The Mormon Church's "War on Pornography"

Gail Dines - Mormon ally

Recently, I noted that an effort was underway in Utah to outlaw pornography - even though Utah has the highest rate of  subscriptions to Internet porn sites in the nation.  Shortly thereafter, an op-ed appeared in the Washington Post that sought to argue that pornography is a "public health crisis" supposedly because porn encourages violence against women, etc.   It turns out that one needs to hear the rest of the story as Paul Harvey used to say.  The author of the op-ed, Gail Dines, is described in a piece in The Atlantic as a self-identifying radical feminist and “anti-porn advocate,” who sees male aggression under ever bush (admittedly, being gay, I don't exactly watch straight porn, but Dines' claims in the piece struck me as more than a bit extreme).  Moreover, she has been in league with the Mormon Church and its political puppets. Here are excerpts fro the piece in The Atlantic which looks at the bizarre alliance of these unlikely forces:

To sociologist Gail Dines, a self-identifying radical feminist and “anti-porn advocate,” these findings added to a body of evidence that she deemed conclusive. Dines believes that non-coercive pornography cannot exist in a capitalist society, where sex-based media will always lead to an industry that becomes a violent manifestation of structural inequalities. In The Washington Postthis weekend, Dines wrote a column that spread widely: “Is Porn Immoral? That Doesn’t Matter: It’s a Public-Health Crisis.” The divisive proclamation was occasioned by a bill passed last month in Utah declaring pornography to be “a public-health crisis.” The bill, like the phrase, traces back to Dines, who has spoken and lectured on the evils of pornography around the world. Dines made the same argument to legislators in the U.S. Capitol Building, at an anti-pornography summit. There she reached an unlikely confederate, a Republican state senator from Utah named Todd Weiler. A blonde, 48-year-old divorce attorney, Weiler returned to his home state to champion the bill. When the text of the bill made it to the Internet, Weiler recalls, it “went viral” and he was “immediately inundated with criticism.” This was, in part, over contentious claims being presented as simple fact, like “WHEREAS, pornography use is linked to lessening desire in young men to marry, dissatisfaction in marriage, and infidelity.” For facts and science, the senator directs me to a Utah-based group called Fight the New Drug. (The new drug is pornography.) The group’s “Facts” page offers much in the way of terse declarative aphorisms; such facts as “Porn hates families,” “Porn leaves you lonely,” and “Porn addiction escalates.”  The group denies a formal affiliation with the Mormon church, though as journalist Samantha Allen notes, its founders are all Mormon, and its facts rely on claims from Mormon author Donald Hilton’s He Restoreth My Soul: Understanding and Breaking the Chemical and Spiritual Chains of Pornography through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Olson and company sell the ideological argument as a “just the facts” approach. Less transparent than an openly ideology-driven strategy, the just-the-facts approach is rather a just-some-of-the-facts approach. Comparisons of drugs and porn have proven less clear-cut than suggested by the intuitive leap that all dopamine-based reward systems must be different degrees of the same thing. While drug abuse is perennially among the leading drivers of morbidity and mortality, the American Academy of Psychiatry has repeatedly deemed evidence insufficient that sex and porn addiction be recognized as mental disorders.  [R]esearcher Nicole Prause . . . found in another study that watching pornography did not seem to kill love, but rather increased people’s likelihood of being aroused by other media, and increased the desire for sex with their partners. The journalist Maria Konnikova recounted last year in Aeon that when Danish criminologist Berl Kutchinsky charted sexual aggression in the two decades after Denmark and Sweden legalized pornography, the crimes did not increase in step with pornography distribution, but actually declined. This suggested to him that pornography was an outlet for sexual expression less than a driver of problematic real-world behavior.  While Dines and others cite many correlations between pornography consumption and negative health outcomes, the causal relationship is rarely explicit. Making that leap is especially tenuous when studies rely on subjects recalling and reporting information about taboo behaviors and thoughts, a notoriously unreliable approach.

In my personal view, what really causes porn use is sexual dysfunction stemming from religious brainwashing that makes normal human sexuality into something vile and dirty that must be repressed. The resulting self-hate and sexual repression are the real triggers for porn use and fulfilling relationships.  Look no farther than the Catholic priesthood or the Bible Belt with its high divorce rate, high teen pregnancy rate, and volumes of false piety to see the fruits of psyche killing religious dogma.   

Bible Belt States Lead in Advance Ticket Sales of 5o Shades of Grey

Apparently, just as the Bible Belt leads in Internet Porn usage, so too do they lead in a lust to see the movie "50 Shades of Grey."  Even more delicious is the fact that top advance ticket sales have been in Tupelo, Mississippi, home of the hate group "American Family Association.  Hypocrisy remains a hallmark of the "godly folk."  The New Civil Rights Movement has details:

[A]dvance ticket sales for the movie "50 Shades of Grey" have been pretty spectacular, and no faster than in the bible belt, of course. Mississippi, Arkansas, and West Virginia top the list, and no town has done better for the film than Tupelo, where many shows have sold out. 

Tupelo, of course is home to the anti-gay hate group and Christian ministry, American Family Association. The group's most famous face is Bryan Fischer, their radio host and now-former spokesperson, after a particularly embarrassing series of events forced them to distance themselves from him.

The AFA has denounced the film, calling it "damaging," and saying a "more apt title for the movie would be ‘Fifty Shades of Evil.’"

 Why do I suspect that sexually repressed women married to overweight, chauvinist "good old boys" have been the top purchasers?

Yet Another Study Confirms that the Bible Belt is the Porn Belt

One of the goals of this blog is to expose hypocrisy and the Christofascists and other self-anointed "godly folk" never disappoint in providing a treasure trove of hypocrisy that needs exposing.  Now, yet another study has found that the so-called Bible Belt is also the "Porn Belt" of America, meaning that the Bible Belt has the highest per capita number of porn searches in the country.  Deliciously, internet porn searching correlates wonderfully well with where Southern Baptists represent the highest percentage of local church bodies.  A piece in Patheos looks at the phenomenon- which ultimately causes wrongheaded public polices -  that needs to thrown in the faces of ranting Baptist pastors whenever they launch into homophobic rants.  Here are article excepts:

According to a new study, the more you say you literally believe in the Bible, the more you watch porn. At least that’s the inevitable fact-based conclusion drawn from the biggest study of internet Google porn searches by region.

In October, two Toronto researchers, Cara MacInnis and Gordon Hodson, published a study in which they used Google Trends to analyze porn searches. Individual search records are protected by privacy laws, but it is possible to compare the popularity of search terms across various regions or states, which is what they did.

Specifically, MacInnis and Hodson linked state level information from Gallup polls asking about religious and political attitudes together with a variety of sex and porn-related search terms… their findings are in keeping with information from other sources: Business professor Benjamin Edelman at Harvard found that states with more traditional views of sex and gender have higher rates of paid porn subscriptions—meaning people who are willing to put porn on a credit card…

Smut in Jesusland: “The honest truth is that we all have our failings, Christian or not, liberal or conservative. None of us live up to our best intentions or deepest values. What’s shameful is not the fact that people find sex arousing and seek it out, even when they feel compelled to do so on the sneak. The problem is hypocrisy and the way that it distorts public policies and parenting, causing real harm to real people. For over a decade, conservatives forced abstinence-only education on young people, insisting that hormone-ravaged teens could ‘just say no’ when they themselves can’t.”

This epic public health fail contributed to the United States having the highest rate of teen pregnancy in the developed world, with devastating economic consequences for young mothers and their offspring. Some thrive despite the odds; many do not. We can do better.

Denying young people information about their bodies doesn’t stop them from having sex. We know that. What it does is create a fog zone, a “haze of misperceptions, magical thinking and ambivalence” that puts teens at risk for sexually transmitted infections and surprise pregnancy. Teens are notorious risk takers. The army sends recruiters into high schools because at age 17 or 18 kids think bad things happen only to other people. Or they simply don’t think. Cognitive scientists tell us that the frontal lobe doesn’t develop fully until the early 20s.

Add to that a conservative, paternalistic “virginity code” that traces back to ancient times, layering shame, denial and secrecy around sexual exploration. Religious and cultural codes prizing virginity may once have helped to ensure that children were born only when parents could provide for them. But in today’s world, an antiquated purity myth can actually have the opposite effect…

Christofascist Insanity: Even "Wet Dreams" are Sinful

I have done several posts as I have been reading "The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies" by James Neill.  The premise of the book might be summarized as follows: up until the Middle Ages in Europe as the Roman Catholic Church sought to control literally every aspect of believers' lives - especially every sexual aspect of their lives - homosexuality was prevalent and accepted pretty much across the globe.  Then, as Catholic missionaries swept out across the world during the age of European colonization, taking with them neurotic/psychotic "natural law" theories and a bizarre form of asceticism, homosexuality came under attack on a global basis. Just how crazy were these "church fathers"?  Here's a sampling on the Church's position on "wet dreams":

A good example of the shroud of sin the 13th century moralists cast around sex is the way they dealt with nocturnal emissions, a natural process whereby the male body eliminates an excessive build up of semen.  Even though the process is completely involuntary, occurring when the person is sleeping, the scholastic theologians held that it was still sinful, since it fit the definition of "unnatural" sexual acts , those where the man's seed is outside a proper vessel [i.e., a wife's vagina where hopefully the parties did not enjoy it].  However, if the nocturnal emissions was not preceded by lewd thoughts the night before, the act was only a venial sin.  If licentious thoughts occurred the night before, it was a mortal sin.  In all cases, penance was to be performed the following morning."

The book is a treasure trove of batshitery which ought to cause anyone with an ounce of common sense and intellectual honesty to run screaming from the Catholic Church's "natural law" justification for sexual repression, hate and bigotry.  If one wonders how Roman Catholic priest could become so psychologically disturbed that they sought release through the rape of children and youths, look no farther than the Church's obsession with sex and its "natural law" justifications for harsh sexual oppression.  Here is one of the author's conclusions:

The historian G. Rattray Taylor has written that "Medieval Europe came to resemble a "vast insane asylum" and observed a direct correlation between increasing church control over sexual behavior and neurosis in the population."  The neurotic reaction to sex of Saint Paul and the early church leaders reached full flower in the widespread sexual neurosis among the Christian of late Medieval Europe.

It was this neurosis that the missionaries then exported around the world, including areas like Africa where cretins and morons in government leadership claim that homosexuality is a foreign import even though the truth is the exact opposite.

The Christofascists' Obsession with "Porn Addiction"

If one peruses any number of Christofascist cites in addition to seeing numerous promotions of "ex-gay" conversion programs one also sees many promotions for programs that will "cure" porn addiction.  Here's a sample "ministry."  Here is another.   I guess it should come as little surprise that these repressive Christofascists organizations should be obsessed with porn because (i) the Internet has made it harder to control the private activities of their sheeple, (ii) Internet porn usage is highest in the Bible Belt, and (iii) there is LOTS of money to be made - just like with "ex-gay" conversion programs (just ask Marcus, a/k/a Marcia, Bachmann) - by marketing fraudulent programs.  A piece in Salon looks at the topic and finds that there is no proof that "porn addiction" exists.  But you will never hear that from the Christofascists.  In the last analysis, with these folks it is ALWAYS about control of others and money. Also note the pathologization of being gay.  Here are some article highlights:

Porn addiction is arguably the diagnosis of our time. The idea has thrived in a time of anxiety about the proliferation of free, ever-intensifying adult material — and how it might be changing our relationships, our sex lives and our (zombie voice) braaains. . . . . But a new study suggests there is no evidence that it actually exists.

With the help of an addiction specialist and an expert in neurophysiology, clinical psychologist David Ley did a survey of the existing investigations into porn addiction. The resulting paper is published in the scientific journal Current Sexual Health Reports and concludes that research on “porn addiction” is hindered by “poor experimental designs” and “limited methodological rigor.” Ouch. The burns don’t stop there: The authors argue that the porn addiction model ignores the real issues underlying compulsive smut-watching, and that the “lucrative” treatment industry that has arisen to address this new diagnosis has no evidence of effectiveness.

The literature is weighted with moral and cultural values. There are tons and tons of theoretical statements that are made but never evaluated. The exact same thing is true for what literature there is on porn addiction.

[W]e found what I expected to find, which is that the literature is so poorly organized and uncritically produced that there is not a lot of clinical or research usefulness to the concept of porn addiction. The overwhelming majority of articles published on porn addiction include no empirical research — it’s less than 27 percent. Less than one in four actually have data. In less than one in 10 is that data analyzed or organized in a scientifically valid way.

What we find is that individuals who are reporting or being reported as having problems with excessive porn use are likely to be male, gay or bisexual, have experienced negative life events in the past, have a high libido and a relationship mismatch around sexual desires.

Lastly, and this is one of the ones that is gonna be controversial, there is a large, lucrative industry that experiences tremendous secondary gain from the promulgation of this concept. As part of this paper we had a grad student call porn addiction facilities around the country and get an idea of the cost — and the costs were extraordinary. The average was $675 a day. These facilities were recommending or requiring stays anywhere between 15 and 90 days. Insurance doesn’t pay for this; it is cash only. The other thing that is really troubling is that there is no data to show that these very expensive programs generate positive results. There is an industry — and unfortunately I count the media in that as well, because the media makes lots and lots of hay by touting the issue of porn addiction, and even by raising the controversy of “is it real or not?” There is a lot of money to be made in keeping this thing alive.

What we’re finding more and more these days is that the claims of sex addiction are based on the pathologization of gay and bi males, . . . .  these are concepts that are turning being a gay or bi male into a disease again. Even with pornography, the research is very clear: gay and bi men use pornography much more than their heterosexual counterparts — but that use of pornography is not pathological, it’s part of their coming out process, their seeking out normative or consistent depictions of sexual behavior that meets and matches their internal desires, which isn’t present in the general media. Consistently, the research shows that gay and bi men are at far greater risk of being called porn addicts than are their heterosexual counterparts, and that is troubling.

China’s Sexual Revolution - Refinding Its Past and Rejecting Christian Puritanism

Among the many untruths constantly regurgitated by the Christofascists is the claim that marriage has throughout recorded history been one man and one woman.  The Old Testament its self shows that this claim is a lie since polygamy, not monogamy was the norm and marriage might better be described one man and numerous women at a time.  A parallel lie is that homosexuality is unnatural and that no nation has survived that ever accepted homosexuality.  This story line comes most often from upstart pastors and/or first or second generation of professional Christians ironically from a nation a mere 236 years in existence.  For comparison, ancient Rome existed for nearly three times this time span and in Russia the Romanov family alone ruled for more than 300 years.

Sadly, the truth never seems to be a high ideal with conservative Christians who rewrite history to fit their fascist like agenda (hence my use of the term Christoifascists).  In reality, outside of possibly ancient Israel which wanted to mark itself as different from all other cultures, same sex relations have been accepted universally among disparate groups ranging from the classical Greeks and Romans, the ancient Persian Empire, to Native American tribes to the Far East, including China.  Indeed, it is only where Christianity - in many ways a repackaged version of the ancient Mythras beliefs mixed with a large dose of extremism from the Old Testament's Leviticus thanks largely to St. Paul - and its Abrahamic cousin, Islam, have gone that same sex relations have come to be condemned.  

Thus it is interesting that increasingly - outside of backward and ignorant areas such as equatorial Africa, where extremist versions of Christianity are flourishing with the help of American Christofascists - many older cultures are belatedly discovering that anti-gay rhetoric and Christianity based puritanism are the imported customs and mores.  A case in point is China, which is undergoing a sexual revolution.  A new book, Behind the Red Door : Sex in China, looks at this phenomen.  Here are highlights from a review in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

But the book’s greatest strength is in carving out a distinctive story for China — and showing that analogies to the Western 1960s sexual revolution are misleading. The Chinese are not so much shedding the mantle of history, Burger illustrates, as they are rediscovering their country’s past. And that past includes a sexual openness that puts the West to shame.
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Beginning as early as the 400s BCE, Daoist sex manuals instructed men, in minute detail, how to prolong ejaculation while bringing a woman to multiple orgasms.

That nonjudgmental attitude extended to homosexuality as well. In the Daoist view, sex between men was not so much morally wrong as pointless, as it did not facilitate the accumulation of precious qi. Sex between women, meanwhile, was implicitly condoned. Roughly half of the emperors of the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 AD) kept young male lovers — a fact we know because imperial scribes dutifully recorded their affairs in works like Biographies of the Emperors’ Male Favorites. Such tolerance prevailed up through the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), when artists produced sex scrolls depicting intercourse between men.

To be sure, Chinese history was not without spells of prudishness. Eras in which the Confucian emphasis on hierarchy and control trumped the Daoist interest in nature were generally not great for sexual freedom. A reactionary swing in the early Ming dynasty brought with it the burning of erotic novels and woodblocks. And yet, Burger shows, the pendulum most often rested on sexual openness. Once the conservative spell had passed, the erotic literature industry again flourished.

It was only in the second half of the 19th century, as Western values seeped into China following the Opium Wars, that puritanism became more entrenched.  .  .  .  . Mao took this notion to a new level after 1949, stamping out prostitution and mandating an androgynous, sexless style of dress, even as he himself maintained stables of mistresses.

The irony is that by the time Deng Xiaoping initiated the economic reforms that would usher in sexual openness, licentiousness had been rebranded as Western “spiritual pollution.” The initial government line on HIV was that it had been brought to China by foreigners. Ditto homosexuality; for years, official lore held that China had no gay or lesbian people. So much for Biographies of the Emperors’ Male Favorites.

As Chinese embrace their rediscovered sexual freedom, the notion that carnality is a foreign import is an increasingly difficult sell. Beginning in 1993, the government allowed the establishment of sex stores, provided they maintained an ostensibly medical focus. Employees at Adam and Eve, the first establishment in Beijing, wore white lab coats and counseled customers on cures for erectile dysfunction. Today, China is reportedly home to 200,000 sex stores, and dried deer penis and other traditional medicines have been supplemented by lifelike sex dolls and French maid costumes.

But as an explanation of the dueling forces within Chinese society, Behind the Red Door is spot-on. Among the book’s more delicious details is the list of seven categories of sex worker devised by Chinese police in the 1990s.   .  .  .  .  And yet the list also suggests a certain innocence — a pragmatic approach to sex in a culture where it has been intermittently criminalized but not indelibly branded as immoral, a culture that will never have the same tortured relationship to contraception, or gay sex, or sexual fantasy that we do in the United States.