OUR JUNE 23 editorial, "Without Reservations," positing a link between hard-core hotel-room pornography and the sexual trafficking of women and children, inspired a thoughtful cross-examination by Spotsylvania letter-writer Bill Mehr ("Are porn, pregnancy rates really connected?" July 2). We thank Mr. Mehr for his views and the opportunity to extend ours.
To clarify, the earlier editorial never suggested that men who view porn in Fredericksburg-area hotels, where often pay-for-view titles like "Barely Legal/Corrupted No. 7" abound, charge out onto city streets to seduce (or worse) teenage girls. Our argument was that in a town that is trying to curb a teen birth rate three times the state average--a statistic inordinately fed, according to its ob-gyn mayor, by the impregnation of girls by adult men--the blithe acceptance of Lolitaized porn (perhaps 20 percent of the typical PPV "menu") in big-name hotels raises the question: Are we serious?
Think of it this way. If the city's smoking rate, along with its rates of lung disease, trebled the state average, would we wink (figuratively speaking) at cigarette girls pushing cancer sticks in hotel lobbies? To stem a public-health epidemic, shouldn't government walk its talk by discouraging that which condones the crisis? Shouldn't good corporate citizens re-evaluate implicated products and services? Indeed, precisely on such grounds, Marriott, a notorious hotel pornmeister, recently banned smoking from its properties.
On the question of whether porn--pseudo-kiddie or otherwise--fuels sex crimes generally, the evidence, as Mr. Mehr notes (and we allowed), is less certain than, say, Newton's laws of motion. But reason indicts, arraigns, and all but convicts porn. Adult Video News--the closest thing the smut industry has to a professional journal--estimates that 20 percent of porn viewers become addicts. As porn increasingly colonizes the imaginations of these men, they tend to view human beings as objects on their mind's sexual stage and may seek to duplicate pornographic scenarios with flesh-and-blood people. This is, in fact, a common complaint of wives seeking divorces, a growing number of which are porn-linked: In a 2003 survey of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds said that the Internet--especially Internet porn--played a significant role in divorces.
MORE PORN, MORE ABUSE
Do porn-induced compulsions push some men into crime? It's axiomatic that porn figures in the lives of most sex criminals--including, says the FBI, serial killers--to an extent that, say, balsa-wood airplane models don't. Moreover, between 1976 and 1991--an era in which new technologies were taking XXX movies out of seedy movie houses and putting them into American living rooms, the annual number of reported cases of child sex abuse--abuse against those least capable of resisting predation and of implicating predators--jumped from 6,000 to 432,000.
If, as some argue, porn allows the criminally tempted a "catharsis" that reduces sex crimes, data such as the above suggest that we had better consume a lot more porn; if, as seems more likely, the pornification of America is multiplying innocent victims, a lot less. This choice should stump no one not seal-trained by modern liberalism to reflexively defend sexual license from curtailment, and to see those who appreciate the destructive power of twisted eros as smug moralists. Curiously, sex alone seems to get a pass: Nobody urges parents who physically abuse their children to achieve "catharsis" by watching movies of adults beating up toddlers.
Mr. Mehr asks, perhaps centrally, whether we believe that hotel porn, which helps drive the demand for trafficked, modern-day slaves, should be outlawed as American slavery was. The answer is simple: no. "No" because the ubiquity of hard-core pornography prevents it from violating community standards (except perhaps in Mennonite communities), a legal requirement in obscenity cases. But "no" mainly because it is far more desirable, as an expression of organic social health, if all of us recognize the manifold evils of hard-core pornography and volitionally expel it from the public square.
The Marriott Courtyard hotel coming to downtown Fredericksburg should eschew both dirty movies--do you think the likes of "Forbidden Coeds: Young Butt" qualify?--and dirty air. Other local inns should follow suit. The tax on a $7.95 film is too high when it's measured in human misery.