Harms Arising Through Pornography’s Consumption | Publications

Harms Arising Through Pornography’s Consumption

Harms Arising Through Pornography’s Consumption

Consumption harms of pornography can be further categorized into two sub-categories of harm.

Harms in which you are forced to watch pornography or imitate pornographic acts at home or at work.

Harms in which you suffer sexual assault or other sexual abuses from someone directly affected by pornography.

The category of harms arising during pornography’s consumption is roughly equivalent to the forcing pornography on a person harm of the MacKinnon-Dworkin classification. These harms can be further categorized in the following two ways.

a. Harms arising when victims are forced to watch pornography at home against their will or is exposed to unwanted pornographic items (such as nude calendars or adult DVDs) daily at work or at home. When this harm arises at work, it represents an environment-type of sexual harassment. When it happens at home, it represents a form of domestic violence. Also, when children are forced to watch pornography, it represents, in of itself, a form of child abuse, and furthermore plays a role of luring children into sexual acts. Sexual abusers expose children to pornography to dissuade feelings of resistance or repulsion to pornography. In this case, it directly leads to the harms of (b) below.

b. Harms suffered when behaviors imitating pornography are enforced at home or within an intimate relationship by a husband, lover, or brother. Customers imposing such acts on women in places where they are bought for prostitution can be included in this category of harms. Customers of the sex industry often feel free to impose perverted sexual acts on women bought for prostitution that they are unable to demand of intimate partners.

Researchers have clarified the causal relationship between repeatedly watching pornography and perpetrating sexual violence. In the MacKinnon-Dworkin classification, this is named assault or physical attack due to pornography. Pornography often takes sex crimes and violence as its theme, including crimes like rape, gang rape, sexual harassment, sexual assault, spy cam filming, incest, torture, sexual exposure, detention/abduction, child abuse, bullying, punching, and kicking, and choking, and present them as enjoyable forms of sexual entertainment. Since pornography imprints on a circuit of intense physical pleasure, in terms of sexual desire, it effectively dominates male sexuality (and sometimes women’s sexuality, too). This woman-hating fundamentalism, which is deeply internalized and sexualized in men’s minds and bodies far beyond mere ideological conviction, converts numerous men who are dominated by it into terrorists. In every corner of our society, some terrorists do what pornography suggests. From sexual objectification through molestation, sexual harassment, and rape, and sexual torture, and sexual murder. The results of these actions produce an even greater volume of “sexual violence due to pornography.”

No form of “expression” openly admires and exalts crime as pornography, let alone against a group so oppressed. Indeed, there are crime or detective novels, but most of these describe crimes as impermissible wrongs and so preordain that perpetrators will be arrested and punished. They base themselves on a sense of justice felt by people and tune into this. Is there pornography that presents such violence against women as truly impermissible crimes? Is there pornography in which perpetrators are arrested and punished? These possibilities are inconceivable, precisely because pornography, by definition, exists as sexual entertainment. It describes all manner of violence against women as not only socially permissible but also supremely sexually pleasurable. It does not base itself on a sense of justice. On the contrary, it breaks down any sense of justice, any sense of equality, any sense of humanity and expels a whole group of women from the domain of freedom, justice, and equality. It is necessary to stem the spread and pervasiveness of materials that incite violence against a socially vulnerable group and which cause real violence and assault.

Akiyoshi Saitou, a Japanese psychiatric social worker with professional experience working with more than 150 sex criminals, suggests that repeated watching of pornography powerfully motivates offenders to commit sex crimes. Although he especially emphasizes a causal relationship between watching child pornography and conducting child molestation, the same relationship can be established between watching adult pornography and perpetrating sex crimes against adult women. Furthermore, we must remember that one sex offender can victimize hundreds of women and girls. Saitou described his experience:

When at a local prison I gave a speech in front of the prisoners serving their times due to sex crimes, I told them about the research of an American researcher, which shows that the number of victims of one offender in his lifetime is 380 on average. In the audience there were some men who had repeatedly conducted sex crimes against children. One of them told me: ‘You said 380…? I did more than three times that.’ Other child sex abusers nodded in vigorous agreement.

Saitou further suggests that, from his interviews with offenders, “child pornography was the trigger for child sex offending” in 95 percent of cases (Abema Times, 2019).

We know from newspaper reports that there are many cases in which criminals were stimulated by rape pornography or spy-cam pornography to perpetrate similar crimes. A 35-year-old Japanese man arrested in September 2017 for sexually assaulting a woman at knifepoint attested to have developed an interest in rape “after watching rape pornography online.” He further admitted to having perpetrated similar sex crimes against two other women (Nittere News, 2017). In another case in June 2016, a 37-year-old Japanese man was arrested for sexually assaulting six young primary school girls and testified to police that he had learned of such behavior from watching child-themed pornography since his 20s developed a sexual appetite for young girls (Sankei Shimbun, 2016). In a further case, on 17 December 2015, a large volume of choking-themed pornography was found in the house of a Japanese man who had strangled a 17-year-old girl to death. He testified that the materials had led him to develop an interest in choking and that he had committed the crime partly as a hobby (FNN, 2015).

The likelihood of regular pornography viewers enacting in real life the sex crimes they have been watching escalates in pornography genres like Japanese chikan public molestation and spy-cam filmed pornography. A survey was undertaken in Japan over the months October-November 2002 in relation to chikan forms of public sexual harassment. A graduate student at a university in Osaka surveyed more than 800 graduate students (513 men and 314 women) about public sexual harassment and found that men had experienced the crime at rates of 9.6% and women at rates of 41.4%. Among male respondents, around 4% had perpetrated the crime themselves. As many as one-fifth of male respondents expressed an interest in perpetrating the crime (among women, these responses were about 1% each). The finding compounded this extraordinarily high response rate among the male students; only 5.3% of those who had perpetrated the crime had not seen pornography of the same genre. The rest had watched it one or more times. Among the male respondents who had no desire to perpetrate the crime, around 60% had never seen pornography of that genre (Fujita, 2003, p. 35).

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