Vice Squad
Saturday, September 15, 2007
An Anti-Pornography Campaign
A new anti-pornography website, HerStoryLives.com, opened this week. (Thanks to Adult Video News.com (not work safe) for the pointer.) The website features stories of people whose lives were negatively impacted by pornography. Though I support legal pornography, it surely is important to know the social costs of porn, so I welcome the website.
Her Story Lives is associated with the Lighted Candle Society, which also operates an anti-porn blog. The Lighted Candle Society hopes to bring civil suits against porn producers and distributors, actions akin to anti-tobacco lawsuits. But tobacco has more obvious health costs, and nicotine ingested via cigarettes appears to be highly addictive. To develop parallel types of evidence, the Lighted Candle Society hopes to fund functional MRI research that would demonstrate neurological effects from pornography exposure. How convincing can such evidence be? Wouldn't eating and drinking and yes, even sex, show some sort of impact via an fMRI? Does this make a case for banning eating, drinking, or sex, or suing their purveyors?
Labels: pornography