Exposing Pornography's Addictive, Destructive Effects
Let's Permanently Enforce President Bush's Proclamation

Judith Reisman
12/16/2003
Reproduced with Permission

President George W. Bush's recent protect-America-from-pornography -for-a-week proclamation was a boon to the heartland. Naysaying the testimony of an army of pornography victims, the Department of Justice has not deigned to plant its flag in the belly of the beast. Even Congress is on board, urging the attorney general to aggressively prosecute obscenity. Mr. Ashcroft might try "aggressively" investigating federal funds going to "academic pornographers."

Jan LaRue, Concerned Women for America's chief counsel asked the hard questions. Why prosecute "only small-time distributors" and ignore those that run "the industry that seduces our nation, abuses our women and children, and traps men?" Fair enough. The New York Times reported yet another pedophile-seducing luminary arrested?this one a posh Manhattan private school headmaster. The Times, always clairvoyant, found it remarkable that affluent liberal parents have grown suspicious of "coaches, teachers, nannies, camp counselors."

"Parents who grew up riding their bicycles to after-school sports" now regularly "watch over soccer practice." And mod moms won't let Johnny go alone into the men's bathroom. Really? Why? The newspaper of record is puzzled. Well, no matter. Let's try to figure this out. Might there possibly be a "causal" relationship between billions of hot-to-trot mass media sex n' sadism messages and the kidnapping of 58,200 American children from parks, streets and yards by non-kin in 1999, most sexually harmed? (US Department of Justice statistics.)

Did some foreign enemy drop a "sexual toxin" in our water supply? Is it "just more reporting?" Are we just more "aware" of molesters than grandma was when she skipped to school each day? We all know the answer. But when our government plays possum while women and children are ghettoized as sexual prey, and when truth is taboo in establishment media, we deny what we know.

In 1987, I issued my final report on "Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler," Department of Justice, Juvenile Justice & Delinquency Prevention Grant No. 84 JN?AX?K007. This grant, under President Reagan, was awarded because these three magazines were commonly found as "manuals" used by juvenile rapists in their crimes. It was, and is, the only grant documenting the visual ideas mainstreamed in "soft" pornography? from December 1953 to December 1984?who did what to whom. Our Playboy investigation electrified the leftist media.

These Yahoos, who love sex research, frenziedly joined the campaign bandwagon to kill the research via its regulation, with mass media blitzkrieg and Congressional duplicity. Having failed to stop the study with "dirty tricks," they whined and whelped hysterically lest the polity see the visual evidence of Playboy's pedophile record. (Note: in Amsterdam, October 1994 Playboy lost a lawsuit in which they denied producing child pornography.) And what a record! For Hugh Hefner was, he says, "Alfred Kinsey's pamphleteer."

Yes, Prof. Kinsey was the "scientific" father of the sexual revolution. Yes, Kinsey's frauds normalized bi/homosexuality, sex mis-education, pornography, lower sex crime penalties and the idea that children are sexual from birth. So, "Kinsey's pamphleteer" sold images of "women and children" as fresh meat. Hefner's girl-as-meat trafficking led naturally, says Adweek, to his recent role "as an advocate of variety in girlfriends and Carl's Jr. burgers."

The heterophobic idea that "girls" are meat to be bought, consumed, digested and expelled carries Hefner's subtext; real guys consume as much young girl flesh as possible. Sales of young flesh defined Playboy. The original college man's pornography, Playboy published 3,045 cartoons, photographs and illustrations of children under age 18. Most were girls; 47% were ages 3 to 11 and 33% ages 12 to 17. Two-thirds of Playboy children were sexualized.

All were mixed in among 8,009 images of "funny" adult crime and violence "jokes" and thousands of provocative, sexually enhanced nude female paste ups. Playboy's desensitizing cartoons, illustrations and photographs yielded a rich lode of rape "jokes" against women and yes, children. Cartoons have always been the art of choice to dehumanize a group: Blacks, Jews, Arabs, Christians.

A Playboy cartoon: Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz is gang raped by her three friends. A photo: a nude girl, looking about age six, sleeps atop nursery rhyme sheets while Playboy urges its dad and granddad consumers to, "Come on Strong, Big Daddy." Another photo: "Jane" is a "naughty" naked teenager, chained to a four-poster bed. Thus Playboy devotees are taught, "How one family solved its discipline problem."

There are "soft" pornography scenes of "funny" sadism, bestiality, adultery, sexual harassment. Children were violated by Playboy's own constituency: uncles, police, doctors, politicians, priests, teachers and sundry others. Did such child sex abuse propaganda trigger copycat crimes? Yes, say the victims. Following the 1985 release of my study, Playboy's monthly 'rape a child' images vanished. Children in the Centerfold "biography" were suddenly older. Celebrity Interviewees and fawning letters establish Playboy as a sexual paradigm for many American leaders. Millions of college men were too emasculated by their own Playboy dependency to prevent the current Internet pornography war against women and children.

No Playboy men ever protected or defended a pictured victim of rape. When "soft" pornography florished, marriages disintegrated and children become the sexual victims of choice for adults and other children. For decades I have lectured on visual pornography as an "endogenous drug" that permanently restructures the brain, mind, memory and conduct of unthinking users.

The South African Constitutional Court just agreed that pornography overrides cognition and causes dramatic changes in viewers' behavior. This can be simple coarsening, impairing the capacity to love, or it can lead to brutal sexual crimes. Now, into this sea of confusion comes a level-headed documentary, A Drug Called Pornography that, says Randy Pitman of Video Librarian Magazine, "makes a compelling case for pornography's addictive and potentially destructive effects" querying "health professionals, convicted sex offenders, social critics and most frighteningly the man on the street."

Dr. Harvey Milkman takes the viewer "directly into the brain on a cellular level to understand how sex addiction occurs" using 3D computer graphics. The Department of Justice would find this a critical training primer for prosecutors, judges and juries. It goes a long way to explaining why even effete liberals are now suspicious of "coaches, teachers, nannies, camp counselors." (See www.harmfuleffectsofpornography.com.)


Dr. Reisman is a former principal investigator for the U.S. Department of Justice, Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. Her last book was Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences - The Red Queen and the Grand Scheme. She runs drjudithreisman.com.

Top