Hampshire College Thesis Explores Northampton Porn Debate; Our Comments

The past year’s Porn Wars can be seen as part of a longer struggle over sexuality in Northampton and elsewhere. This struggle has resulted in greater acceptance for gay people, which we think is good. Among “third-wave” feminists, it has also blunted concern about porn. That’s unfortunate, a misunderstanding of what sexual liberation should be about.

Hampshire College student Murial Barkley-Aylmer chronicles Northampton’s recent sex debates in “NoPorn Northampton: An Interdisciplinary Ethnography Following One City’s Struggle with Pornography”. She has kindly permitted us to make this paper available as a PDF download. Barkley-Aylmer was recently featured on Bill Dwight’s August 14 talk show on WHMP (listen to the mp3):

Murial Barkley-Aylmer did her final thesis at Hampshire College on the Northampton Porn debate. It was an impressive ethnographic study from a unique perspective. She provides context and analysis we’re not used to in our cranky municipal debates. She’s Gr-r-r-eat!

We agree with Barkley-Aylmer on some important issues:


  • The movement towards greater sexual liberation has led to increased rights and respect for women and gay people. This is good

  • The overall state of sex education in our schools woefully fails to meet present needs

  • The treatment of Smith College Professor Newton Arvin in the 1960s was deeply regrettable

  • The physical destruction of stock at the Womonfyre bookstore in the late 1980s was a disturbing and inappropriate way to express displeasure with pornographic materials

  • Creating spaces where people feel safe is good.

On the other hand, Barkley-Aylmer indulges in certain theatrical devices that generate more smoke than light. She endows the characters in her play with distinctive characteristics so you can quickly tell the good from the deluded. This saves the reader from having to engage with the Deluded’s hundreds of thousands of words of evidence. Just look at ’em. You can see they’re odd just from the pants they wear. (p.37)

If patriarchy is a concern, Barkley-Aylmer should consider how the mafia, one of the most patriarchal institutions of our age, has displayed a keen interest in pornography and adult enterprises for decades now. Surely if mafiosi believed that porn, taken as a whole, challenged the concept of patriarchy, they would be less enthusiastic about selling it.

Here are some of our other key points we’d like to reiterate to counter Barkley-Aylmer’s arguments…

Secondary effects are a real and contemporary phenomenon

Capital Video has recently demonstrated in Springfield that secondary effects are alive and well. Residents and developers have come forward over the past few months to say that Capital Video’s Springfield store economically blights the neighborhood and attracts prostitutes. The police commissioner concurs and says that merely trying to keep up with crimes as they occur is inadequate in this case.

Springfield’s experience completely undermines breezy assertions from Bill Dwight and Andrew Shelffo that adult enterprises can’t be tied to community problems. It echoes the negative experience Kittery, Maine residents recently had with their own Capital Video store.

Secondary effects are indeed a present-day phenomenon, not limited to some dark age like the 1980s. A federal appeals court just reaffirmed this in June in Daytona.

Residents have every right to object to their neighborhood going down the tubes. If this can be prevented by moving adult enterprises to places where nobody lives, that sounds like a big win for homeowners and a trivial impediment to free speech.

Dispersal zoning protects rich and poor alike

Barkley-Aylmer suggests that the zoning we advocate (dispersal zoning) relocates adult enterprises from wealthy areas to poor ones. (p.12) This is false. We aim to shift adult enterprises from where lots of people live to where nobody lives. This is as fair a measure as we can envision. No evidence has been presented to us that dispersal zoning tends to disadvantage the poor.

There are two major types of adult-use zoning, the cluster method and the dispersal method. The cluster method aims to gather a city’s adult businesses into one district. An example was Boston’s Combat Zone. It is indeed reasonable to argue that you’re more likely to find such a district near weaker, poorer neighborhoods.

In recent years, the dispersal method is the more commonly used. Dispersal zoning aims to put reasonable distances between adult enterprises and homes, schools, and houses of worship, and between each adult enterprise. This is the type of zoning NoPornNorthampton advocates, seeking to keep adult enterprises away from all homes, rich and poor alike.

There is evidence to suggest that adult enterprises impact residential areas more than commercial and industrial ones (examples: Indianapolis, Oklahoma City). There is also evidence that a concentration of adult enterprises has a higher negative impact on the surrounding communities than an area with one isolated adult enterprise (example: Dallas).

From a real-world standpoint, adult enterprises like to locate near transit hubs and in places where they are less likely to get “guff”. This means they frequently seek out neighborhoods which they perceive to be “weak”, economically and politically. Working-class people busy making ends meet are less likely to have the time, resources, expertise or connections to give an adult enterprise major resistance (example: Minneapolis). Dispersal zoning empowers all neighborhoods to reduce the harm of adult enterprises.

Porn and adult enterprises create spaces where many feel unsafe

In the home…

Testimony from Northampton Shelter for Battered Women: Half of Abusers Use Pornography as a Part of the Abuse (explicit)

“Spousal Use of Pornography and Its Clinical Significance for Asian-American Women”

Robert Jensen: Listen to the Stories of the Victims (explicit language)

Testimony in Massachusetts: The Lasting Impact of Growing Up in a Porn-Filled Home

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Living Environment at M.I.T.

At school…

Maggie Hays of Against Pornography: My Story (explicit language)

Porn Confuses Young Men about How to Behave

Porn and a Hostile Learning Environment at M.I.T.

At work…

Porn and a Hostile Work Environment

A Hostile Work Environment: The Porn Sections of Movie Gallery Video Stores

Testimony in Massachusetts: Porn and a Hostile Work Environment in Carpentry

In neighborhoods…

The Evidence of Relationships Between Adult-Oriented Businesses and Community Crime and Disorder

Secondary Effects Across America: 1977-1999

Crime, Nuisances Motivate Cities to Regulate the Location of Adult Entertainment Uses

Testimony in Minneapolis: Secondary Effects Around Adult Theaters; Police Suggest that Concerned Citizens Move Away

Journal of Planning Literature: Adult Bookstores Often Increase Fear of Crime, Discourage Walking

Des Moines, WA: Adult Uses Cause Business Failures, Scare People Away

Gazette: “Porn store’s viewing booths raise stink in Springfield”

Urban Compass: Amazing.net Hearing Follow-Up
Erica Walch was a very good witness and described how she and other women, while walking in the Apremont Triangle area, have had cars stop next to them and ask “Are you working?” which they took to mean that the drivers had mistaken them for prostitutes.

Capital Video stores are unusually popular sites for high-risk sex

It is true that Squirt.org, a website that serves people who cruise for sex, lists rest stops and gyms as well as adult enterprises like Capital Video. However, Barkley-Aylmer neglects to mention that Capital Video’s stores have led the pack for comments in Springfield, Meriden (Connecticut) and Kittery (Maine). This suggests there is something about these Capital Video environments that uniquely encourages this behavior. As Springfield has the second-highest per capita rate of HIV infection diagnosis in the state, anyone who is serious about containing AIDS must address this.

Considering that high-risk sex has been a contemporary and prevalent phenomenon at Capital Video’s stores in Springfield and elswhere, a passage like the following is unfair and misleading when it suggests we use old, inaccurate information merely as a disguised way to bash gay people (p.19):

A large percentage of the statistical and scientific “evidence” on the site was harvested from the 1980s and, as I discuss throughout, included rhetoric that by today’s standards seemed outright homophobic, and in some cases, factually wrong. [Risk of environmental transmission of HIV without active exchange of bodily fluids, is extremely rare. In fact, Center of Disease Control studies have estimated the theoretical risk of transmission through bodily fluids left in public spaces at virtually zero. http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/transmission.htm]

Capital Video turns a blind eye to customer actions that put themselves and others in grave danger. There is substantial reason to believe that plenty of fluids are being exchanged in their viewing booths. We are not talking about used condoms or blue gloves strewn on the ground, although these remain (non-HIV) health hazards in their own right and a blight on their environs.

Like strong medicine, sexual liberation is a good thing that can be taken too far

The health impacts of promiscuity are well-studied and dire. Gabriel Rotello recounts how HIV, a virus that is relatively hard to transmit, is in large part a cultural phenomenon. With porn providing encouragement, large numbers of people began to see having a large number of casual sexual partners as desirable. The list of porn actors who have died from AIDS is long.

Death is not the only possible consequence of promiscuity. A physician recently told me of his distress over how, after he successfully treated a young girl for cancer and preserving her fertility, she then lost that fertility to an STD.

Let’s not forget the severe emotional consequences of practices promoted by porn, such as infidelity.

And finally, when it comes to raising children, not all family structures are equally likely to lead to good outcomes. It’s easy to make fun of the title of an article like “Dan Quayle Was Right”, but the inconvenient truth is that family instability and single-parent families are frequently hard on children, with consequences that are often deep and lasting. Porn’s celebration of promiscuity and short-term thinking are especially toxic in this regard.

The fact that we support our positions with a great deal of evidence is not a strike against us

It may seem paradoxical to hear claims that, because someone provides a vast amount of support for their position, this somehow undercuts their arguments. Yet this is what we’ve seen from Professor Marc Randazza’s law students

“NPN bombards you with information with their goal being ‘to increase awareness about the impact of porn on people and the community.’ The website is filled with endless diatribe not at trying to educate the public but rather keeping an adult store out of their community.”

“Providing testimonials and cautions from aging porn stars hardly supports the argument that women and men involved in making pornographic videos are submissive and oppressed.”

“…NPN floods their readers with entirely too much information. Such a barrage of information overwhelms the brain. All of the articles seem to run in together until all the reader gets is a continuous message of how bad porn is without ever being provided with any real substantive information or relevant factual evidence (if such evidence does even exist).”
MoPornNorthampton…

“…the answer to “Hey, how do readers read on the web?” is they don’t, not in depth. The web is a bustling marketplace of infinite reading possibilities, and to compensate, readers tend to scan.

We are just saying — it’s entirely possible to distill an idea, link to the relevant and longer source, and sum it up in under two or three paragraphs. Cite and check your sources, and be skeptical, as the plural of “anecdote” is not “data”. Complex topics need not be oversimplified, but respecting your reader means respecting your reader’s time. And bottom line: volume does not equal quality.

Are we saying we are better writers than NoPorn?

Yes. That is what we are saying.” [link to full post]

“NoPornNorthampton is an information logjam. This is on purpose. For one thing, they seem to think that the more words they write, the more true they all become (see “proof by verbosity,” coming in part VIII). Second, there’s so much information on there that it is impossible to subject it to any level of scrutiny. You can’t read what they’ve written, and you can’t check their sources; there’s too much material. You can’t keep up with it.” [link to full post]

“The proof by verbosity gets its own section because of its incredible level of pervasiveness. NPN seems to be convinced that there is a relationship between the correctness of their position and the number of words on their blog, the number of articles they’ve posted, and even the number of page views they receive.” [link to full post]
and Barkley-Aylmer…

A phenomenally impressive collection of primary and secondary porn-related material, nopornnorthampton.org boasts a whopping 280,980 words, strategically linked to one another in an awe-inspiring informational network. Entries are organized by date and by common theme, and are also navigable through a personalized site-wide search engine and an ever-present sidebar containing the most pertinent information. That said, it is impossible to observe, let alone absorb, even a fraction of the site’s content without dedicating at least several days to the cause. This inundation of information is frustrating and overwhelming for those attempting to understand or analyze each entry individually. If volume proved accuracy, noporn.org would prove beyond any doubt that pornography is inherently and unavoidably harmful. Unfortunately, the site gathers many of its “facts” from questionable sources and occasionally foregoes citation altogether. The effect then, is an overwhelming amount of material supporting a group of ideas, but only questionable sources to back it up.

Barkley-Aylmer cites the posts of Doug Schubert on MoPornNorthampton as evidence that our sources are “questionable”. We invite readers to see for themselves whether Schubert has made any meaningful dent in our case. Schubert’s position is essentially that his armchair speculations, logic games, and some limited material publicized by the adult industry should carry more weight than the testimony of porn victims, beleaguered neighborhoods, dozens of scientific studies, and numerous experts in the fields of psychology, counseling, urban planning and police work.

At bottom, it is hard to see how the “Too Much Information” objection is anything but a dodge to avoid engaging with us on the merits of our arguments. Among other things, we can understand how it would be a fearsome task to try to counter the mass of personal testimony we present from battered wives, molested children, and ordinary community residents–few of whom came to the subject with any particular profit motive or ideological axe to grind. All they know is that bad things happened when porn came into their lives and adult enterprises came into their neighborhoods. The relationship is direct, logical, and recurs again and again. It expresses the simple fact that people are influenced by the media they read and watch. In the case of today’s porn, that media teaches violence and abuse.

If a specific item on our website is factually incorrect, we invite people to tell us and we’ll correct it. Vague, hand-waving complaints that our arguments are not “substantive” or “factual” are not persuasive. In essence, this is equivalent to saying that other peoples’ years of bitter experience have no value, that victims have nothing to tell us about the causes of their own suffering. This is true elitism: the grand theories of academics and the callous profits of businessmen take precedence over the lived reality and common sense of ordinary people.

Amassing volumes of incriminating evidence was a key part of the campaign to abolish slavery in Great Britain. There’s no reason to think that a similar campaign won’t get people to think about porn with greater wisdom and compassion.


See also:

Academic Defenders of Porn Need to Engage with Reality (explicit language)
I have met hundreds of women and men who have stories to tell about pornography and the devastating impact it has had on their lives…

I have heard about what it is like to be coerced into making pornography by parents, brothers, uncles, boyfriends, husbands, and pimps. I have listened to women tell me about being raped and brutalized by men who wanted to reenact their favorite porn scene, and I have spent time with women who were gang-raped by their male “friends” after watching pornography. The women who tell their stories speak of the lasting effects that pornography has had on their lives…

In the world of scholarly discourse, these stories are contemptuously referred to as “anecdotal evidence”, first-person accounts that may make for interesting reading, but are not comparable with real scholarship. In a world cleansed of pain and passion, the realities of these people’s lives are lost in the maze of postmodern terminology and intellectual games…

Feminists Confront Feminists Over Pornography
For anti-pornography feminist activists, writers, and scholars, pornography has never been simply an intellectual, academic debate over the interpretation of images; rather, the struggle has been against a multibillion-dollar industry that contributes to pervasive social inequalities and endemic sexual violence. It has never been a campaign to ban sexually explicit material; its object has been to challenge and to eliminate the pornography industry’s participation in discrimination, bigotry, and violence. The salient issue in the feminist fight against pornography has not been an objection to sexual activity or representations but, rather, to the sexism and racism of pornography, the structure and dynamics of eroticized inequality, and the sexual mistreatment, abuse, and violence that occur in connection with its production, distribution, and consumption….

D.A. Clarke: Women Adopting Men’s Bad Habits Is Not the Answer
Ruthlessness, hardness, force and intimidation have characterised the successful businessman, soldier, gangster, politician and pimp from the very beginning. If we admire those qualities, we implicitly endorse the world these men have created – perhaps we subscribe to the fantasy that women can become hard enough and mean enough to compete with men on their own turf. Suppose we do so, and suppose some of us win: will a world that contains a token handful of lesbian aristocrats among its ruling class be a better world?

Dartmouth Law Journal Article: It Should be Legal to Possess Child Porn; Our Rebuttal
Cortelyou Kenney graduated summa cum laude with High Honors in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College in 2005. Her thesis on political power of art and theater was awarded the Chase Peace Prize for best thesis on the topic of war and post-conflict reconstruction. She currently attends the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. And she believes it should be legal to possess child pornography…

“Thesis dissects porn store”
The Daily Hampshire Gazette mentions Barkley-Aylmer’s thesis and our comments in its August 21 Off the Beat column.