The Fourth Form of Pornography’s Harms - Social Harms | Publications

The Fourth Form of Pornography’s Harms: Social Harms

Pornography causes damage to specific persons, but, more than that, its widespread existence in society also causes damage to an unspecified number of people (needless to say, mainly women). We call these harms the social harms of pornography. These harms can be further broken down into two subcategories.

Psychological harm experienced because of exposure to widely circulating violent pornography (i.e., environmental pornographic harm).

The exacerbation of sex discrimination and misogyny because of the widespread dissemination of pornography

Harms arising in subcategory (1) above are those that an unspecified number of people can sustain when they unexpectedly or unwantedly view advertisements, posters, signs, flyers, advertising posters in trains, men’s magazines, and magazine covers that display photos or graphics of women’s naked or semi-naked bodies, or graphics or drawings highlighting the sexual body parts (breasts or buttocks) of young women. These are called environmental harms of pornography, a social version of the “environment”-type of sexual harassment. In Japan, where comics and graphics sexually depicting young girls are popular, the possibility of viewing something like the materials described is much higher than in other countries. Many foreigners who come to Japan are surprised and perplexed by the sight of such materials in daily life. An early piece of research undertaken in 1999 by a gender research group at Konan University interviewed 59 women living in western Japan, from teenagers to women in their 70s. Of these women, 81-96% had been exposed to pornography in the form of train carriage advertisements, sex industry classifieds in men’s magazines, or flyer advertising for sex businesses. Further, of the 59 women interviewed, 54 (91.5%) had experienced sexual assault, and of these, 49 (83%) had been victims of public chikan harassment (Konan University Graduate Gender Research Group, 2000).

In this case, the harms of pornography are two-fold. First is the harm involving the discomfort and embarrassment of the person who has been incidentally exposed to pornography in a setting where sexual materials are not expected to be present. This harm is remedied even in anti-obscenity laws, which see such cases as matters of public nuisance. Second is the harm relating to the fact the materials are not just sexual but depict women as sexual objects. In other words, they diminish women’s humanity and reduce women to an existence that is fundamentally sexual. The second harm of the materials relates precisely to this feature—they are harmful to the discriminatory and demeaning message they fundamentally convey about women. When women express displeasure at the materials, they are not usually concerned about their sexual nature as much as their sexism. In other words, women are worried about, and object to, how sexual depictions and sexualized distortions reduce all women, including themselves, to merely sex or to specific body parts.

Furthermore, in today’s world of the Internet, unintentionally clicking on a hyperlink can mean that sexually explicit images or sexually violent graphics can incidentally be seen. That causes mental damage for the unintentional viewer of such images or graphics. This harm is even more significant when the viewer is a victim of sexual assault. And, unfairly and unjustly, victims of sexual violence may be more likely to encounter such images on the Internet unintentionally. This is because, for example, when people targeted for sexual victimization, spy cam filming, or other sexual assaults try to look for information about these problems on the Internet, they find most websites are pornographic ones, such as chikan porn, spy-cam porn, and rape porn. It is not difficult to imagine the seriousness of the harm victims encounter when searching for information about crimes they have sustained. It is undoubtedly hard to imagine a more unjust and dispiriting situation than this one, in which victims come to realize they live in a society that enjoys crimes committed against them as sexual entertainment.

These environmental harms of pornography are still more serious for children. Today most children daily use smartphones or tablet computers, so when searching for something on the Internet, they can incidentally view brutal pornographic pictures or footage or pornographic advertisements. These circumstances in which children are vulnerable to seeing such cruel pornographic images is nothing less than child abuse on a society-wide scale. The message that these materials carry to children is that women and girls exist for men’s sexual pleasure. Such a social message becomes a powerful driver directing them towards sexual abuse and the sex industry.

As with the separation of smoking areas as a measure against the harms of cigarettes, zoning regulations for the placement of pornography are generally proposed as measures against pornography’s harms. To be sure, we believe that zoning policies are mostly ineffective, as with the separation of smoking areas. For example, pornographic magazines and books are vanishing from the big convenience stores in Japan at the time of writing, partly driven by progressive concerns (Buzz Feed News, 2019; Etcetera, 2019). But this measure is massively insufficient (because the rest of pornography’s harms remain untouched), and on the Internet, a zoning policy is hardly workable.

The harms of category (2) above, described as the exacerbation of sex discrimination and misogyny as a result of the widespread dissemination of pornography, are equivalent to the trafficking of pornography of the MacKinnon-Dworkin ordinance classification. Even when zoning regulations for pornography are well-established, not all women can avoid harms, including declines in sex status, aggravation of inequality between the sexes, sexual objectification, and harms arising from the mass production of pornography, its widespread circulation, and its mass consumption. This type of harm should not be residing at the same level as harms arising from the circulation of an incorrect ideology in general. The widespread circulation of pornography is different from the mere dissemination of a false ideology. It has an impact far beyond any such level and so brings about declines in women’s status through real harms imposed directly.

The structural hierarchy of social inequality between men and women, which has been historically maintained and accumulated for many centuries, turns free-speech “expression”into something more than mere expression. This effect is, of course, common to other forms of racial and ethnic hate speech. But, in the case of pornography, to purvey an ideology of sex discrimination, visual means such as pictures, photographs, and footage are used, and these have a more direct and popularly inciteful effect than strings of letters. Indeed, hate speech directed at other groups also incorporates visual representation (such as posters of Jewish people made by Nazis), and novels are found among pornographic materials. While most hate speech against other groups is conveyed through the written word, the opposite is the case for pornography, which is overwhelmingly a form of sexist propaganda conveyed visually through pictures.

Importantly, in the case of live-filmed pornography real women are sexually used and abused in its production. It is not just that these uses and abuses of women, in of themselves, comprise a practice of sex discrimination, but also the incitement effect of the materials, in using real human bodies, is different from that of other ideological propaganda. It produces an existential and internally felt conviction in men, deep in their minds, that it is permissible to treat real women in such a way, and to do those sorts of things to women, and that women deserve such treatment or delight in suffering it. Pornography socially drags women down to second-class citizenship and hence promotes men’s sexual violence against women who are placed in this low status. Inversely, sexual violence incited by pornography maintains women’s secondclass status. Thus, pornography is, also in this respect, not only a theory or expression, but also a practice. Further, it is a practice of sex discrimination for enacting a range of acts of sexual violence at the micro-level in its production and consumption and at the macro level in its contribution to enacting a society of violent sex inequality. It therefore comprises a structural practice of sex discrimination.

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