Ahead Of 2016 Election, Anti-Porn Group Holds 'Capitol Hill Briefing'

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Unfortunately, AVN was not able to attend the "Capitol Hill briefing" held by Morality in Media the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE) yesterday—nor the "live abortions on display" on a Jumbo-Tron TV set up at the Lincoln Memorial—but it's not as if any new ground were broken, at least according to the several "news" stories about the event. The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) seems to have published the most comprehensive coverage, and made it simple for their less discerning readers by opening with, "Porn is just prostitution with a camera—that was the message at a Capitol Hill briefing Tuesday on the ties between sex trafficking, prostitution, and pornography." Present at the event were all the usual suspects—Dr. Gail Dines, Dr. Melissa Farley, Dr. Mary Anne Layden, Donna Rice Hughes and Drs. Sharon Cooper and Donald Hilton (the only medical doctors in the crowd)—as well as relative newcomers Cornelia Anderson, founder of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sex Abuse and Exploitation, which "fights adult and child sexual harm," and Ed Smart, dad of world-famous kidnap victim Elizabeth Smart, now an anti-trafficking activist and sometime Mormon missionary. And since the event was put together by NCSE, current and former executive directors Dawn Hawkins and Patrick Trueman filled out the bill. And Anderson was more than ready with the falsehoods. "This is supposed to be a sex enhancer, but instead it's harmful. It's the same lies the tobacco industry used, that this would help you with your anxiety, make you look sexy," she told the crowd. "Now we're still hearing that to be hip, if you want to show you're hip sexually and cool and show you're tolerant and 'with it,' then you're supposed to be okay with your partner using porn or using it yourself." Well, that's certainly the first time we've seen it implied that porn will give you lung cancer... For her part, Dines repeated almost word-for-word the same claims she made during the AOL Build panel on the "documentary" Hot Girls Wanted, saying, "When they studied 50 of the top-selling, top-watched scenes in porn, 90 percent had some form of sexual, physical, or emotional violence against women," Dines told the standing-room-only crowd. "This is the peer-reviewed literature. Those who argue that pornography is not violent are basically lying, or what they say is not based on peer-reviewed literature." Bear in mind that for Dines, "violence in porn" includes one partner slapping the other on the ass during the heat of intercourse, or having his/her hand on the neck of that partner. It's a bit unclear what Dines means by "emotional violence" since she provided no examples. Anti-porn/prostitution crusader Melissa Farley made similar bogus claims, including, "The same things happen to women who are pornographized, trafficked, and prostituted. They're recruited in many of the same ways. The same kind of violence and coercion channel them into the sex industry. ... If you understand what sexual abuse is, what humiliation is, what rape and intimate partner violence are, then imagine if people get paid and are generating profits from those activities. That's what the sex industry is. Just because there's money thrown at acts of violence and coercion and sexual assault of children, it doesn't mean it's any different." Farley apparently has some trouble understanding the difference between people who are forced to do something against their will, and people who do things, even sexual things they're paid to do on movie sets—not real life!—with eyes wide open, with agents, friends and other performers looking out for them, and with the ability to walk away from whatever activity they're asked to engage in and not look back. And of course, if one listens to these jackasses, porn is the biggest boner killer around. "We're seeing increased sexual dysfunction among young men these days," Hawkins noted. "We're seeing increased demand for prostituted and trafficked women and children and increased child sexual abuse. Our courts and our jails are overwhelmed with predators right now and we would argue that pornography has played a role in that." Of course, the target of all this bullshit was whichever Capitol Hill politicians and aides they could get to attend the briefing, though the only actual legislator mentioned in any of the news stories was California Rep. Jackie Speier, who told USA Today that she plans to introduce a bill to make "revenge porn" a federal crime. One "legislative advisor," Eleanor Kennelly Gaetan of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, told USA Today that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should conduct research assessing the connection between pornography, sex trafficking and prostitution. "Until CDC identifies a phenomenon as harmful to the public, then from that identification can flow policy," she said. "To date there's no research by the federal government." But, of course, there's plenty of research by non-governmental entities, and all of it that's been peer-reviewed has found that porn is enjoyable and harmless, and in some cases even beneficial to relationships. Ah, well; another day, another porn-bashing seminar. Expect many more of them as the 2016 presidential election draws near.