Page 395 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Pornography

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Cyberpornography and Human Intimacy

From pornography’s early expression in engravings, to film and magazines, writing and
research designed to understand pornography and its effects on human behavior and sexu-
ality have occupied scholars from the social sciences to the humanities. With the rise of
the Internet and the vast cyberporn industry, new questions about human sexuality have
occupied researchers trying to explain the motivations and consequences of heavy use, or
even what some characterize as addiction, of online pornography. Pamela Paul and other
health researchers have found disturbing consequences for male intimacy in those who are
habituated to cyberporn. Many men accustomed to erotic responses from online pornog-
raphy reported difficulty being aroused without it, even when having sex with their wives
or girlfriends. One consequence of cyberporn, then, is a loss of erotic desire during sexual
intimacy. Many men reported the need to recall or imitate the acts, behaviors, attitudes, and
images of cyberporn in order to achieve sexual gratification, leaving them and their female
partners at a loss for creative eroticism, individual expression, and interpersonal connection.
Such sensibilities in the age of the Internet need not be unique to gender or sexual prefer-
ence, and more research on the effects of mediated sexual experience are necessary to
understand the complex nature of the relationship between human sexuality and media.

unwillingness of people to accurately report their own behavior, the political
bias of the researchers, and so on.
Internationally, feminist researchers point out links between pornography
and sex trafficking and slavery as well as the use of pornography in conquest,
where prostitution is imposed and pornography is made of the subjugated
women as well as men. For example, during the war between Serbia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina and Croatia, Serbian forces systematically raped women as a tactic
of genocide and these rapes were photographed and videotaped. Sexual torture,
photographed and displayed as kind of war pornography, also was practiced
by U.S. troops against Iraqi prisoners in the American prison at Abu Ghraib in
Iraq in 2003. Subsequently, investigators released photographs of male Iraqis
sexually humiliated and tortured by U.S. soldiers. There also were pornographic
videos and photographs made of female prisoners, but these have not been re-
leased. Feminist activists argue that in the case of war and forced occupation,
pornography regularly is used to bolster the invading forces’ morale, and to de-
stroy the self-regard of occupied peoples who are used for pornography as well
as sex tourism.

ConCLusion

Pornography is now openly diffused throughout American culture. Not only
has it grown enormously as an industry, but, in mainstream imagery, other
media outlets use typical pornographic images and themes in advertisements,