INTERNET PORN IS RUINING AMERICA! WHO SAYS?

I was recently speaking to a colleague who just found out that a close female friend of his was date raped. As he struggled to understand what happened, he asked me: "How do we help men take women's feelings more seriously?" This is a question that I think about nearly every day - whether it's because another girl in a school that I work at reveals a history of sexual assault, because Brett Favre gets caught up in a supposedly trivial sexting scandal or because unrecognizable female bodies turn up on a beach in Long Island.

This holiday season, we have much more important things to talk about than who will win the Super Bowl. We have to figure out how to make the world safer for women. And that may start with adding "no more porn" to your New Year's resolution list.

Before you scoff, hear me out.

While pornography has always been around, it exploded with the advent of the Internet. The days of accessing porn via forbidden magazines, pay-per-view movies or videotapes hidden behind bead curtains seem like ancient history. We increasingly take it for granted as part of the cultural background in our world; late night talk show hosts can barely make a joke about the Internet without throwing in, with a smirk, that it's a fountain of pornography. (Here's Jay Leno: "New York Gov. David Paterson wants to solve the state's $15 billion budget deficit by taxing Internet porn. Guys, you know what that means? You have the solution to the recession, it is in your hands.")

Yet behind such casual commentary is increasing densensitization toward a $13 billion industry that fuels a warped version of sex in which female sexuality exists solely to serve men's needs. This narrow depiction of sex has become standardized within pornography and is routinely reinforced to its 75 million monthly viewers.

And that is having a profound, corrosive real-world effect on the way men and women interact.

Perhaps that sounds to you like an archaic feminist assertion - the kind of thing that hip women no longer say. Yet the conventional wisdom that claims pornography is innocuous is actually little more than a dangerous delusion, peddled by those who stand to make a profit.

For example, UCLA media researcher and academic expert on pornography Neil Malamuth has found that viewing pornography can have a disturbing influence on men and even lead to violence toward women if certain risk factors exist. These include a promiscuous attitude toward sex and being turned on by power over women.

These aren't just abstractions for me. For the last six years, I've been having conversations about healthy relationships with New York City high school students - and those risk factors basically sum up every boy that I've worked with. During countless classroom discussions, boys have told me that from a very young age, they have been taught that for a "real" man, sex is about the aggressive conquest of female bodies and scoring with as many of them as you can. While these ideas have long been around, they are more socially sanctioned now than ever before.

So what happens when individual risk factors become societal norms? And when pornography, because of its ubiquity and availability, effectively becomes sex ed?

We see the answers in the schools: sexting between kids as young as 12, videos of sexual acts going viral and a growing consensus that "no" is just a starting point for the re-assertion of male desire and dominance.

And boys aren't the only ones affected by our porn culture. Girls, who make up a portion of the 12-to-17 year olds that comprise the porn industry's largest consumer base, have internalized these messages too. The prevalence of porn tricks them into believing that sending naked pictures of themselves or engaging in oral sex rings in school stairwells is edgy, cool, even liberating.

A 15-year-old Miley Cyrus poses for a near-naked photo in Vanity Fair; a girl of the same age at a prestigious Boston-area private school causes a scandal by performing oral sex on several members of the hockey team; and yet another female celebrity – Kim Kardashian, Kendra Wilkinson – makes her rite of passage with a sex tape. These separate incidents are all part of the same phenomenon. And the very real aftermath that I see nearly every day is girls feeling depressed and worthless as they realize that real-life translations of porn don't make them feel sexy or powerful at all, since the sexual personas they're trying to emulate have been created by - and for - men.

The problem isn't only what pornography promotes; it's what it fails to encourage. Our society actively ridicules men who are gentle and express sensitivity about sex - tragically, the very qualities that serve as protective factors in preventing men from doing harm to females.

Yet this serves the porn industry, which feeds on the most vulnerable women. The women plastered all over our computer screens are young and desperate, often survivors of sexual assault. The actress Jenna Jameson, the "Queen of Porn," was brutally gang raped before she turned to the industry. Traci Lords, who was raped at age 10 and molested at 11, wrote in "Underneath It All": "it isn't uncommon for children of sexual abuse to act out in the many ways that I had." Traumatized girls in need of a paycheck make up the bulk of the porn workforce - and in our society, where rape occurs every two minutes and females ages 16-19 are at the highest risk, there is never a shortage of applicants. It's hard to imagine that consumers of porn would still be aroused if they learned the gory histories of the women they were watching. But the social norms of manhood keep men unaware of and uninterested in the humanity of the girls they use for their sexual pleasure.

Here's to hoping that in 2011, we can take active steps to combat the misogynistic take on sex that porn promotes. Our young people need us to reclaim sex and legitimize qualities like compassion, caring and sensitivity. Male readers: Our kids need to hear this especially from you. Because it's men who can best teach boys how to respect girls. Getting involved with organizations like Men Can Stop Rape or A Call to Men could make you a better husband, boyfriend, father or teacher.

And ladies, let's make something clear. The porn industry is not empowering for us. It is just another male-owned industry that has brilliantly co-opted objectification in the name of feminism; our sexual "liberation" has become the most streamlined and profitable business around.

So, yes, sex sells - but the human cost is immeasurable. And young women pay the highest price.

So this year, let's work together to beat back the ever rising tide of pornography by valuing the parts of girls' bodies that porn is not interested in - their brains and hearts.

That starts by having men change their behavior and cease to view pornography as a harmless distraction.

If we succeed, our daughters - and our sons - will someday thank us for it.


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