Op-Ed: Anti-Porners Have a New Plan—Get 'Em While They're Young

The National Coalition on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) held an anti-porn conference in mid-June, in part to promote its new sub-group, the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation (CESE), and some of the "greats" of the anti-porn movement showed up to tell the (not very large) assemblage basically two things: 1) that nearly everyone who's engaged in sex work of any sort around the world is doing it either because they're being forced to, or because they were abused as a child and don't know any better; and 2) that the best way to keep adults from wanting to view porn is to indoctrinate them with anti-porn "facts" while they're young. The conference, some of which was webcast on NCOSE's Facebook page (and of which AVN virtually "attended" about seven hours), took place at the Hyatt Regency Dulles in Herndon, Virginia, from June 12-15, with the first day being devoted to lobbyist training followed by meetings with various legislators and/or their assistants on Capitol Hill. The rest of the convention was dedicated to multiple tracks of anti-porn/anti-sex work/anti-sex trafficking speakers, several of whom claimed to have once been sex workers themselves. The conservative religious character of the event was made clear early on, with the very first session devoted to "Affinity & Religious Group Meetings," which included "devotionals" for Catholics, Protestants and Mormons. The conference then jumped right into the ignorance with its second individual speaker of the day, Dr. Donald Hilton Jr., a neurosurgeon by training and currently an adjunct associate professor at the University of Texas-San Antonio. Hilton's a very religious guy, having written a book in 2009 titled He Restoreth My Soul: Understanding and Breaking the Chemical and Spiritual Chains of Pornography Addiction Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, though what gives him any expertise in porn or sex work is never made clear; a Google search attributes little actual research on the subject to him. "Pornography, particularly as personified at massive companies, has become like Tolkien's one ring: 'One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,'" Hilton began, quoting the Religious Right's much-reviled J.R.R. Tolkien, then promptly proceeded to bash MindGeek, charging that it was "willing to sacrifice the well-being of performers on the altar of MindGeek's profit," in part because it backed the fight against California's Prop 60, which would have set AIDS Healthcare's Michael Weinstein as the state's "porn czar," as well as Prop 60's predecessor, Measure B. And Hilton isn't above dipping way back into history to find quotes that make even respected adult industry members seem either ignorant or cruel. For example, he reached back to 2001 to find Jonathan Morgan telling anti-porn "journalist" Martin Amis about how actresses "could be graded like A, B and C. The A is the chick on the boxcover. She has the power. So she'll show up late or not at all. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of them do that. Here you have a borderline A/B doing a double anal. Directors will remember that. She'll get phone calls. For a double anal you'd usually expect a B or a C. They have to do the dirty stuff or they won't get a phone call." (AVN spoke with Morgan about the quote. He's ashamed of it now, putting it down to his general lack of experience and former wisecracking attitude.) Hilton continued, claiming the defeat of Prop 60 shows how little the industry cares for the health of its performers—while, of course, not bothering to mention the PASS system and the almost universal talent testing every 14 days. And, of course, he's sure porn is addictive, despite much evidence to the contrary—but he has no problem comparing porn watching to tobacco use and obsessive gambling—and as the reason there was full frontal nudity in Game of Thrones. In short, Hilton's one nasty piece of work—and few know that better than sex researcher Nicole Prause who runs the sex-positive company Liberos. According to a defamation lawsuit Prause filed against Hilton, he "publicly claims that I personally appear in pornographic films, attend the Adult Video Network awards, and molest children in my laboratory, because I trained at the Kinsey Institute." None of that is true—but truth seems to be a flexible quality for Hilton. Also webcast was June 13's first panel, "Different Perspectives: Exposing the Connections Between All Forms of Sexual Exploitation"—which, frankly, was the conference's theme in a nutshell: pornography and sex work cause most of society's ills. Featured on the panel were two women who claim to have once been prostitutes and who now run sex work "rehab" agencies, plus Crissy Outlaw, formerly adult performer Crissy Moran, who does the same. "I worked in the sex industry for seven years, the porn industry," Outlaw told the audience. "In 2006, somebody spoke to me about Jesus and changed my whole life. I left the industry; I didn't have a plan but I put people in my life like Harmony [Grillo, a former stripper/panelist]; she was my first mentor, and I got to learn how to reach out to other women. I worked on staff, and I helped run a support group." "I was exposed to pornography at the age of three, and that for sure formed the way I thought of women and sexuality," Grillo added, "but even I remember in elementary school, my best friend and I would sit and flip through magazines and we would look at the women and we would say, 'I want her eyes and her legs and her this part of the body and that,' and so even though I didn't understand what objectification was, I learned the process of how to turn a woman into a thing and how to objectify her, and also what I'm supposed to be as a woman and what matters about who I am." So now, a six-year-old fantasizing about what she might want to look like as a grown-up is de facto objectification? Does Grillo seriously think there are kids, whether they've been "exposed to pornography" or not, who don't have such fantasies? It's completely natural at that age. But these panelists see sexual exploitation and its effects everywhere, from "If we go back to the black exploitation movies, that's where we glamorized pimps," to "When you look at the graph of the increase of women working in strip clubs, it coincides with access to the internet and the increase we've seen in accessibility to pornography," to "All the music now is about sleeping with people to get money," to "We've got gangs, we have neglect, we have childhood sexual abuse—I mean, it's this huge confluence of all these vulnerabilities that are really creating pipelines for massive sexual exploitation of vulnerable young people." Yeah; much better to just wrap them all in a cocoon for the first 18 years so no one or no thing can "sexualize" them! Oh, and let's not forget the adult industry! "Prostitution happens in porn," Outlaw/Moran began her rant. "I mean, it kind of is porn. I mean, it's prostitution, and a lot of violence happens in porn. Women are forced to behave in a way that's degrading to them, but I think a lot of women don't really see themselves as being degraded; they think they're being empowered, but there's so much violence—there's so many things that are going on in porn today that are even different than ten years ago. It's gotten worse and it's going to get worse, you know. Women are doing—I don't want to say what they were doing but sex acts that are not normal, and then the men who are buying it, they always want something more. It's a drug; they want more. When they get used to one type—like I've seen it in my experience, because the way I started in the industry, and I evolved into something different in seven years. When they get bored of one thing, they need something stronger. It's kind of like a drug, and it goes off into this weird fetish place. There's a lot of fetish stuff; there's like so many things, and bestiality, all of those things. People who may not have started watching that start watching it because they need more to get the same kind of arousal." "When you think about the addictive and progressive nature of porn, the industry itself is having to reflect in its content that progression, so the industry itself is going into deeper and darker places," Grillo charged, leading another panelist to claim, "So what we've landed on is, pornography is violence against women. ... Pornography is filmed prostitution." But that's not all! "Certainly we've served many women who are just clear-cut victims of trafficking and were forced into pornography," claimed Grillo. "You also have the situation where pimps and traffickers know that they can make more money off of a woman if they say she's a porn star, so they film porn of their trafficking victims, put that porn up and use that to advertise them in prostitution." It's crap like that that religio-conservatives use to tar the entire adult video business, no matter the checked IDs, the model releases, the licensed and bonded agents, the licensed studios—none of that matters when the ignorant just "know" that porn performers are trafficked women! Later that afternoon, another academic speaker was Walter DeKeseredy, a professor of sociology at West Virginia University, where his specialty is "violence against women" (VAW)—and sure enough, he finds plenty of it in porn! "Pornography is a very powerful correlate to violence against women in a number of relationships, especially separation and divorce assault," DeKeseredy claimed. "The research I've done has shown that pornography played a very key role in non-lethal forms of separation assault, physical assaults and sexual assaults. ... Pornography is not necessarily a direct cause. In other words, a billiard ball effect. It's not that people watch it on the screen and instantly go out and abuse. It is a correlate, and there are other factors that are associated with pornography that result in violence against women. It's not a direct cause but it's a strong correlate." (Guess no one's ever mentioned to Walt the universally accepted scientific caution, "Correlation is not causation.") "A lot of men learn about sex through pornography," DeKeseredy continued. "A couple of years ago, the research was showing that the average age the American boy first starts consuming porn is 11. There's research indicating it's now dropped to 9, and this is terrifying in many ways because that's their first exposure to sex, and you know the industry is increasingly violent and racist." "Average age [of] 9"? Seriously? That'd surprise the experts at MedicineNet.com, which has puberty in boys starting between ages 12 and 16, and kids who haven't reached puberty are not interested in porn. And as for "increasingly violent and racist"—well, a simple "Horseshit!" will do. DeKeseredy had a few other "out there" views, like how college kids "view it in groups and they learn to objectify women through their exposure to porn and they often learn this in all-male settings," but interestingly, one thing he's not worried about are sex robots. (Don't ask.) But it's not just porn these jackasses want to get rid of; it's also legalized prostitution, no matter where in the world it occurs. That was the basis of a late afternoon panel, "Bright Light on the Red Light: Exposing the Harms of Legal & Deregulated Prostitution," moderated by Donna M. Hughes, who in the mid-'00s led the fight to recriminalize prostitution in Rhode Island—she even claimed that legal prostitution made RI a "sex tourist destination"—and including Melissa Holland, an ex-hooker who found The Lord and now works to criminalize that pleasure in Nevada, plus two Europeans who run prostitution "rehab" organizations in Germany and The Netherlands—and want to recriminalize it there. Hughes started out by attempting to define the difference between decriminalization and legalization, claiming that "Decriminalization means that all laws and regulations have been removed so there is no one who can intervene in what is going on, whether it be the police, the health department, the zoning officials." It's horseshit, of course—if criminal activity happens, cops can investigate and make arrests—but no one dared to contradict her. But Holland doubled down on that idea, and after declaring that "I want to make sure it's clear, there is no safe way for prostitution to exist," she went on to bash legal sex work in general: "In Nevada, we're 48 years into legalized prostitution, so I actually can picture it, and it makes me want to cry picturing the effects and the harms of legalized prostitution 48 years later. And in my state, on a daily basis, I interact with these women and these children that are affected by generations being raised in a state that have desensitized themselves to the dehumanization and commodification of women and children, and when you frame it as a job like any other, it means they get to go into your high school for career day; it means they get to be track coaches at the high school for the girl's track team, because it's a job like any other. And you see it infiltrate so nobody gives it a second thought that there is a strip club owner who is a high school coach for the girls track team. It is not even a conversation." See, for these jackasses, people who work in the sex industry aren't actual human beings; they're more like demons, always looking to subvert women and children in dozens of subtle ways. Or as Holland put it, "The desensitization of the spectrum of sexual deviancy is younger and younger and younger for their appetites, and that is the sad effect of what happens 50 years later if we legalize this. I mean, this is not a theoretical argument for my state. We live in it." As for the two Europeans on the panel, their take on the legal prostitution in their countries is that women are still trafficked into the brothels, are still saddled with pimps who control their every move, and that because of legalization, the cops either do nothing about it or they're easily fooled by wily brothel owners. Somehow, the idea that some women might choose sex work because it pays good money never filters into their philosophy. Or as Holland put it, "When you legalize the sex trade, that's what the whole system says: 'There's really no harm happening to you, there's really nothing wrong with what's happening to you. How could there be? We legalized it.'" The next session AVN "attended" was Friday morning, when the assemblage heard from Patrick Trueman, one of the founders of Morality in Media, the predecessor to NCOSE, and one of that organization's attorneys, Benjamin Bull—who certainly managed to live up (down?) to his last name. The title of their talk was "The Movement's Voice in the Courts & Legislatures," and Trueman laid out his organization's game plan: "Every great movement needs to be active in the courts and in the legislatures. Otherwise, you pass legislation; the other side takes it to court and you're done. We need a law center, so we started one at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, but we needed a top-flight litigator, so we searched high and low and found Ben Bull. ... He has litigated against the sex industry time and time again as a prosecutor and won every case." If that's true, the internet is pretty light on the evidence of it. Although Bull seems to have worked for all the major religio-conservative law groups—First Liberty Institute, American Center for Law and Justice (run by Trump's personal attorney Jay Sekulow) and Alliance Defending Freedom to name a few—a Google search for his "wins" as a prosecutor—NCOSE claims he's been involved in "more than 14 jury trials against pornographers without a loss" and "numerous obscenity and child pornography appellate cases, including at the Supreme Court"—failed to reveal any such cases in which he's been involved. In any case, Bull spent his time at the podium to promote NCOSE's attempts to train law students and lawyers to "populate the world of stopping trafficking and pornography" and to "persuade the Department of Justice to begin enforcing existing obscenity laws." "Did you know Pornhub and Pornhub copycats and all that, did you know they're violating federal law right now, and that there are laws on the books, tools to be used to put them out of business?" Bull claimed. "Well, that's priority number one, and that's something Pat and I are working on right now and Lord willing, in the next couple of months, we'll see some action at the Department of Justice to start coming down on this illegal smut that's raining on all of us and our children on the Internet... We want to intervene in major key federal litigation like the FOSTA/SESTA case... We need to make sure that statute remains on the books and is enforced over time." Yeah, Bull has a lot of big plans, like "circulating model legislation on trafficking and pornography" and "stopping bad legislation when we see it," but really, it's the same old crap most of these anti-porn organizations feed to their members to show "We're doing something!" to get donations. Trueman's go-to subordinate Dawn Hawkins took the stage next to lecture on "Out of the Shadows: Confronting Child-on-Child Harmful Sexual Behavior," a subject that frequently brought her to tears. (Seems she cries pretty easily.) And Hawkins had plenty of stories to tell, such as the one about the 14-year-old uncle who was a sex abuser: "When the police went to take him and they searched the home, they found tons and tons of pornography: In his bedroom, on his Xbox—there's just so much in this web coming together." One of Hawkins' main points was that in cases of suspected child abuse, porn "isn’t focused on, very much." "There's a whole host of studies about the impact of pornography on children and teens," she claimed. "I would argue that pornography is contributing to a public health crisis in the United States and there's a whole host of impacts from pornography but one of them is this child-on-child harmful sexual behavior. ... The single factor that drove kids to act out is their exposure to pornography." While Hawkins never managed to list any of those "whole host of studies," AVN is familiar with several that would probably be on that list, by such "researchers" as Profs. Gail Dines and Chyng Sun, and the vast majority are poorly done, almost always with the research geared to support the predetermined conclusions. "When a youth is seeing and perceiving that sex is about hitting and spitting on and calling women horrible names, then when they try to engage in sex and they just mimic it—or when the women in pornography are saying 'no' but then they're violently penetrated and they seem to like it in the end, what message is that teaching our young kids when they hear 'no'?" Hawkins asked. Of course, it's unclear what porn she's referring to, since the overwhelming majority of content produced by the recognized adult industry contains none of those memes. Perhaps one of the most troubling speeches that we heard at the conference was Kristen Jenson's "Why Prevention Is The Smarter, Cheaper Way to End Sexual Exploitation." Jenson runs an organization called Protect Young Minds, and she's got a short series of books, Good Pictures, Bad Pictures. "Good Pictures, Bad Pictures is a read-aloud book for parents to read to young children, because we know that young children are getting exposed to pornography because they are online and they have digital devices," Jenson told the crowd. "Sometimes I think every school bus in America is a 'Rated X' theater. So I wrote Good Pictures, Bad Pictures to make it easy and comfortable for parents to start these conversations, because this is a new world, and their parents didn’t really talk to them about it, so this book and another one, Good Pictures, Bad Pictures Junior, for 3-6, and these books teach three essential things that children need to know so they're not caught off-guard: A simple, age-appropriate definition of pornography; a warning so they understand that looking at pornography can actually be harmful to their brain and to their view of other people and to their relationships; and it prepares them with a plan of what to do when they see pornography, so they're not caught off-guard." Sounds simple enough, right? Get 'em while they're young and you won't have to worry about them when they're grown. It's an old idea, and one that's been part of the authoritarian playbook for millennia. "Give me the first ten years of a child's school life, let me appoint the teacher and prescribe the methods, and I care little who has his after-instruction," declared Prof. Jas. E. Vose in his 1876 book Qualifications for Primary Teaching. It's a philosophy that's served dictatorships well throughout history—and it was a central theme at CESE. "Parents will learn the four pillars of prevention strategy," Jenson assured, "which includes teaching children effective ways to protect themselves from the brain-damaging effects of pornography, early information about healthy sexuality, healthy ways to meet emotional needs, and safe and positive habits for using technology." Right; brainwash, rinse, repeat. Someone identified only as Carrie from NCOSE affiliate Fight The New Drug doubled down on that message: "Given that the average age of first exposure is about nine to 11 years old, we aren't the first people to expose teens to the topic; they already know about it. The trouble is unlearning and unteaching what they already have been taught by porn, and that's just being real and reminding them of their value or reminding them of their worth and that they deserve to have healthy relationships and that porn only serves to drive a wedge in there... The statistics are, 99 percent of people see it before the age of 18, so we just really try to destigmatize it and say, hey, since you already know about it, let's just talk about it face-to-face; let's deescalate it, let's first talk about relationships, let's talk about your brain, let's talk about the world, and then let's slowly introduce the topic of pornography, and that's how our presentations are structured." Yeah, just ease into it and maybe they won't notice you're trying to brainwash them. But perhaps most frightening was the lecture by Dina Alexander, CEO of Educate and Empower Kids, "an organization determined to strengthen families by teaching digital citizenship, media literacy, and healthy sexuality education—including education about the dangers of online porn." Her talk was titled, "Why We Need To Fight For Kids' Healthy Sexuality," which seriously suggested putting kids as old as 18 in anti-technological cocoons. After suggesting that parents need to have comprehensive discussions with their kids about sex—something few who attended this conference would be qualified to do in anything approaching a non-judgmental manner—Anderson stated, "Okay; we've had porn talks in our home, we've had sex talks, we're doing great; what's the next level? Because they're going to get smartphones, right? Hold off on that as long as possible. Make sure they have a smartphone before they leave your home, but it should be a lot later than you think. Not 13, not 14; we're talking close to before they leave your home. ... People ask us all the time: When should I give my kid a phone? When should they be allowed on social media? We no longer say an age. We used to say, wait till 13 or wait till 18; that was always the hope. Not good enough. Our kids, we need to wait until they are able to be deliberate. That means when they can get on, say something, get off; go on for a specific person or a specific purpose, get off. And I have a lot of people who say, 'I don't think my freshman in high school can do that,' and I say, 'Exactly! So they shouldn't be on.'" Wow! Just wow! The real message is, "Stop the flow of information communication," and these people intend to bring that "message" to every school and community group in the country. Or as Trueman said during a dinner speech Thursday evening, "When I think back to our first summit just six years ago, I have to think just how far this movement has come. How great our victories have been. Think of FOSTA/SESTA, the greatest anti-trafficking bill passed by Congress in over 20 years, and it has the sexual exploitation industry quaking in their boots. Think also of the destruction of Backpage.com, and think of the 15 states that have declared pornography to be a public health crisis in America. This is a movement now that expects to win and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." That's what groups like Free Speech Coalition, the Woodhull Freedom Foundation, the National Coalition Against Censorship and several other organizations hope to do: Make these anti-sexual fascists "take 'no' for an answer." Let's just hope the adult industry and its fans are concerned enough about these issues to help them do it. Pictured: Screen grabs from various talks at the conference—and incidentally, Amazon doesn't sell child sex dolls as Trueman claimed.