Perhaps because of the tawdry nature of the business, it appears that a brewing crisis within the porn industry is not getting the attention it deserves.
As the New York Post reported Wednesday, four young women in the adult film industry have died within the past two months, the most recent on Sunday. The cluster of deaths includes one suicide and an overdose that some suspected could have been a suicide.
This burst of tragedy has offered a glimpse of the nasty underbelly of the porn industry. Some actresses have started to speak out about being consumed by depression, drug abuse, cyberbullying, eating disorders and other health and work issues.
But it’s not just sex-industry workers who are at risk from porn — at least according to state Sen. Kelli Stargel.
The Lakeland Republican believes porn consumers and others hit by the spillover effects of the industry’s products are suffering and in need of help.
Stargel recently introduced a resolution that declares pornography a public health crisis that should be addressed through “education, prevention, research and policy change" in order "to protect the citizens of this state.”
Stargel’s measure notes that widespread pornography creates a myriad of social ills. Those include the “hypersexualization” of children; the sexual objectification of both men and women, and the normalization of sex-related violence, including rape, which in turn feeds the demand for sex trafficking, prostitution and child pornography; the undermining of marriage through either engendering a reluctance to marry or infidelity; and mental health issues that include “risky” sexual behavior.
The senator’s idea is not necessarily new. Delegates at the 2016 Republican Party convention incorporated language into the party’s platform that dubbed porn a public health crisis. The resolution called on states “to fight this public menace.” As of last February at least five states — Tennessee, Utah, South Dakota, Arkansas and Virginia — had followed the GOP’s position by declaring it a crisis or at least harmful.
Some, of course, dispute this notion. Writing in The Washington Post in May 2016 after Utah adopted its resolution, feminist scholar Mireille Miller-Young criticized anti-porn activists for scapegoating the industry, and attributed that to a “sex panic.” “Creating a space to examine sexual taboo and to take pleasure in sometimes radical sexual ideas is what pornography has historically been all about,” she wrote. “As a countercultural force against gendered norms and sexual respectability,” she added, “(p)orn is not actually a thing. It’s an idea and an argument.” Miller-Young also maintained that “porn has never killed.”
That last comment might be arguable. Last August the Daily Mail in London revisited cases in Britain involving six females, including a 5-year-old girl, who were murdered between 2003 and 2016 by men who devoured “extreme porn.”
Still, porn — of the nonviolent, consenting-adult variety — has been a cultural force for decades, as the death last year of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner reminded us. It has changed how many of us think about sex, razed standards for media and been argued by some as a force for empowering women. Efforts to eradicate or mask it — except under circumstances to outlaw child or “revenge” porn — have been met with largely successful arguments that it is a form of free expression guaranteed by the First Amendment. Thus, porn remains readily available and highly profitable, especially online.
As we read Stargel’s resolution, however, the senator doesn’t appear to call for banning porn, despite her reference to “prevention.” Instead, she appears to argue Floridians need better education and additional research about its effects, particularly about the causal links to sex crimes involving children and violence against women.
In that context, we see her measure as worthy of adoption.
This aligns us with the thinking of Jay Dennis, the former pastor at the First Baptist Church at the Mall in Lakeland and founder of One Million Men, an anti-porn ministry.
Last April, after Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed his state’s resolution, Dennis told the Baptist Press, "Identifying pornography as a public health hazard presents factual information to those outside of Christianity that this is not just a spiritual battle, it is a health issue facing every person." Well said.