Addict Nation (19 page)

It seems all of corporate America wants to “penetrate” this market. Most of the big hotel chains offer X-rated films on in-room pay-per-view television systems. Adult films are bought by a whopping 50 percent of their guests, accounting for nearly 70 percent of hotel in-room profits. These are, for the most part, businessmen on business trips, average guys.
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The nation’s largest satellite/cable companies make hundreds of millions of dollars each year from adult programming, distributing sexually explicit material to their customers, although it’s been noted that the word “porn” doesn’t pop up in their annual reports. Americans now spend more than $10 billion a year on adult entertainment, which is as much as they spend attending sports events, music, or mainstream movies.
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The consumers of Internet and video porn are, overwhelmingly, someone’s husband, boyfriend, and/or father. Of course, it almost goes without saying but . . . the vast majority of porn consumers are men whose wives or girlfriends have
no idea
their men are hooked on porn! We’d all prefer to live in the delusion that graphic porn is being bought by “that weird guy next door.”

“There are so many wonderful things about the Internet, but one thing that is not so wonderful is that people have been able to really isolate, go into their home, and for years now just get on the computer all day every day and build up these sexual urges and desires.”

—Alison Triessl, attoney and cofounder/
CEO of Pasadena Recovery Center

How many American men are keeping their porn-viewing habits secret from their wives and girlfriends, sneaking onto the computer when she’s asleep or out? Lots! Tens of millions of men are forsaking true intimacy with their partner and opting instead for the quick and easy high offered by hard-core Internet porn.

Porn and Crack, Nothing Else Can Compete

Like crack cocaine, porn is highly addictive. Porn watchers can quickly develop a dependency on images of explicit sexual activity that often make their real life relationships seem dull or, even worse, irrelevant. Not many flesh-and-blood females can compete with the imagery that’s available at the touch of a button today. There’s no need to wine and dine a virtual Internet sex object. You don’t even need to shave or bathe.

In stark counterpoint to the lazy passivity of the viewer is the grotesque and extreme physicality of the “actors” participating. “Most girls who enter this industry do one video and quit. The experience is so painful, horrifying, embarrassing, humiliating for them that they never do it again,” says a prominent porn-industry media observer.
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The kind of sex women are required to perform in porn is precisely the kind of sex many, if not most, women are loathe to perform in real life: being penetrated by two men at once, anal sex, humiliation, and acting out rape fantasies, etc., etc., etc.

“I guess I see pornography in our society as a . . . perversion of sexuality. It removes the ‘human’ from the experience. As an addict, I used people to feed my fantasies, which I believed would bring me comfort. I did not see people as they were; I saw only my own distorted image of how they could bring me pleasure.”

—Dave, recovering sex addict

Addiction is a progressive disease, and that holds true for cultural addictions. In one century, we’ve gone from men becoming sexually excited by the sight of an ankle to many men requiring graphic sexual imagery on a giant high-definition plasma screen in order to experience arousal.

A High Tolerance for Smut

As we’ve discussed, addicts invariably spiral downward because they build up a tolerance for their substance of choice and need ever-increasing amounts of it to achieve the same high. This principle applies to behavioral habits like sex and porn addiction. A man who gets hooked on porn often finds himself needing ever more graphic imagery to “get off.” It’s not long before vanilla sex barely registers. Therefore, he will need porn playing on the bedroom TV screen to “enhance” his experience with a flesh-and-blood woman. Porn also fosters a sexist outlook that can carry over into everyday interactions by indoctrinating the porn consumer to perceive women as sexual objects and commodities to use or abuse at his whim.

“Most pornographic material portrays women as subservient and slaves to men. So they (male porn consumers) have a major problem relating to women in any type of normal social setting because their idea of a woman is so skewed by what they see in pornography.”

—Alison Triessl, attorney and cofounder/CEO
of Pasadena Recovery Center

Many women feel they’re in a losing battle to mimic the shape of a porn-star body that is often surgically enhanced to turn on a man. As the obesity-crisis escalates, with two-thirds of Americans overweight or obese, the hour-glass-figured woman who pops up in adult films has become even more of a precious commodity.

If the proliferation of porn continues unabated, we could be headed toward a future of loneliness where cyberporn is the primary way in which we experience sexual arousal and gratification. Picture a world where a human touch and the exchange of human fluids is considered horribly old-fashioned or even dirty. In the 1993 futuristic dystopian action film
Demolition Man
, the two leads, Sylvester Stallone and Sandra Bullock, engage in a safe and “touch free” virtual intercourse by wearing sex simulators mounted on their heads. On some level, it seems we have already arrived.

We Need Some Old-Fashioned Feminism

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a prude. I’ve seen highly erotic films that include nudity, and some of them were pretty darn entertaining. There’s even a soft-core subgenre where romantic story lines, beautiful actors, and gorgeous backdrops elevate the material to the point where it’s still an adult movie, but it’s not smut. And there are also films that touch on taboo fetishes, like dominance and submission, that are handled with an artful sense of playfulness or experimentation that redeem the material, be it a remake of
The Story of O
or
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
. Sometimes, in these films, the sex is simulated and sometimes it’s real. That’s not how I draw the line. Where does it cross over into denigration, thereby becoming something morally objectionable? In 1964, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart tried to define “hard-core” pornography by famously explaining, “I know it when I see it.”

If what I am watching is highly graphic, demeaning, and/or violent porn where the theme and imagery is the violation and denigration of women, I object to it on a visceral level. Many women probably feel the same way, but in an effort to appear cool, worldly, and open-minded, they have embraced the porn habits of their significant others or concluded that it’s just a nasty habit that they’re going to have to put up with, like the boxer shorts he leaves on the bedroom floor. Porn is a lot more pernicious than dirty underwear. While hard-core porn denigrates all participants by prostituting what is meant to be the most private and personal of human interactions, let’s be real, it demeans women more. Maybe the male actors don’t really care that they are being exploited as well because at least they are in the throes of arousal. An aroused male is a male experiencing pleasure. Since he’s experiencing pleasure, his exploitation is less acute than the female, who is on the receiving end and who may be feigning pleasure as called for by the director.

There’s another key reason why hard-core porn is so horribly exploitive to the point of being dangerous. Addiction is progressive, meaning it invariably gets more extreme. As the porn consumer becomes increasingly deadened to the material, requiring ever more graphic material for stimulation, he will often stray into pornography that involves extreme violence. There are dozens of subgenres of hard-core porn that involve sadistic torture and practices too X-rated to mention here. There’s even “amputee porn.” There are crush films, where helpless small animals are crushed to death, which apparently creates arousal in some very sick minds. And, as we know, although thankfully I’ve never seen one, snuff films exist where women are actually murdered on tape in the course of a sexual act. And then there’s . . . child porn.

Hooked on Kiddie Porn

In 2009, a United Nations expert estimated there are more than 4 million websites worldwide that contain images of child porn, 4 million . . . and growing! And, says the expert, the images on those sites are becoming increasingly graphic. There are numerous examples of how an addiction to violent porn or child porn has resulted in the addict becoming obsessed with acting out the sick, forbidden act
in real life
! Violent pornography may not be the cause of sex crime, but it is often found at the scene.

One sunny day in October 2009, seven-year-old Somer Thompson was walking home from school in Orange Park, Florida, with her brother and sister when she decided to run ahead of them. The adorable little girl was never seen alive again. Two days later, her body turned up in a Georgia landfill. After a lengthy investigation, Jarred Harrell, a twenty-four-year-old neighbor, was arrested and charged with her murder.

It would turn out that, back in August 2009, two months
before
little Somer was defiled and murdered, the suspect’s roommates had gone to the police about him.
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They had told cops they’d looked into his computer and discovered a slew of graphic child pornography that included a file named “toddler insertion.”
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The roommates were so freaked out they handed Harrell’s computer to the cops and begged them to do something. Apparently, law enforcement didn’t regard it as the critical, time-sensitive matter it would turn out to be. Authorities took months to complete the forensic examination of the computer. By the time they wrapped up their work and arrested Harrell, little Somer was long dead. The arrest warrant affidavit says, as part of their investigation, cops found “a video and multiple still images of a partially nude white female child between the ages of 3 to 5 years old. The defendant was . . . seen on the recording taking his hand and spreading the child’s buttocks to expose her rectum and vagina.”
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Cops believe Harrell molested and videotaped this unnamed child long before he allegedly attacked and murdered little Somer Thompson.

After they finally connected the dots and charged Harrell with Somer’s murder, reporters asked cops why they dragged their feet and failed to make a timely arrest of Harrell, given the child porn in the computer his roommates had dropped in their laps months earlier. The implication was clear. Had cops arrested him quickly, on kiddie porn charges, he would have been behind bars and not walking the streets free to allegedly act out his sick fantasies on an innocent little girl. The sheriff defended himself by saying that plenty of men who watch child porn don’t act on it.

Issues
on HLN, March 26, 2010

SHERIFF RICK BESELER, CLAY COUNTY
: Not everyone who . . . who participates in that type of conduct actually ever becomes an offender that attacks someone. Mr. Harrell had not come onto anyone’s radar screen as far as someone who might commit a crime like this. The things that he was accused of early on, you know, don’t necessarily . . . not necessarily a precursor to this type of event.

VELEZ-MITCHELL
: Well, really, Sheriff? We have to ask. Take a look at the affidavit for Harrell’s arrest from last month, describing the videos cops were given back in August in this computer. There were twenty-four pornographic images of children and five movies that contained child pornography.
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ALISON TRIESSL, DEFENSE ATTORNEY/ADDICTION SPECIALIST:
Yes, there’s a bit of a leap that this person would go out and kill somebody, but they should have been on the radar looking at this person, interviewing him immediately, taking him in, questioning him. More . . . much more could have been done.

VELEZ-MITCHELL
: Any thoughts, Samuel?

SAMUEL THOMPSON
: (Somer’s father): Well, that’s . . . that’s some pretty heavy information there.
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