Harvard Houseparent Encourages "Ethical" Porn

Erika Christakis, a house parent at Harvard and an academic, thinks there is nothing wrong with pornography so long as one can find an “ethical” source for it? I’m afraid so. Writing in the Huffington Post early this month, the same “educator, public health advocate and Harvard College administrator” put “The Case for Fair Trade Porn”. It’s time, she argued, that we became as selective about “our” porn as about our coffee and pork.

Basically her view of porn is this: the urge to watch it is primitive (universal) but “relatively harmless”, and with the advent of online porn the vast majority of Americans (if not the human race) indulge the urge -- including Evangelical Christians (important to mention that). Calls to regulate the content of pornography must be rejected because they would spoil the “buzz” which is the essence of porn for many people: “One person’s degradation may be another person’s kink…”

Nevertheless, consumers cannot be completely without standards when shopping for porn. Although some porn stars may actually like what they are doing, it appears that some are coerced and subjected to dangerous conditions, and it is important for consumers with ethical sensitivity to know which are which. People should be able to make an informed choice of filth that the actors enjoyed making or at least agreed to freely.

Feminist preoccupations lend a certain subtlety to her argument, in particular the idea that women are not getting their fair share of pornography. A lot of “so-called ‘feminist porn’” is “sanitised” and “a buzz-kill”. “Fair Trade porn”, however, would tend to lift the aesthetic standard “which might, in turn, shift the skewed gender balance of viewership.” Somehow, all this could put us in “a better relationship with the human body.”

It’s a reasonable guess that most parents of the 400 undergraduates for whose wellbeing Mrs Christakis is responsible do not read her blog on the Huffington Post. If they did, they might be thrown off the scent by three recent posts examining the Twilight series in which the Harvard House Master praises the films for exploring “female fantasy life” in a way that the movie industry generally fails to do. Exactly what depths that fantasy life might sink to is not spelled out; one has to read the porn post for that.

Still, it’s out there and word must be getting around. It would be reassuring to think that parents, and students themselves, some of them, are engaging Mrs Christakis or her husband (who, presumably, goes along with her predilection for porn) on the subject of exactly how sexual degradation puts the consumer in a better relationship with the human body, and just what they understand by a “moral journey”.

The Pforzheimer House Master(s) may reply that a moral journey is simply one that faces the “truth” that we are all beasts at heart (“primitive”) and that most of us actually live that way. My guess is that most parents, if not students (who have already heard a lot of this stuff in high school), would vehemently disagree with this philosophy and be appalled at the thought of young people absorbing it within the apparently civilised environs of the leading Ivy League university.

But what does the university itself think of encouraging the use of porn? The authorities must know where its House Master of three years has set her ethical bar -- on this subject, at least. How many other people on the staff agree with her? How would it affect efforts the institution might make to discourage hooking up like beasts, or drinking like beasts?

Mrs Christakis is obviously a talented woman and she no doubt has a genuine interest in young people. Her views on porn are neither unique, nor, in the contemporary moral landscape, uniquely wicked. But they are horrible nonetheless and it is discouraging to think they may influence the next generation of top professionals.

There are more things to consider in choosing a university than most parents have dreamed of.

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet.


Read the full article here.

Canada's Bill C-30

Bill C-30 , also known as the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act, introduced in the House of Commons on 14 February 2012 by Canada's minister for public safety, Vic Toews.

"The fight against online child pornography is a legitimate aim, but it should not be waged at the expense of protecting rights and freedoms on the Internet," the press freedom organization said.

"By rubber stamping excessive monitoring of all Web users and allowing the authorities to obtain information about users without a warrant, Bill C-30 goes much too far. The fight against cyber crime should not be carried out at the expense of respect for people's private lives and the presumption of innocence."

The bill beefs up the existing legal framework for accessing users' personal information and gives the police greater rights to fight cyber crime.

Internet and cell phone service providers could be forced to provide tools to monitor and record subscribers' communications.

Armed with a warrant, authorities could obtain records of the online activities of users for the preceding 90 days.

Guns, Pornography and Jihad

What follows is a portion of an article from here exploring the relationship of guns, pornography and national security.  It seems that those who would kill innocent people need to feel powerful.  Is this the connection between porn, guns and terrorism?  Jennifer S. Bryson is asking some important questions.

Jennifer S. Bryson

We may need to invest in understanding the impact of pornography on those who use it, particularly on those who also become obsessed with extremist ideologies. So, I wonder, is anyone in the U.S. government tracking and surveying the presence and types of pornography on these media? If we have access to the libraries of the personal pornography preferences of those who support and engage in terrorist violence, we may have a window into the dark corners of their minds. What lurks there? It may be to our own peril that we would ignore this information before us.

In seeking to understand terrorists, studying their ideas alone is not enough. We need to study and understand their minds—and in this day and age, this includes, in perhaps more cases than we are aware of, minds shaped by pornography.

Sometimes terrorists’ identification of their motivating ideologies can tell us more about who the terrorists aspire to be than who they actually are. Most significantly, if we want to understand modern terrorism in order better to prevent and counter it, we need to go beyond the surface level of what terrorists want us to believe about themselves and delve instead, to the extent possible, into the deepest levels of their actual lived reality.

Consider Abdo. In his words, he kept trying to portray himself as a man driven by righteous religious motivation. When he volunteered to join the military in 2009, he said, “I thought God would be proud of me.” Just a year later, he sought exemption from his Army unit’s deployment to Afghanistan on grounds of conscientious objection, again citing his personal religious motivation.

Contrary to his views of 2009 and contrary to the view of other Muslims, including Muslim jurists, Abdo claimed in 2010, “Any Muslim who knows his religion or maybe takes into account what his religion says can find out very clearly why he should not participate in the U.S. military.” Abdo wrote that instead of deploying to Afghanistan, he wanted to use his time to “revive the faith of the Muslim nation.” He also claimed, “I want to use my experience to show Muslims how we can lead our lives.”

Yet his words do not tell the whole story. As evidenced by Abdo’s possession of child pornography, he appears to have had interests other than—and in conflict with—just being a man who “knows his religion” or who takes his religion “into account.”

When there is dissonance of words and actions, words are not enough to explain behavior. What is needed is a comprehensive and authentic account of who an individual is. Focusing exclusively on ideology, as expressed in words, risks turning a blind eye to the internal reality of a person as expressed in his or her actions.

If we want to understand the inner workings of terrorists and would-be terrorists, we must seek to understand their entire person, including the relationship—or inconsistencies—between their words and actions. In the case of the 9/11 hijackers who visited strip clubs, and in the case of Abdo and among what seems like an increasing number of terrorists, actions include sexual perversions and pornography use that cannot be squared with what these ideological terrorists and their supporters espouse.

I do not know what link, if any, exists between terrorism and pornography, but I do think this question warrants attention. Since 9/11, we have investigated radical ideologies that claim their affirmation in Islam, and that terrorists have identified as their inspiration. Yet when terrorists adhering to such ideologies are found with pornography, we tend to look only at the terrorists’ words, not at the reality of their behavior.

Today, the lives of terrorists and aspiring terrorists often include the use of pornography. The pornography on their captured media and in their online activities is information that tells us something about them. What remains in question, however, is whether or not we will seek knowledge and understanding from this information.

With the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks staring us in the face, we already know that our failure to have an approach to security that is robust and accurate has dire consequences. Pornography has long circulated nearly unbounded due to calls for “freedom,” but what if we are actually making ourselves less free by allowing pornography itself to be more freely accessible?

Are there security costs to the free-flow of pornography? If so, what are they? Are we as a society putting ourselves at risk by turning a blind eye to pornography proliferation?

I wonder further: Could it be that pornography drives some users to a desperate search for some sort of radical “purification” from the pornographic decay in their soul? Could it be that the greater the wedge pornography use drives between an individual’s religious aspirations and the individual’s actions, the more the desperation escalates, culminating in increasingly horrific public violence, even terrorism?

As Bynum and Fair pointedly questioned, “Can being more realistic about who our foes actually are help us stop the truly dangerous ones?”

Here I offer only questions. I do not know their answers or what rigorous studies of these and related issues will yield. I merely think the time has come to suggest that our continued failure to ask these questions and to pursue their answers may be a mistake we make at our own national peril.

Jennifer S. Bryson is the director of the Witherspoon Institute’s Islam and Civil Society Project. This article has been republished with permission from Public Discourse.

Ironically, as I post this a visitor from Ankara, Turkey is reading a post about how Portland has become American's top porn city.

Youth Made Aware of Porn and Exploitation

ROME, JULY 29, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The "digital age" generation flocking to Madrid for World Youth Day in a couple week's time will be made aware of one of the darker sides of digital culture: the flourishing business of Internet pornography.

Thanks to an award-winning documentary created by Anteroom Pictures in New York City, the pornography industry will be exposed and analyzed before the young audience.

"Out of the Darkness" features the story of Shelley Lubben, a former sex worker and porn star who left that life behind and converted to Christianity.

The film, winner of the Mystery of Love award at the 2011 John Paul II International Film Festival in Miami, will have an online screening with Morality in Media next Thursday. After that, it's on to World Youth Day in Spain for a screening on Aug. 17.

ZENIT caught up with filmmaker Sean Finnegan, the director and producer of "Out of the Darkness" to talk about the film's message.

Read the interview here.

 

Name and Shame Sex Merchants

When Melinda Tankard Reist’s latest book, Getting Real: Challenging the sexualisation of girls, was published last year, a reviewer described it as a “collective shout against the pornification of culture”. “I liked the phrase so much I decided to give it to a new grassroots campaign I’d been thinking about,” says the Australian advocate for women and girls. Here she talks to MercatorNet about the impact that campaign is having.


Mercatornet: What is your overall aim in confronting the pornification of culture?

Melinda Tankard Reist: The aim of Collective Shout: for a world free of sexploitation is to name, shame and expose advertisers, corporations and marketers who objectify women and sexualise girls to sell products and services. We are at the forefront of nation-wide action to pressure them to recognise their corporate social responsibility not to depict women and girls in ways that harm them.

Our overall aim in confronting various forms of objectification is to make them unacceptable. We want companies to think twice before using exploitative, hyper-sexualised imagery of women. We also want them to think twice before marketing inappropriate sexualised toys, games, clothes and other products to children. We want them to recognise what the research says about the connections between over-sexualised imagery and negative physical and mental health outcomes in young people and children especially.

We also oppose the ultimate outworking of repackaging little girls as sexually interesting, which is the global trade in their bodies. We challenge anything that treats the bodies of women and girls as appropriate elements of sexual commerce and fuels the global industries of pornography and prostitution.

Read it all here.

Portland Top Porn City

Portland, Ore., is widely featured as a young, green, hip city; it also has gained a reputation as a national hub for child sex trafficking.

State police report encountering three to five trafficking victims a week. Although the Sexual Assault Resource Center, an advocacy group that offers services to Portland-area victims, estimates that it handled 75 cases in 2009, it also says that for every girl in its system 10 more are still being exploited.

"I just believe with my whole heart that people across the community would be appalled if they knew what was going on," said Sgt. Mike Geiger, who heads Portland's sexual assault detail.

Portland's legal commercial sex industry is the biggest per capita in the country, according to a report by researchers at Willamette Law School's International Human Rights Clinic. Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather once called the city "Pornland." The city has more strip clubs per capita than glittery Las Vegas, and a tolerant attitude toward sex, both legal and illegal.

Read it all here.

Missouri Restricts X-Rated Industry

The new law prohibits the serving of alcohol, total nudity, and physical contact between employees and the customers they serve. The law goes into effect at the end of the summer.


While industry spokesman predicted that passage of the law could result in job losses totaling 3,000, Jude Huntz, director of the Human Rights Office for the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., disputed this forecast.

“I don’t know how many employees there are statewide in this industry, but I liken this prediction to similar arguments made by restaurant owners when faced with laws banning smoking in their establishments. They said the ban would hurt business, but people adapted. This is just industry bluster.”

Read more here.

Pornography's Social Costs

WASHINGTON — Recent headlines about pornography use at the Securities and Exchange Commission stirred public disgust with government officials who viewed thousands of hard-core images while Wall Street banks imploded.

Yet experts and religious groups that have struggled for years to raise awareness about the destructive consequences of pornography use hope the news will contribute to a sea change in social attitudes.

In fact, anti-pornography crusaders received another boost from the American Psychiatric Association, which just released new draft diagnostic guidelines that identified pornography addiction as a form of “hypersexual disorder” and thus worthy of serious study and treatment.

The breakthrough at the American Psychiatric Association provides additional context for a new report endorsed by a broad swath of academic leaders: “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations.”

Read it all here.

Canada: Priests, Porn and Child Abuse

The arrest on Dec 8 of the Rev Robin Barrett, rector of St John’s Anglican Church in Goulds, Newfoundland, is the second recent high-profile arrest of a clergyman in Canada for possession of child pornography.

On Sept 25 Ottawa police charged Roman Catholic Bishop Raymond Lahey with possessing and importing child pornography. Bishop Lahey, who resigned as Bishop of Antigonish in Nova Scotia shortly before his arrest, allegedly brought a laptop home to Canada that contained images the Canadian Border Services found of “concern” during a customs inspection.

The laptop was confiscated and after a forensic analysis the Catholic bishop was charged with possession of child pornography.

Fr Barrett was arrested after detectives in Toronto, posing as paedophiles on an internet chat room, struck up an on-line relationship with the priest, and allegedly received pornographic images from him. “I can tell you that they are images that involve, basically, sexual activity, and it involves infants and babies. This person had what I would consider a fairly large collection, however the age of the [people in the] collection really concerns us,” Detective Paul Krawczyk told the Toronto Globe & Mail.

 
Read it all here.

Porn Dangerous to Teen Conceptions

"Pornography is a visual representation of sexuality which distorts an individual’s concept of the nature of conjugal relations. This, in turn, alters both sexual attitudes and behaviour. It is a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness. In undermining marriage it is one of the factors in undermining social stability."

So begins a major new report on pornography by Patrick Fagan, Senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Research on Marriage and Religion at the Family Research Council in Washington.

"Social scientists, clinical psychologists, and biologists have begun to clarify some of the social and psychological effects, and neurologists are beginning to delineate the biological mechanisms through which pornography produces its powerful negative effects,” says Dr Fagan, whose 30-page report, The Effects of Pornography on Individuals, Marriage, Family and Community, is a synthesis of these recent findings.

MercatorNet presents here some excerpts on adolescents and pornography from the report.

Read it all here.

Porn Surfing Epidemic at NSF

The National Science Foundation distributes billions of dollars in scientific research grants. A report in The Washington Times indicates that investigations of employee misconduct -- ostensibly to uncover grant fraud and misspent tax dollars -- grew sixfold last year when cases of porn access by workers began to surface. Pat Trueman, special counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), tells OneNewsNow that in one case, a senior executive spent 331 days accessing pornography on his government computer, often chatting with women who disrobed, before he was discovered.

"But when he was finally detected, he gave a 'humanitarian' defense for his actions," Trueman shares. "He said that many of these women who are posing are poor women, and he was helping them make a living."

The cost to taxpayers is estimated as high as $58,000 in this one situation. After being outed, that senior executive retired, according to the Times. The U.S. inspector general was shocked at the number of cases of porn surfing, and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) is looking into it.

Trueman suggests some form of financial penalty would be appropriate. "In my mind, the people who are involved in this porn surfing at work on the government dole should [not only] be fired but also have to pay back the money for the time they spent online looking at pornography," he states.

According to the newspaper report, the investigation overwhelmed the agency. "They actually had to take inspectors off the effort to detect fraud and put them on the effort to detect those who are downloading and looking at pornography at work," Trueman explains.

The ADF attorney says he was surprised to learn that the computers are not filtered -- but adds that porn access at work is not a problem isolated to the government and really is indicative of what is going on throughout America. In fact, he says, it reflects where America is spiritually.

From here.