Porn is an industry where they exaggerate the size of everything, says David Klatell of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Pretty nifty turn of phrase for an academic.
Juliane Appling, who along with her merry band of gay-haters runs the Wisconsin Family Council, is just out with a “comprehensive” study which she says shows how porn threatens marriages, children, communities, and individual happiness.
The guy who did the study, Patrick Fagan, PhD., says porn is addictive. He works for a Washington think-tank. He says viewing porn releases dopamine. Bingo - addiction.
They stop short of saying porn causes train wrecks in neighboring states, fires in orphanages, and may have been behind Tiger Woods’ recently publicized “transgressions”.
But they do say porn is a major threat to marriage, family, children, and the community.
So, how pervasive is the porn industry? Not anywhere near as much as the industry would have you believe. There are widespread claims that it’s a 10- to 14-billion-dollar-a-year enterprise, but, as the good professor said, this is one of those claims that’s wildly exaggerated.
So is the claim that adults spend 4 billion dollars a year on renting or buying X-rated videos.
Since it is an “industry”, there are some believable numbers out there, and a Forbes Magazine/Adams Media study says the closest you can get to an estimate on the real amount of money spent on adult videos is somewhere between half a billion and 1.8 billion dollars a year.
The same attempt to put numbers to the porn industry says there’s about a billion dollars a year spent on downloading porn from the internet, about the same amount is spent on porn and soft-porn magazines, and about 128 million a year on pay-per-view porn.
Meanwhile, back at the Wisconsin Family Council, Appling claims in their Wednesday news escape that she “knows thousands of Wisconsin marriages and families (which) have been ruined by this insidious industry”.
Indeed. Thousands.
Plenty of my former colleagues in broadcasting referred to their workstation computer as “the porn machine”, but it was a joke. A somewhat dated NetRatings study showed news websites get about 41.1 million unique visits per day; finance websites rack up 34.2 million daily visits; greeting card websites account for 25.5 million hit’s a day, and porn sites….22.9 million daily hits.
It takes more than what’s left of the broadcast industry to rack up 23 million hits a day, so the online porn biz is doing OK.
One more gem from the “talking points” about the study on the WFC website: “Child-sex offenders are more likely to view pornography regularly or to be involved in its distribution”.
In writing workshops, we used to call that sort of talking point “stating the obvious with a sense of discovery”.
But, if anybody can save us from pernicious porn, it’s the Wisconsin Family Council.
With or without regard to 'ruined marriages/families'--
ReplyDeleteIt should be self-evident that porn at least derogates the value of the person (particularly women) and is a perversion of human sexuality.
The reason I say 'w/ or w/o regard' is that 'ruined marriages/families' is analogous to the 'health cost bankruptcies' bogeyman.
There are a LOT of factors, ONE of which may be porn (healthcare bills), but is that the lone determinant?