At the age of seven, I was conservative as most children are conservative, and inherent in this traditional outlook was the “best friend” with whom I played traditional girlhood games - mummies and daddies, dolls, horses, skippings. Late one afternoon (we had been paddling in her pool), she said she had something to show me. I followed her into her parents' bedroom. From beneath a pile of woolens in the wardrobe, she pulled out a black-and-white leaflet. On the cover of this leaflet was a photograph of a naked woman with her legs spread and in between them, a kneeling man performing cunnilingus. I can still remember the intense impact of this image - a certain shock, fascination: multi-layered disturbance.

On arriving home, I took my younger brother by the hand, led him into my bedroom, took off my pants, spread my legs and blithely asked him to perform the act I had seen depicted on the cover of that leaflet. I was curious as most children are curious, and inherent in this curiosity was a desire to experiment with behavior condoned by adults I trusted. My brother refused; he left the room to tell our mother. Her response was measured. I was discouraged from visiting my friend's house and told not to repeat my actions. Nonetheless, that image haunted and confused me. I had been given a particular understanding of adult sexuality, an understanding which distorted the way in which I viewed both adults and myself. In retrospect, I feel that I was poisoned.

Beatrice Faust, co-founder of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties and author of Balderdash Backlash: Where Feminism Is Going Right, believes that there is no correlation between pornography and actions such as the aforementioned. “Numerous commissions and committees of inquiry,” she wrote in the Australian, “have failed to demonstrate a causal or even permissive relationship between pornography and social harm. This plethora of evidence is all very unsatisfactory for those who want to ban pornography and tragic for feminists seeking a quick fix for rape and violence against women.” Had my brother responded differently, I wonder what the consequences would have been and whether they would have been classified by Faust as “social harm”.

Melbourne , 1991: a 6-year-old girl met a 10-year-old boy after school and was by him led - without coercion or violence - to “the back of a vacant flat”. She later explained to police that the boy had “rooted” her, inserted his “dick” into her mouth, and then sodomized her. The boy did not contest her account. Police gave evidence that in his home were “about 50 pornographic magazines”. (An education comes in many guises.) The Crown Prosecutor commented: “Each of the sexual acts the boy inflicted on his tiny victim were graphically depicted in close-up color ... in those magazines.”

The impact of photographs and televisual images on viewers is profound in that those whom the pictures record can act as behavioral role models. “Pictures are a form of communication and highly effective,” remarks Doug Watson, Creative Director of Mojo Advertising. “The impact they have is emotional, not logical.” After seeing an advertisement, we may find ourselves selecting the product promoted without even knowing why; all that matters to the producers of the product and its advertisers is that we do, and their persuasiveness hinges on the emotional appeal of their imagery. The ability to absorb text and subtext is the crucible of our psychological development, and when presented with an effective image - that is to say, one that on some level startles or gratifies - we learn to link all that the image represents with the response elicited.

“It's all about the association of having a wonderful time with something that isn't necessarily good for you,” explains Ross Renwick, creative director of Billy Blue Advertising. “Our advertising industry and educational system are based on rote-learning, on the acceptance of images and ideas you wouldn't have accepted unless they had been pounded into your brain.” As 7-year-old children, we sit in classrooms chanting multiplication tables, copying the alphabet, mimicking the pronunciation of our elders, absorbing the behavior of our guardians as that which is appropriate and acceptable. As adults, we retain this “parrot” methodology. To cap: in 1994, Dr Hugh Potter, sociology lecturer at the University of New England, conducted a study of the “x-rated client” and discovered that 54% of those surveyed watched one or more pornographic videos a week.

Exposure and repetition, the technology of fixation.

Imagine, then, the psychological and behavioral returns of pornography, the text and subtext of which are absorbed when our ability to filter out the inappropriate is at its weakest. Firstly, pornography not only validates but promotes the linkage of sexuality and commerce. Within the industry, footage of ejaculation is known as “the money shot”. In five-star international hotels, hard-core pornography is prominently listed on the “in-house menu”. The newly-mainstream veteran of 150 pornographic movies, Annie Sprinkle, encourages all women to think of sex as “[a way] to make money” and as a tool for barter - “trade it for all kinds of things”. The pornographic equation is simple: sex = money = more sex. Our cinematic heroines reflect the social acceptability of this equation. Reporting on the 1996 Academy Awards, Mike O'Connor wrote: “Susan Sarandon, Best Actress, [played] a lone nun in a category ... filled with prostitutes.” And why shouldn't prostitutes represent womankind in the films of men to whom womankind's dominant representation is pornographic?

“We know that 81% of American students use pornos,” Alex Katz, a pornographic director, commented. “63% of American singles masturbate three times a week or more and buy our movies as fantasy ideals.” The “fantasy ideals” of which Katz speaks are imposed - however indirectly - on all of us: men, women, and children. The advent of mainstream pornography has created a new consciousness and with this new consciousness, dangerous new definitions.

Let us shelve the issues of violent and “bizarre” pornography and instead focus upon the portrayal of human beings in “non-violent adult erotica” (that Disney phrase so loved by pro-porn lobbyists). Every verbal exchange, every gesture, every look, every sentiment in these magazines and films is directed at one goal, and that goal is copulation. In pornography, there is never the suggestion of either sex being valuable for reasons other than its ability to penetrate or to be penetrated. There is no consideration for intellectual, emotional, or spiritual complexity. There is never the suggestion that expressions of sexuality are significant beyond their relief-value (orgasm) or their enhancing of status (conquest). There is never the suggestion that sexual expression is based on any perception of our fellow human beings as anything other than autonomous sex-aids.

This perceptual dislocation is reflected in modern slang - “ho” (whore), “cunt”, and “slut” denoting a girl; “motherfucker”, “cocksucker”, and “prick” denoting a boy: the verbal reduction of human beings to their sexual organs and sexual functions. Pornography is a culture of reductionism and destruction. Its target? Our ability to enjoy sexual expression without it. This remarkably sound economic principle is ignored by those who would redeem pornographers as defenders of the First Amendment. The sad fact is that pornography is not created to help us enjoy sex; pornography is created to help us enjoy pornography. The aim of pornographers is to sell wares, wares which demote sex to a subset of financial enterprise. Rejected as a form of powerful emotional communication, sex is depicted by pornographers as a system of exchange. And to remain a major player in the market of our consciousness, pornography must condition, and in this respect, it is fantastically effective.

Those who view pornography do not do so in a public place or where they can be easily distracted. The material is viewed in private and with intense concentration. These and other factors facilitate absorption of the pornographic ethos. Dr Freda Morris, former professor of medical psychology at UCLA, has stated that to be hypnotized, the subject must be kept still and quiet in order that a “new focus” be created. “And at a certain point,” she told Jerry Mander, author of Four Arguments Against The Elimination of Television, “[you] get them to follow your mind.” Dr Charles Tart, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California , Davis , explains hypnosis as “a state where you destabilize the ordinary state and then eventually get people into an altered state where they will follow a particular stimulus input much more strongly and with much less critical reflection [my italics] than they would normally.”

It can be said that human powers of discrimination are not at their most acute in the build-up to orgasm. “We rehearse sexual roles in fantasy,” says Dr Iain Montgomery, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Tasmania , “and if the fantasies are of a particular nature, then that is the image of ourselves and others we develop. It becomes conditioning. Over the course of a number of years, there are thousands of `trials' and repetitions of this fantasy and in turn, these help create the sexual identity and sexual behavior.”

Regular viewers of pornography are conditioned to respond sexually to objects and to objectification, rather than to subjects and to the subjectification by which individuality is defined. Regular viewers of pornography are conditioned to respond sexually to that which they can see, rather than to that which they can feel or touch or smell or hear, thereby dulling emotional intelligence and coarsening emotional response. Regular viewers of pornography are also conditioned to develop particular expectations of themselves and of their sexual partners. Once the mechanisms have been activated (by high heels, pigtails, etc.), the expectations follow. “The width of the span within which two stimuli are perceived as `the same thing',” Arthur Koestler wrote, “depends on the precision of the analyser - the gauge of the sieve through which they must pass.”

The gauge of the sieve has been damaged. English GQ magazine recently ran a “special” on seduction (that is to say, the pornographic definition of seduction). One of the pull-out quotes ran as follows: “The two women who have invited us back for coffee genuinely mean coffee - maybe with milk, but certainly not with fellatio.” There is a tone of surprise in the writer's voice. Maybe with milk, but certainly not with fellatio . What can the world be coming to? These are very modern sensibilities, sensibilities appropriate to our new consciousness. In 1996, it may be assumed in the pages of a highly respected upmarket magazine that coffee is a synonym for fellatio. In 1996, it only seems logical that a national study conducted by the Office For The Status Of Women discovered that one in ten Australians surveyed believe that women are “often asking” to be raped. Given the proliferation of pornography and its associative ramifications, why wouldn't one in ten Australians hold such a belief?

We are living in a society in which the dominant representation of our sexuality is divorced from those qualities we are as children taught to believe our finest. As a society, we are growing to understand sexual expression as devoid of context, as distinct from our emotions, as a commodity, as the end and not a part of a vital continuum. In its ruthless promotion of orgasm as the ultimate reward of any human interaction, pornography dehumanizes, and when we buy or sell pornography we are, in effect, condoning this dehumanization and incorporating it into our psychosexual vocabulary. Above all, pornography teaches us that we are the sum of our genitals and therein lies our appeal.

The social harm resulting from these lessons is the real price of pornography and understandably, not acknowledged or advertised by its producers.  

When visual material is used as a source of arousal, repeated exposure to it inevitably results in lower levels of sensitivity. This process is known as “desensitization” and is used internationally in psychiatric departments to help cure phobias and anxiety disorders. Once desensitization takes place, more extreme levels of the material are tolerated. Allied to this is disinhibition. If the viewer originally felt inhibited by social constraints about certain acts - rape, say - then repeated exposure to the material in which these acts are successfully depicted serves to reduce inhibitions. The acts become increasingly less troubling to the viewer. They can become acceptable.

Prior to his execution, the highly intelligent serial killer Ted Bundy said that “without exception”, every sexually violent man he had encountered in prison was “deeply involved” - as he was - with pornography. A Michigan police study of over 35,000 sexual offenders revealed that in 41% of sexual assaults, “pornography was involved just prior to...or during the act.” Isabel Koprowski, a member of Feminists Against censorship and self-described “hardened, jaded pornographer”, begs to disagree. “No causal link [between rape and pornography] has ever been established,” she confidently told the Age. I know a woman who has worked with sex offenders for 10 years, and not one of them has ever blamed pornography.”

Koprowski was clever in using the verb “blamed”. The issues she does not address are whether pornography triggers, encourages, or teaches rape and its allied sexual crimes. Dorothy Ginn, director of the Child Abuse Prevention Service, does not produce or sell pornography. She merely works with its results. “However outwardly respectable,” Ginn states, “people who regularly watch pornography inevitably adjust their perceptions of their own children. Most of this is subconscious. What we're talking here is a perversion of context, wherein inappropriate sexualization is validated. Pornography triggers abuse. We see the damage wreaked by this stuff; we work with the offenders; we are the ones who pick up the pieces.”

Robert Manne, associate professor of politics at La Trobe University and editor of Quadrant, has argued the point for many years. In a lucid essay for the Age, he wrote: “Most liberals believed that pornography was a product of Puritanism. How wrong they all were. Pornography once existed on the margins of society. It is now ... larger than the film and record industries combined.” Interestingly enough, there has also been a sharp increase in the number of recorded sexual assaults. The number of victims presented to the NSW Department of Health Sexual Assault Services has increased by over 30% since 1989. The incidence of child sexual assault has increased by 50%. Susan Kendall, coordinator of the sexual assault department of Sydney 's Royal North Shore Hospital , believes pornography to be “an anathema”. “My observation is that rapes are becoming more violent,” she says. “The injuries are worse, they are increasingly horrific. As someone who works in the field day in and day out, I believe that pornography of any description inspires violence, whether actual or ideological.”

Pro-porn lobbyists would have the public believe that pornography celebrates “freedom of expression”, rather than the freedom to be abused with true ingenuity; its “freedom of expression” is that of the Holocaust. Victorian Crown Prosecutor, Richard Read, is a professional witness to the results of such liberal creativity. “The nature of rape has changed in recent years,” he stated. “Where 30 or 40 years ago most rapes were forced vaginal intercourse, today they often include anal or oral rape, or the insertion of bottles and other instruments into the vagina.” Connoisseurs of “non-violent adult erotica” will (perhaps with an indulgent smile) consider the many times they have reviewed those routine pornographic films in which a woman is happily “bottled”.

Beatrice Faust has been defending the right to be “bottled” for posterity - without violence and between consenting adults within an appropriate sociopolitical visual context, it must be said - for longer than most of us care to remember. “Irrational responses in adulthood,” she opined in the Bulletin, “are assumed to derive from anxieties originating in childhood; distress over sexual explicitness is basically a gut-reaction called ‘visceral clutch'.”

Some ‘visceral clutch' was undoubtedly experienced by the boys sexually abused by those exposed by Justice Wood's Royal Commission. It is possible that these boys - that is to say, those who did not suicide - will or do, as adults, exhibit irrational responds deriving from anxieties originating in their childhoods. Pedophile T7, a trader in pornographic photographs of young boys, told Justice Wood that “without appearing van, I wanted some acknowledgment or recognition for my sort of artistry.” Three years ago, Faust dismissed public concern over such matters as “the ‘kiddie porn' panic”.

'Visceral clutch' may also have been experienced by the 11-year-old girl who was shown a “non-violent” pornographic video cartoon by her stepfather before he raped her. Distress over sexual explicitness may have been one of the responses of the 31-year-old photographer to her rape (after which she was slashed with a knife and had her nipple “sliced off” by a fan of Bondage Love, a pornographic video Justice McGarvie of the Supreme Court described as “almost a blueprint of what actually occurred.”)

The causal relationship between Bondage Love and the photographer's rape has, as yet, to be established by Faust and Koprowski.

But let us not gag those who celebrate post-modernist expressions of sex equality. “Pornography,” gushed author Sallie Tisdale in the Independent Monthly, “tells me that none of my thoughts are bad, that anything goes.” Pornography told Fred and Rosemary West exactly the same thing. It has to be said that unlike many of us, pornography is, at least consistent. Tisdale expressed her (few) reservations bout her passion to the Sun-Herald: “What disturbs me the most about pornography ... is the narrowness of the images ... It's limited to young, good-looking white women - where are the old women, the fat women, the average women?” A visit to any sex-shop will confirm an abundance of pornographic material in which obese and unarguably “average” women feature. As for the “old” women, well - we can only hope that as Pedophile T7 exists, so much Gerontophile T7 (in which case all women - and not just us “young, good-looking white” stereotypes - can be inappropriately sexualized for Tisdale's delectation.)

Annie Sprinkle, “fat” and “average” prostitute and a “performance artist” who, in her biography, lists her favorite films as being those in which “people [have] sex with animals”, is a figurehead of the pro-porn movement. During her show (Post-Porn Modernist), Sprinkle (disingenuous baby voice, corkscrew curls) announces: “You know, if  you've got to work to make a living, this is not a bad job.” Sally-Ann Huckstepp, the prostitute whose strangled corpse was dragged by police from a Sydney pond, may not have agreed. The average American woman, Sprinkle tells her audiences, earns $230 a week; in her heyday, Sprinkle could make $4000. The average American woman, Sprinkle tells her audiences, works 40 hours a week; in her heyday, Sprinkle only worked 17.
 
Sprinkle conveniently omits to mention the spectacular rates of battering, suicide, drug-abuse and mental instability in her “profession”. Justice McGarvie expressed his opinion of Sprinkle and her fellow ideologies in 1991: “It is a despicable thing that people in this community make profit by carrying such [a] trade as the sale of  [pornographic] magazines. The message which is strongly made in those magazines is that it is socially acceptable for a man to engage sexually in cruel, degrading and humiliating conduct towards women.”

“Cruel”, “degrading”, and “humiliating” are not adjectives that interest Sprinkle, who on stage shows numerous slides of herself in action: Annie holding her labia majora apart in order that we fully see the process of her urinating on a man's face; Annie chortling as a man inserts his foot into her vagina; Annie rapturously smiling as an amputee penetrates her vaginally with his truncated limb; Annie's mouth bulging with the penis of a man she introduces as “Mark”. “Mark,” she purrs after a beat, “was like a brother to me.”

Given that most children are unlikely to report sexual assault and that of reported cases, 27.4% of children were sexually abused by members of their families, Sprinkle's commentary is, of course, hilarious.

The venerable Faust will undoubtedly be pondering the causal relationship between these Health Department incest statistics and the offenders' socioeconomic status. “Whereas the link between pornography and harm is disproven,” she wrote in the Bulletin, “or, at worst, weak and indirect, the crucial relationship between poverty and all forms of social casualty is well established.” Susan Kendall, who works in the field of “social casualty” rather than promoting herself by merely discussing it, disagrees. “Nice, middle-class people do rape,” she emphatically says. “Rape and violence statistics on the [A1] North Shore are the same as they are anywhere else. What you find, though, is that highly-paid and educated people have the wherewithal to protect themselves.”

If, as the pro-porn lobby believes, there is no causal relationship between pornography and social harm, why do they bother drawing distinctions between “non-violent adult erotica” and those magazines and videos known in the trade as “nasties”? If, as the pro-porn lobby believes, pornography has no deleterious effects on behavior, why not legalize faux “snuff” films and publications celebrating the infinite scope of sexual brutality? After all, as Faust says, the link between pornography and social harm is disproven or, at worst, weak and indirect. In fact, why regulate pornography at all when most children can access it online?

A Citizens Against Unnecessary Government Censorship ad amply exhibits the reason of those who defend pornography. In large black typeface by two photographs of Hitler and Stalin is the information: THE EXPERTS AGREE THAT CENSORSHIP WORKS ... AND LIKE ALL GOOD CENSORS THEY BOTH PLAYED THE MORAL GUARDIAN AND BANNED NON-VIOLENT ADULT EROTICA. Both Hitler and Stalin also sported distinctive moustaches. Given that this is the case, should Albert Einstein and Groucho Marx have been tried for crimes against humanity?

*Originally published in An Instinct for the Kill