Rampton
Hi, welcome to our Panel on sex---although we’re just going to discuss it, it is going to be very, very informative. It is wonderful to have this on Valentine’s Day, and several people have asked me whether or not the decision to put this panel on February fourteenth was accidental or coincidental and the answer is no, we are very aware of the irony. So we’re glad to have you here today.

This panel is a coordinated effort by three organizations here at Pacific, the Center for Woman and Gender Equity, the Berglund Center for Internet Studies, and Student Life. And before I introduce the panelists I would like to thank a few people who have been involved in the production of this effort. Kyle Brickman is our tech guy and he's working with Student Life. And Julie Murry-Jensen who is also with Student Life. In fact, this was her idea and we appreciate her seeing this through to fruition. Cecelia Warner of the Center for Woman and Gender Equity helped on publicity. Caitlyn Tateishi and Marc Marenco helped us in securing some of our speakers. Peter Urcial was also involved. So it’s taken a bit of doing, but we are delighted to have this panel of experts here today. So do come on over and settle in.

I am Martha Rampton, the director of the Center for Woman and Gender Equity. And this is one in a series of brown bag presentations that the center produces every couple of weeks and it is my pleasure to introduce our panel today. I won’t say much about them because we want to spend most our time listening to what they have to say. Doctor Patricia Barrera is going to be speaking to us today about the implications of sexuality on the web, and its objectifications. Dr. Barrera is the Victim Services Coordinator Clackamas County Corrections. She is also a longtime feminist activist, who received her master’s degree in Woman Studies at George Washington University. She has worked with two prominent American anti-prostitution organizations WHISPER in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Council for Prostitution Alternatives in Portland, Oregon. So she brings a tremendous amount of expertise.

The second person who will speak is Dr. Jerald Block. Dr. Block is a psychiatrist working in Portland and perhaps he will tell you a little bit more on his work. He is a specialist in a variety of types if addictions. So he’ll be talking about the addictive power of pornography online.

Next we have George Heuston a ex-FBI officer. So he’ll perhaps tell you a little bit more of his work in the FBI and is going to be talking about the legal implications of pornography on the web.

And finally, we are pleased to have two students from Pacific, both RAs; Matt Leady and Cameron Bardwell, who will give us some observations on net pornography in the dorms. So it is my pleasure now to turn the time over to Patricia; each will be speaking for about seven to ten minutes and then we will have a lot of time for questions after.

Patricia Barrera
Thank you. Engaging in the critical study of pornography is a complex task and requires the examination of many sensitive and controversial aspects of human sexuality. And I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with all of you today about the commercialization of sexuality and talk about the signification of pornography on our lives and in our communities.

I want to begin by explaining my understanding of what pornography is. Euphemistic descriptions of pornography mask the inherently abusive nature of the industry; therefore it’s critical to define what pornography is for me. Evolina Geobe, a prostitution survivor and a long time feminist activist and theorist has described pornography as “Nothing less than the technological recycling bin of prostitution. Prostitution is the foundation upon which pornography is built. Pornography cannot exist without prostitution. It is impossible to separate the two. The acts are identical as is the population that is acted upon, except that in pornography there is a permanent record of the abuse which is then marketed and sold as adult entertainment.”

I agree with Geobes understanding of pornography, when I speak about pornography today I am talking about filmed acts of prostitution. Women and children taken into prostitution will be used on the strip circuit, on escort services, on the street; will be used to make pornography. The men who buy pornographic materials will also be the ones going to strip clubs, cruising up and down the street looking to buy a woman. And the pimps bringing these two groups of people together will be running the film studios, will be running the strip clubs, will be hustling the girls on the street. The people are the same, and what they do are the same.

The single most important player in this triangle is the John, or trick. These are the men demanding unconditional sexual access to women and girls. The most common type of John is the user; he’s quite self-centered and simply wants what he considers to be his needs met. The user will deny any attempt to harm anyone and might even claim some consideration or care for the people he uses. However, his empathy does not extend to discontinuing his abusive behavior, or in helping anyone escape from the sex industry. He does not care whether the people he is using are unwilling or unusually vulnerable. He simply feels entitled to whatever he wants, whenever he wants it. If someone is hurt, that’s not his problem.

Johns would like to believe they are paying for sex, but the people they are having sex with get little or none of the money. The money goes to pimps, to pay for the force needed to keep prostituted women and children compliant. It goes to the drug dealer, who provides whatever it takes to keep the workers from becoming psychotic or committing suicide, and it goes to pay the businessman who provides the real estate, the support services, and the legal protection for the trade.

I want to explain the three general types of pimping that I see taking place in this society. First, there are the media pimps; they sell fantasies that ultimately hurt people. Two of their central lies are that women are only good for sex, and men are only good for violence.

Media pimps degrade ordinary people; living ordinary lives by showing only idealized characters with perfect bodies, high-powered jobs, and plenty of money. The characters problems are usually solved within and hour or two with a little application of sex and violence. Real people whose lives cannot hope to measure up to these ideals are made to feel inferior and worthless. The media pimps work to divert people from the ups and downs of our real lives with the dependence on fantasies that they sell. Relax, don’t worry about your life, lets worry about Red's, Jennifer’s, and Angelina’s, after all they’re more interested aren’t they? Media pimps have a lot of money. The own the magazines, the newspapers; they produce movies and television programs. They can afford to hire advertising agencies to further their interest, further their ideology about men and women. They’re wanting to buy access to political officials and garnering special treatment for the business and in return they offer favorable media exposure and large campaign contributions.

The second type of pimp is the business level pimp. These are the people who own the bars and the strip clubs, which attract concentrations of potential Johns. The offer jobs as dancers and hostesses to vulnerable young people who are potential candidates for more direct use in the sex trade. They own the adult bookstores, the massage parlors, the hotels, and the legal brothels. They produce and distribute commercial pornography. Business pimps have cultivated the support of civil libertarians and have gotten themselves some great defense by people like the American Civil Liberties Union. None of whom are considering the harm done to the people used to make pornography. Like all pimps, business pimps disclaim any responsibility for the people they use, any responsibility for the actions of the people who use pornography, and most certainly they aren’t worried about all of the families whose real lives are eclipsed by a mans increasing use of pornography.

The last level of pimp I think we should be concerned about are the street level pimps. These are the foot soldiers of the sex industry. Typically they’re small time criminals with a high need for sadistic gratification. The Johns and the business level pimps depend on these particular people, overwhelmingly men, to inflict the brainwash and terror and beatings and occasional murders to keep prostituted women and children compliant. Street pimps pride themselves on their finesse and controlling their victims by psychological manipulation. They claim that prostituted woman and children give their money up to pimps because they love them and in criminal language, “I love you,” means, “I am controlled.” Street pimps play down their use of threats and violence despite the fact it is their biggest contribution to the sex industry.

As a group, the people most venerable to be taken into prostitution are typically the young and the poor and those who lack other economic or personal resources. Most were abused or neglected as children. Many naïve, young, or desperate woman or young girls are recruited into prostitution through ads for escort services; which omit mentioning the sexual component of the job. Others are recruited into pornography by misleading advertisements for models or actresses. And unlike legal models or actresses, people being used in prostitution are not paid by the shoot or the film; they are paid by sex acts. Woman who may be persuaded to simply pose nude find themselves later being coerced into engaging in violent sexual scenarios. In addition to the violence, woman used in pornography are also vulnerable to STDs. During a typical three to four day shoot, a woman can have over a dozen different sex partners all without the benefit of condoms. And I cannot emphasize enough how devastating this can be on a person.

Prostitution, especially in childhood, is at least as effective as war in producing post dramatic stress disorder in this population. No one really wants to have sex with five, ten, twenty strangers a day, everyday. Besides the sheer numbers involved, some of these strangers are going to use a person in a way that are bizarre, painful, disgusting, or even fatal.

Like survivors of other sex crimes, people who have been used to make pornography, report feelings of humiliation, degradation, defilement, and dirtiness; sometimes for years afterwards. They report difficulty establishing intimate relationships with men, extreme mistrust, caution, disdain, and outright hatred of men. They experience disassociation, difficulty integrating the body, mind, and spirit during sex. And they have flashbacks, nightmares, and phobias.

Public hospitals have reported that fifteen percent of all suicide victims are people who were prostituted. One survey of prostituted woman relieved that seventy-five percent had attempted suicide, and in a Canadian study, they found that prostituted woman and girls have a mortality rate of forty times higher of that of the national average.

The physical damages of prostitution and pornography are equally horrifying. This included trauma from continuous sexual intercourse and having to maintain painful sexual positions while being photographed or filmed. This includes damages from beatings and rapes, like tooth loss, bad vision, chronic bladder infection, brain damage. Survivors frequently experience chronic pelvic inflammatory disease, infertility, HIV infection and death from AIDS. They are tortured and murdered by pimps and tricks and are the particular interest of serial killers. To put it bluntly, the life of a prostituted person is nasty, brutish, and short.

These women and children are paying the ultimate price for men’s demand for prostitution and pornography, but we are paying as well; not only psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, but financially.

In San Francisco, for example, prostituted people are one of the heaviest uninsured used of the emergency rooms and health clinics. In the late 1990’s, the two hundred heaviest users of the system cost that city twenty-five million dollars a year. Of that number, forty were prostituted people. Their cure cost that city an estimated 5 million a year. Like the good people of San Francisco, the people of Oregon, the people of Portland, we too are paying the bills of the sex industry.

Some Johns are young and are without significant responsibilities of a job or a family. A few may be even independently wealthy. Most of the Johns are neither; they rarely start a side business or take a second job to finance their prostitution activities. The money they spend does not grow on trees or fall out of the sky; it comes out of their families, and their families cannot afford it.

With each new generation of boys, the sex industry is working hard to maintain their influence on male sexual desires. They want a steady consumer base. The sex industry does not make money off of men who chose to explore their sexuality with free woman. They want men hooked on pornography for life, if possible, and sadly, it is possible. In real relationships with real people who are free, you are stuck with the limitations of who you are, who that other person is, and what you can do together without hurting each other. The sex industry exists for those who do not want real relationships, who do not want to be with people they cannot control, and for those who feel entitled to something beyond what they already have. A lot of the Johns are married.

I am here to tell the men in the audience that the sex industry is not your friend. They think of you as nothing more than a dick with a wallet and they are laughing all of the way to the bank. Don’t wake up one day and find that the amount of money you have spent on pornography could have paid for a small business. Don’t find yourself alone with no understanding of how to communicate with free woman or how to connect with anyone other that someone you have to pay to be there. Don’t let your sexuality be co-opted and distorted to the point where no one is really interested in knowing you or even finds you interesting. You deserve better than that.

And so do all of the woman in the audience. You deserve sexual relationships that are amazingly stimulating, physically and psychologically fulfilling and dynamic. A relationship with someone caught up in pornography will most likely involve some sort of compulsive, ritual, routine, sexual script. Certainly there will be the continuous threat of STDs. Some of which are incurable, some of which are fatal, and you’ll most certainly have problems with communication developing deeper levels of intimacy.

The sex industry has been very successful in silencing criticisms by exploiting Americans dedication to the individual’s freedom of choice and expression, and by continually developing sophisticated and well-founded campaigns of distortion and mythologizing about what they are really doing to us. They are activity influencing all of our expectations of what it means to be a real man or a desirable woman and what we should look for in a sex partner or expect in our sexual experiences. They are influencing our research efforts and our public policy initiatives.

We have to face this issue dead-on and take action. We absolutely have to develop a means for securing the resources of woman and children attempting to get out of prostitution. I also think we should pass the Dworkin-Mackinnon Ordinance, a law that allows anyone who can prove that they were hurt by pornography, to both sue for monetary value and demand a recall of the materials from circulation. Canada has already adopted a version of this ordinance. In addition---this goes out to all of the researchers in the audience---we need to undertake a cost analysis like San Francisco did, to determine the actual dollar amount that we the taxpayers and the healthcare system incur as a result of having the sex industry run amuck in our city. And much like that has been done with the tobacco industry, we need to recover as much as of these costs as possible through licensing, taxation, and civil lawsuits. I mentioned licensing and taxation, because the legal parts of the sex industry, the strip clubs and the pornography stores, must be required to pay their own way, rather than being allowed to continue making us, the taxpayers, clean up their damages.

As we accumlate more information about the sex industry, the quality of our decision making will improve. I wish the best for everyone of you and I thank you for letting me speak here today and I look forward to hearing all of your thoughts on the matter. Thank you.

Dr. Jerald Block
Hello, I’m not sure if we said Happy Valentine's yet, but Happy Valentine's. Why don’t we start with the next slide? I'll tell you a little bit about the sex industry, mainly the online sex industry and then move into some treatment issues. First a little bit about myself, I’m an adult psychiatrist. I work in a private practice and I also teach at OHSU. And I have an interest in this really more from the question of compulsive computer use, which has been an area of fascination for me for a number of years. In that capacity, I created a company, which tries to address compulsive computer use through a number of different products.

One of the areas that I’m interested in is, how to better police or control sex crime parolees once their out on parole so that they don’t relapse and start to look at porn and move from there to child porn and things like that.

There are four major issues around online sex. I tried to summarize them there. The first is a concern about the content; does bad content mean bad people?

The second is a concern about compulsive use; does time online take away from time offline in real life relationships?

The third issue, and these are issues that have been debated nationally. You often see them debated around that concept of computer game legislation. But we’re also seeing it in the sex industry, legislation issues. But the third issue is confusion: what is real? What is virtual? When you have people who can buy a virtual island online, we’re talking game industry now, but you can buy a virtual island online for $16,000 dollars of real dollars, then sell that, parcel it out and sell it off and make money from that. Is that a virtual transaction, is that a real transaction? What’s the distinction between real and virtual?

And lastly, I think there’s a large element of fear that a lot of policy makers are of a generation that were not exposed to the virtual world in the way that other people are, and it’s all very alien to them.

Ok, now when we’re talking about online sexual activity, it’s a diverse area, a diverse topic. People go online for educational information, they go online for masturbatory information, that could be erotica or movie, or even a one-way cam, where they watch somebody do something, then type in instructions of what they want them to do.

And then they also go online for matchmaking, and that can range from looking for a single encounter with somebody all the way to looking for a long-term relationship. And finally, they go online to look at stores to buy sexual paraphernalia. And they go online, when I say go online, they use a different, a number of different mediums, such as an ftp, that’s pretty rare nowadays, and if you go to websites, it’s more common. It used to be a major source of sexual material, it probably still is, we’ll come back to that. And more popular nowadays is peer-to-peer and BitTorrent. BitTorrent is actually the number one consumer of bandwidth right now, and I would suspect a great deal of that is from porn. You can download a porn movie using BitTorrent in an hour or two hours or something like that, or any other movie for that matter.

Ok, now what is it that’s attractive about online sexuality? People talk about the three A’s. Accessibility, you can access porn just about anywhere from any computer. Affordability, it’s cheap, or at least it appears to be so. And anonymity, no one knows who you are. And some people add a couple more of these criteria, but one I like is E, the escapism, that you can get away from your daily problems and go into a different virtual world, and don’t have to worry about your boss or whatever.

Ok, how big is it? Well, we don’t have good stats on this. The latest stats we really have is from 1997 about the porn industry, and at that point it was estimated to be $8 to $11 billion dollars in the United States, of which, these are a little more recent, DVD’s account for about $4 billion, phone sex about $1 billion, and cable TV, movies, and hotel movies, about another billion.

We don’t really know much about the websites. However, we do know it’s well trafficked. In August 2003, about 34 million people visited websites, that’s one out of four users of the Internet in the US. About 1% of websites are porn, but they account for about 40% of visits. Up to 60 million unique users visit porn sites each day worldwide. And now, unique visitors means that one person can go to multiple sites but when they go back to the same site, they don’t count them again. And 20% of North American users regularly go to websites, of which about 3 quarters of men.

Now looking at some studies from Sweden, you see about 50% of the population that use the internet, and four out of five men do online sexual activities. That consists of watching virtual sex, looking for contacts with people, or reading erotica.

And two out of three women use sexual activities online. It’s interesting because the behaviors are different, it’s much more about being connected, so you know, you want to email your boyfriend about a date or something, that’s the sort of activity it is. And in terms of how it’s perceived, one study looked at how people feel betrayed, and is it a betrayal to do online sex. That’s sort of a ranking of the betrayal that people felt.

Ok, going to addiction. Now addiction is very controversial. It’s not clear what criteria we should use to define "Internet addiction", online sexual addiction. We’re not clear that there’s a real clear diagnosis as to what it is. Most authors that have proposed it have proposed it around these criteria. Let’s do the next slide. And I don’t know if you can see that, but I’ll read it to you. I’m gonna use a game ad here to portray it, and I couldn’t find a picture of someone masturbating so instead I chose this one. This is for Medal of Honor, and it says, “Jay, we need to talk. It’s me or the games. Love, Alicia.” And James has made his decision, it’s the games. Incidentally, James has also eaten a piece of pizza, which you can order through the game through the slash pizza command.

Now, the important things are looking at the different criteria. Dominance, what dominance means is, that this is the most important thing in your life, this is what your life goes around. And for James it is, because he wants to play his game. The second is mood; do you feel good when you’re doing it? Do people feel good when they’re looking at the online porn and masturbating? Tolerance, it takes more exposure to get the same affect. Withdrawal, when you’re not using, you feel loss and you’re craving going back to it. Conflict, you get conflict with Jane about time. You may want to hide the amount of time you spend you're spending doing it, or when you're actually doing it. And relapse is, there’s a chance of quickly going back into the same activity after a period of breaking away from it.

Some symptoms that have been described around the addictive use of computers more generally is, fatigue, eye pain, muscular skeletal problems, poor grades and work performance, mainly because of fatigue. People tend to shift their sleep cycles so that they’re staying up until 2, 3, 4 in the morning and missing morning classes, or work. Poor social interaction because more of their real life is assumed by the virtual life.

As to the prevalence of addiciton, it depends on who you read. Cooper did some very good studies, probably the best in the field, and he says, online porn addiction is about 1% of the Internet population. Young, on the other hand, says 20%. And it’s really that you're looking at different study designs, and you're looking at different definitions of the illness. Consensus I think, is somewhere around 8 to 18%, especially among the college population.

And the treatment concentrates around several different things. Taiwan has recognized that this is a problem, and what they’ve done there is, they cut the power off in the dorms at 1 a.m. It works.

Here, we tend to use a different approach. We try to address the three A’s, making the activity less anonymous, making the expenses involved with the activity more apparent. And making it limited so that they can’t go to any computer, but you have to go to public computers only. And then we sometimes also use antidepressants. This is a different approach using stop-it. Next slide.

Ok, now, there's a different issue around porn and pedophiles. And this is very disconcerting. About 4% of search engine queries are around porn. And if you look at those, about 4% of them are around child porn. And looking at some of the studies in specific areas---Singapore has done some good work, where they talk about 60% of parents worry about their kids and making virtual contacts with others. And then the kids talk, 60% of the kids are getting contacted. There’s a large percentage of contacts actually lead to, virtual contacts actually lead to real life contact.

In the US, it looks like about 7% of virtual contacts lead to real contacts among children from 10 to 17 years old. Border countries, it’s about 14%, Singapore, it’s 16%. Some of these contacts are at high risk, because a good portion of them are either people who are alone or never notified another person about their meeting someone.

And interestingly, there are two studies where filters were placed on the computer, screening for porn. The filters had no affect on real life contacts. The only thing that seemed to have a real strong affect were two rules, the first rule was that you cannot have face-to-face meetings with strangers, and the second is that you can’t meet strangers online. Those are the only two rules that seem to correlate with the protective result to the children. So again, there’s some concerns.

Online sexual activity is widespread, it’s common. It seems to be even, perhaps, even a part of I hate to say this in light of the prior speaker, but part of normal development now in some ways. On the other hand, there is a dark side to it as well. Thank you.

George Heuston
Hello everybody. My name is George Heuston; I work for the Hillsboro Police Department, just down the road. If any of you have been stopped by one of our people lately…you would know them. I am retired FBI, I was twenty-two years in the FBI. I went to law school and decided I didn’t want to add to the plethora of lawyers out there. So I decided to do something else.

Part of my career involved working cases of child pornography. I was involved in Innocent Images, which was launched in 1993. And to give you some information to buttress this statistical analysis that you have been given so far, there has been an over two thousand percent increase in the number of cases opened since 1993 to today in child pornography cases. My basic reason for being at the table here today, it to reflect the fact that Oregon does not really do any enforcement of any obscenity laws. There are federal obscenity laws, but the Supreme Court has deferred to the states to decided what obscenity is. You’ve heard the old, the old adage, ”I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.”

So you find some prosecution of obscenity in the southern states. The core violation on the federal side is sexual exploitation of children. You can find that, if you go to Find Law Online, or if you just go a google search, you will find the relevant statutes. But all that is really, is the visual depicture of a minor in sexually explicit conduct. So criminal law has important elements. The first element is visual depiction. The second element, is a minor. The third element is sexual explicit conduct. I worked a number of those cases and I can tell you that most of them do not go to trial. The only one that I ever had go to trial was a three-strike offender out of California and he was going down for the count because of the third violation. So he had nothing to lose, and he got 476 years. The jury really threw the key away on him.

But as far as passing judgment, I am not in position to do so, other than having been a parent. I will say that my experience goes back on the Internet a long…maybe not as far as Gore, he invented it, but to the early 80’s I worked down in the bay area for ten years in high tech crime. And N.A.S.A. is the western end of the Internet backbone. N.A.S.A.’s Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, Ca. Back then, the fellow who ran that western end of the backbone, called me in one day and he said, “ You know I run the stats on our bandwidth.” And this was back when the interest was just researchers, you know universities; not propagated out the public, to the public. 80 percent of the bandwidth was hitting the sex cites. So it started out with a. I hate to use the word, “bang”, it started out with a bang and took off. So , and beyond that I heard , you all have been sitting here and sorta out of touch, as you often are with reality as being students, they have raised the homeland security condition from being yellow to orange. Apparently, they discovered that Dick Cheney is going hunting again. That’s all I have.

Matt Leady
Okay, I guess, I am here on behalf of Residence Life. I am supposed to talk about, as an RA in the dorms, what I experienced or have experienced as far as roommate conflicts or anything of that sort along the lines of pornography. And I guess the few instances that I have encountered were where there was a roommate who came to me and said, “My roommate looks at porn all of the time and it makes me uncomfortable,” to deal with that situation, what I found, and this was only a couple of times that this actually came up, but the roommate that was looking at porn all of the time was very kinda self inclusive, kinda self-centered.

So I guess I don’t really have a whole lot to say about this; sure the panelistshave said that there are a lot of people who have been looking at porn, which is fine, but the only times I dealt with it as an RA, is when someone was looking at a lot of porn. And if they are doing it at six-hour stretches, where one roommate is wanting to go to sleep and the other person is just up looking at porn the whole night. Which, you know, that’s, that’s an interesting thing for an RA to deal with, cause I, as an RA, I am not going to condemn you for looking at porn, but, you know, to work out your schedule with your roommates about when you can look at porn and when it is time to sleep, I guess. Yeah, that’s practical.

You know another side of it, is, it definitely is an interesting interaction between males and females when it comes to the topic of porn. Uou know, we’re college students, we come to college and some of us hang up posters on our walls or have pictures all over our room of scantily clad woman or non-clad woman. And that’s a really interesting, it is an interesting interaction between girls and guys on a floor because we all kinda hang out together and we are friends everything, but you can definitely tell that there were tensions. Not because some girl or some guy was offended by there being a poster, but for a girl walking into a guy’s room that has posters of, you know, sexually posed woman all over their rooms, you can tell that there, that there might, you know hinder your relational aspect. I mean, it will, ultimately made the girl feel uncomfortable. And some girls, I guess, didn’t feel that uncomfortable with being in rooms like that. But that’s just something that I have observed, is the amount or quantity of sexually explicit or just sexual picture or posters or depictions there are in a room; even between males and females. It really complicates how females and males interact, how males and males interact, how females and females interact, it definitely complicates the interactions. Because, some people are really comfortable with it and other people are not comfortable with it. So, I guess that is all that I have really observed.

Cameron Bardwell
Along with Matt here, I am supposed to give the Residence Life perspective on pornography use in the dorms. And as he said, this is my first year as an RA and I haven’t come up against any excessive porn use that has lead to any real problems in the dorms. But, and if there are real instances they are usually pretty few and far between and it’s usually someone who is using it a lot for long stretches of time.

So, just to come back to what he has been saying, this really kinda, most of the issue for Pacific students, you guys out there, most of you are probably not the 30-40 married guys cruising the strip. So the real issue here, is respect and responsibility; and kinda two parts, I think. One is just, kinda a respect for your fellow students, I mean honestly. If you are going to, it really is your choice to put up, you know, the scantily clad woman or you know, if you want to coat your room in pictures of naked woman, that really is your prerogative. But I mean, you’ve got to understand that there’s going to be a lot of people not comfortable in entering your room. Because, that’s just, it makes things awkward; it makes things uncomfortable for quite a few people. So, it’s just a fundamental respect that people should have for each other.

And the other is a respect for yourself, I mean, if you chose to look at pornography; it is easily accessible because of the Internet today. I mean, that is a fact of life. But you also have to understand, you know, what are you giving up? I mean, it’s been said by everyone on the panel that it can consumes people lives if you look at it, you know, for six hours a day. You’ve got to understand that you need to have some more respect for yourself than not just becoming completely engrossed in any one thing. And letting that consume your life is inhibiting why you are fundamentally here; which is to learn. You learn in a classroom and you can, you know, learn about people. And you can’t do that if you are sitting on your computer in your room all day. So yeah.

Martha Rampton
Thank you to all of our panelists, that is very interesting. We have some time for questions and we hope to get some. A lot of very provocative statements have been made, and lets respond to them. …do you think it’s a problem the use of porn in the dorms or in the library? I’ll tell you, the genesis of this panel actually was that somebody who will not be named, was in the library and saw pretty graphic pornography on the computer of the person next to him or her, and was pretty upset by that because whenever she looked up,--uh-oh I told you it was a woman--whenever she looked up, she’d see this pornography there. So, people are using pornography pretty openly at least in the library and apparently a little bit in the dorms. So lets hear some questions. If you differ from anything that the speakers have said, please tell us that, and why. Lets have a discussion about this. There’s a microphone right there, you can just walk up and speak in that.

Question 1
Can anyone talk about the number of minorities that are involved in prostitution?

Patricia Barrera
Just so you know, along with working with two anti-prostitution organizations, I’ve also funded my own organization. Six years ago, I created the Baldwin Foundation as well. So, I have over a decade of experience working with prostitution survivors and it was my understanding that women of color were differentially taken into prostitution in Minneapolis. When I was working with Whisper, we found that overwhelmingly, the people who were prostituted to the street were Black and Native American women. There were not only more numbers of them on the street, but they were also arrested more frequently and charged more jail fines than their White counter-parts. Women of color are marketed in prostitution based on the prejudice of their people in the larger societies. So you see, ethnic prejudice, racism, is rife in pornography--Black women wanting to be enslaved, wanting to be with White men, you see Asian women as submissive and subject to bondage and sadomasochistic acts. And Latina women are portrayed as being very hypersexual. So, I find that women of color are absolutely prostituted in greater numbers and it looks like they’re subjected to violence as well and uh, sexually made to live out, uh, societal stereotypes around their race, but I’ve also witnessed that with men as well. Men of color are also being made to live out in sexist ways the stereotype of their people.

Question 2
I have two very different questions. My first question is, looking at online sexual abuse how similar is in behavior to say drug abuse or alcohol abuse? Then my second question is very different; I was watching CNN yesterday, they had a story on, basically, Ipod porn. Now with the video Ipod, amateur men and women can make a video of a sexual nature and then put it on the Internet for free and basically take out the middleman. I was just wondering what all of you thought about amateur pornography?

Dr. Jerald Block
Let me start with the first question. Drug and alcohol abuse and porn addiction... the model that’s being proposed for a clinical definition around porn addiction is using substance dependence criteria such as with drug or alcohol abuse. So, first, there is a similarity; it’s challenged though, because, there are quite clear and horrible repercussions for methamphetamine abuse, and heroine abuse and such, that you don’t see with some of the behavioral addictions. And so that makes it a little bit more controversial to lump porn addiction together with these other addictions. The other way to go about it is to call it an impulse disorder and use criteria around those disorders.

The second question is very interesting as well. I think a bigger concern is the transition from using computers to using Ipods and cell phones as a carrier for imagery---movies and such--- because, frankly, they are harder to police, for the parole board people, for one. Another aspect of it that’s very interesting is that it’s decentralized the porn industry, such that now somebody can set up a shop, which is a question I had for the residence people here as well, but people can set up a shop and put cameras in their house or whatever, and, and create their own site and not be involved in the porn industry per-se, but make considerable amounts of money publishing it to the web. And my, my question is actually, have you had any experience with you know, "Jenny cam-like things" (editor's explanation: The "Jenny Cam" was one of the first successful on-line porn sites.) here with students and having to deal with that as a policy, at the school where people start to sell their own voyeuristic product?

Matt Leady
I haven’t heard of anything like that. I’ve seen students with those kind of cameras in the room, but I’ve never heard of anything quite like that. I guess it would be feasible, we have single suites in the dorms where you could have a computer and have your own camera but I haven’t heard of anything quite like that. But also to sound off on the video Ipod thing, for me, I see it as just a continuation of the same--- not necessarily problem-- but the same behavior as that of an excessive porn user in their dorm rooms. It would just be a continuation of a kind of anti-social, self-centered behavior, You know, instead of using your computer, you sit on your video Ipod or your cell phone; it would just be kind of a continuation or another avenue to practice being a little cut off from the world and in your own little virtual place I guess.

George Heuston
The only thing I would say, on that second question, moving towards an appliance based ubiquitous nature of this. So you’ve got platforms out there that are mobile and and you know, you’re going to be running into situations like that which was discussed about the library, with people displaying this in the open. So, we’re going to have to make some societal decisions about whether that’s acceptable or not, and if so, how are we going to deal with it?

Cameron Bardwell
I definitely agree with that, and, ultimately, what I was going to suggest is that really it does come down to going around if you want to watch porn on your iPod in the UC while you have dinner, I mean, ultimately that is a choice that you can make; however, most of us would agree that’s probably not the wisest one because that does show a pretty inherent disrespect to the rest of the student body. So, I guess on that, you really would have to make the choice, on what would be the best decision; whether you would be the more self-centered one, or the one that might set you back a little bit, but be better for the rest of the world.

Patricia Barrera
Well, my thoughts on the the connections between pornography, addiction to pornography, and addiction to drug and alcohol---you had said that there’s a difference in that the devastation of heroine or methamphetamine use is very visible, it’s very obvious, someone’s breaking into your home to get their hit, right? Well, pornography addiction, I think, is equally as devastating. It’s immediately devastating to the people used to make it, and I want to continue to bring the victims to the fore.

But also, I think that it is devastating to the men who succumb to it – become addicted. But it doesn’t affect the rest of us in society, so if some man disappears to pornography addiction, who does it hurt? Well, none of us, but him? His family, if he has children? The majority of porn users are married. There are some devastating consequences to porn addiction that I think are equally as horrible as drug and alcohol. But they don’t necessarily impact society as much as the drug and alcohol does.

You don’t have someone, you know, pissed on themselves passed out on your doorway. But, in terms of pornography addiction, you still have the victims who are being used to make these materials for the users. In terms of amateur pornography, I don’t really believe that there is any concern with me about who’s doing it. I don’t care if it’s Disney, I don’t care if it’s AT&T, I don’t care if it’s your next door neighbor.

The consequences for being used that way, sexually, are going to have significant impact. The consequences on the people who use it are the same. So, yeah, there’s a lot of amateur porn out there, but there’s also commercialized porn by corporations. I don’t think that there’s a difference with that. It’s what the consequences are on all of us, sexually, and societally – communicatively.

Question 3
Two things; One: I just want to say that I completely relate to the library story… when I was a freshman in high school, I took a computer course and there were several people in that class who would look at porn in the middle of class, even though the teacher would be standing right there. Not a day went by that I couldn’t look over and see some spread legs on the screen next to me. But anyway, the second thing is, uh, I just wanted to ask everyone in general what they thought about illustrated pornography in relation to law and degradation of Pacific. (From audience: particularly child porn) Yeah, especially illustrated child porn – illustrated porn.

George Heuston
I never did run across any prosecutor that would touch anything that had to do with, with illustrations. Even though the visual depiction may be of a minor or is obviously of a minor, so I am not aware of that being taken on by the courts. You know, these are fine lines as in the case of morphing. There have been-- there are convictions out there for taking the face of a real child and morphing that to another’s body. There have been a lot of defense lawyers out there that have said, you know, that that’s not a real person; although, you think of the impact that would have on the person that’s been used for that morphing process. So this brings up some interesting gray areas. But right now, I don't know of any situations where that in itself was the core reason for prosecution. They may bring it in to show that it’s contributing to the delinquency of a minor. That’s a violation of state law. These materials were often used to prime kids for sexual acts; to break them down.

Patricia Barrera
My comment on that is that, I think fantasy is really important. I don’t think any of us become successful at what we do without fantasizing what it means. You know, the idea of visualization, and I think that having sexual fantasy is great and really healthy, and illustrations, I think, not only with illustrations but with actual people, whatever you want to do, go ahead and do it, but that’s why I think the beauty of the Dworkin-Mackinnon Ordinance, that why it is so powerful is that someone is hurt by it. That should be it really; it should be a harm-based understanding, a harm-based definition in the law. Because, if you want to draw, you know, adults raping or having sex with little kids, go for it; but if someone is hurt by it, that should be the trigger in my opinion. I think sexual fantasies with children should be questioned. I think those really should be, but in terms of concepts of freedom of speech, protection, censorship and that, I really think taking a harm-based approach is much more healthier in terms of all of the depictions, with using actual people or drawings. Is somebody hurt in the making of it? Is somebody hurt as a result as a result of the production of it? This should be our trigger.

Jerald Block
I can add just one thing. I know in other countries there are other policies. Whereas in Canada, I believe, visual portrayals, even drawings, of child porn are illegal; but in the United States, no. Sort of a segue into a different area: one of the things that I don’t understand, that I’d be interested in if some of the other panelists have some sort of input on this: With a certain subset of users of porn, specifically the "allow child porn" people, they tend to collect sets or collections of photographs that are then traded back and forth in order to increase the volume of photos, so that in the typical forensic exam you might find, like 15,000 photos of porn on the computer. And I’m wondering if anyone has an understanding of that, this collection concept as a sort of consuming fantasy.

George Heuston
Well, I can’t speak to the psychological side of that, but I can only reinforce what you’re saying on the pedophile area. They do collect, they’ve even been known to will their collections to other pedophiles. And generally, they know where things are; it’s a very easy case to make because they have everything indexed either by age, by whatever other preference they might have. They’ve got everything organized. So, I think it’s something at work that’s deeper than just fantasy; I defer to you [looks to Jerald Block], but it’s deeper than just a fantasy, when it gets to be that obsessive, and and to the point of wanting to maintain those collections. And generally, if they’re hiding it, they won’t hide it very far. So, you know, it’s one of those things; they’re obsessed with it, they can’t change, so...

Patricia Barrera
In my understandings of Johns, I think it’s a particular form of greed, frankly. I think it’s a form of voraciousness and control where they can have such control of so many pictures of a person, and the greed in that. And I’ll give you and example that I see in today’s contemporary society. I don’t know how many of you knew that Malcom X pimped women. He was living in terrible circumstances. And profited, took money from women in prostitution. Well, as soon as he was able to get out of that, he did.

Now, we have a talented musician today, his name is “Snoop Dog,” and he also grew up in hard times, and also prostituted women. And once he became famous and became rich, you’d think that he’d let that go. Well, actually, it’s rumored he is still pimping in Las Vegas, and he actually has created a pornography studio in the basement of his mansion. And you’d have to wonder why someone would be involved in that industry, if you do in fact believe it is a disgusting industry based on misery and power over others, and I really do believe that there is something in wanting to control human beings, and a greed in that, and a desire for that particular form of violence.

Martha Rampton
We are losing our audience; students have to get to class. Thank you for being here.

Sex Online: A Panel

April-May 2006

Volume 6, Issue 2

Feature

Security

Legal

Education

Gaming

Technology

Book and Site Review

Book and Site Review

Editorial