Certified Sex Therapist Marty Klein Wants You to Believe Porn Is Harmless

Many adult industry lawyers like Marc Randazza are not content to defend their clients on narrow constitutional grounds. They could say, for example, that yes this material is reprehensible but we must protect it so that more worthy speech will not be threatened. Instead, they apparently want you to believe that porn and the lifestyles promoted by porn (bondage, sadomasochism, swinging, casual sex) are actually liberating and good for you.

To this end, Professor Randazza presents us with Certified Sex Therapist Marty Klein:

Dr. Marty Klein is an American marriage counselor and sex therapist. He describes his goal as: “To tell the truth about sexuality, help people feel sexually adequate & powerful, and support the healthy sexual expression and exploration of women and men.” He is highly critical of censorship and the anti-pornography movement.

Dr. Klein publishes an online newsletter, Sexual Intelligence, and has another website where he promises “straight talk on sex, love, and intimacy.” Dr. Klein claims that “Each year he trains thousands of professionals in North America and abroad in clinical skills, human sexuality, and policy issues.”

Let’s look at what messages Dr. Klein is communicating in Sexual Intelligence…

March 2000: The Myth of Sex Addiction
The concept of “sex addiction” really rests upon the assumption that sex is dangerous. There’s the sense that we frail humans are vulnerable to the Devil’s temptations of pornography, masturbation, “promiscuity,” and extramarital affairs, and that if we yield, we become “addicted.”

June 2000: Victims of Pornography Month
If groups like this would simply come out and call themselves “Citizens Against Eroticism” or “Americans United to Restrict Sexual Expression” it would be easier to gauge just how much support they have. But hiding behind the specter of sexual violence or the protection of children simply obscures their real agenda. And it cleverly prevents the formation of any effective constituency to oppose them. Who wants to be seen as favoring child molestation, slavery, or rape?

September 2001: Drafting Child Porn Stoolies
South Carolina has become the latest state to demand that untrained service workers become snitches about alleged child pornography. Along with the state’s photo developers, computer service techs are now required to report any images of people who appear to be under 18 having sex or in “sexually explicit postures.” Neither photo developers nor computer technicians will receive any training with which to implement this mandate.

October 2001: Book Review: “Not In Front of The Children”
Marjorie Heins is a project director at the National Coalition Against Censorship. Her wonderful new book is Not In Front of The Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth.

Combining scholarly detail with an engaging style, Heins examines the long history of “protecting” children from “indecency,” from Plato through the Victorians down to the Internet. She presents a history of the idea that young people need special protection from sexual imagery, as distinct from sexual activity itself. She exposes the complete lack of any evidence that such imagery actually harms young people, as well as the ways in which American society has meticulously ignored this lack of evidence.

April 2002: Child Porn Extortion Attempt
…Their threats could only be credible with the cooperation of:

* The media, for scaring everyone about a supposed “epidemic” of child pornography–which is almost impossible to find, and is used by a tiny, tiny percentage of the population;

* Citizen immorality groups, for exaggerating the incidence of child pornography as the basis for their fund-raising, for using phony data to exaggerate the danger that America’s kids are in, and for linking anything sexual with everything bad…

January 2003: Book Review: “Pornography, Sex, & Feminism”
This is a terrific book by a fascinating guy. A philosopher at the University of New Orleans, Alan Soble has written a number of books and papers on various aspects of sex, love, and intimacy…

In his latest book, Soble demolishes conservative feminist critics of pornography by beating them at their own game. First, Soble has done something heroic–he’s actually read the work of Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, Phyllis Chesler, Diana Russell, and others who have written massive, often-emotional tomes about the evils of pornography.

Soble demonstrates how most of these anti-porn arguments stem from assumptions and concepts that are never articulated or examined, such as “natural,” “normal,” “degrade,” and “moral.”…

Soble also shows that most anti-porn feminist and conservative descriptions of pornography are rarely accurate. Describing today’s porn as invariably violent, filled with coercion, mutilation, animals, and cruelty is a common tactic–and dramatically inaccurate. Soble wonders if these critics have ever seen mainstream pornography, or if they’re attacking demons of their own intrapsychic hell.

February 2003: Pedophile Hunt Continues
Two high-profile child-porn busts last week highlight fundamental flaws in our society’s continuing obsession with those who appear to have a sexual interest in children. These cases tell us nothing about kiddie porn and too much about our fear and our future…

…Paul Rubens (Pee-Wee Herman) was charged with one misdemeanor count of possessing a depiction of children under 18 engaging in sexual conduct. Police carted away 30,000 pictures and 650 hours of film, which court documents describe as “a vast and valuable historical collection of artwork, kitsch memorabilia and adult erotica…”

Pee-Wee has a collection of enormous cultural significance. Only he knows whether he jacks off to it. Regardless, American courts say we should destroy pieces of our own history–exactly like Roman and Communist tyrants who wrote their predecessors out of history books and chiseled them out of public statuary. Like those tyrants, we wish to erase a past that challenges our contemporary reality. Is the present that fragile to need such protection?

Our legal system gives the image of children’s eroticism no existence as cultural artifact, sociological phenomenon, historical reality. By taking it completely out of context our society strips it of true meaning; demonizes it; and ultimately leaves it to those who are confident in their biases and invested in everyone’s proud ignorance. What hubris, as Homer would have said, to think we know everything there is to know about such an important subject.

“Sadomasophobia” Tied in Knots
There’s very little that’s new in sex. But a few weeks ago I was privileged to hear the results of two new studies of individuals who play with sexual sadomasochism–erotic power play, as my San Francisco colleague Bill Henkin calls it.

Researchers from the Los Angeles Sexuality Center, led by Dr. Pamela Connelly, have now shown scientifically that S/M players are no less emotionally healthy than non-players. Indeed, in many areas they were healthier. [Request to Dr. Klein: Please provide details of this study so we can examine it.]

Saying that someone is no more sick than the average vanilla hetero may be damning with faint praise, but if that’s America’s standard, then let’s use it. Let’s use this validated scientific data in custody battles, job discrimination suits, and in the training of psychotherapists and physicians. And let’s eliminate the urban legend that people who like to spank or be spanked are acting out some kind of abusive background. This is Freud gone wild, the bastard child of Oprah, Dr. Laura, and well-intentioned but misguided child molestation activists.

…As Dr. Charles Moser and others have been saying for years, S/M is more an orientation than an erotic menu selection. Connolly’s study shows that people with this orientation are more like everyone else than they are different. In a wiser future, what other erotic predilections–now pathologized and thus punished in family court proceedings–will we realize are orientations rather than paraphilias or deviance?

For now, start remembering the word Sadomasophobia. Connolly coined it to mean, like homophobia, a fear and hatred of a sexual orientation not one’s own. One day, divorced parents warring over child custody will be prevented from using an ex-mate’s S/M practices as evidence of parental unfitness. The kids of those parents will be in debt to researchers like Connolly, Moser and Ottawa’s Peggy Kleinplatz.

June 2005: “Victims of Porn” Month: Puh-leeze
On May 19 the U.S. government held yet another hearing about the effects of sexually explicit material. This one was focused on “victims of pornography,” sponsored by Citizens for Community Values.

According to their website, the “victims of pornography” include:

* “Boys and girls that have lost their innocence by viewing pornography at an early age;”

* “Women who are being treated with disrespect and sexually abused”;

* “Children used for the sexual satisfaction of fathers, stepfathers, and men they trusted”;

* “Neighbors that have increased crime and decreased property values because of the proliferation of pornography in their communities.”

The government hearing accepted these claims as fact–even though these claims are demonstrably inaccurate. They have been repeated so often they have achieved the status of ultra-truth–stories that sound so true, and fill so many cultural and emotional needs, that their truth is not only no longer examined, it’s considered irrelevant. The actual truth is that no one has ever shown that adult use of adult pornography has ever resulted in poor interpersonal adjustment, anti-social behavior, or increased crime. But no one in authority seems to feel the need to respond to these facts.

April 2006: Divesting Porn–and Integrity
This one’s so hypocritical it’s difficult to find a sufficiently nasty analogy.

The Texas Teacher Retirement System is going to divest its $100 billion investment portfolio of any companies receiving 10% or more of their income from topless bars, porn films, and other sexually-oriented businesses.

Board member Greg Poole told the American Family Association that the Retirement System has a professional interest in the welfare of women and youth, and therefore can’t, in good conscience, invest in pornography: “To think that we are in some way, by the use of our money, promoting something that is so degrading to women and children–it just seems irresponsible,” he says.

Yes, if you’re going to demonize sex, trot out those women and children…

———

Dr. Klein styles himself the apostle of tolerance and free love, but this love and tolerance doesn’t extend to his critics. He recently published this exchange on his blog:

A reader named Janet has sent a vitriolic response to my criticism of the concept “victims of porn” in Sexual Intelligence.

She says, “You totally missed the real victims…there is no
pornography without the object of lust…this sends so many girls down a
path of self-destruction, eventual shame and abuse in the porno
world…where their self-esteem is forever damaged. They typically end up
like Playmate of the Year Anna Nicole…confused, sad, and powerless to
end their own misery.”

This is a great example of the confusion and sex-negativity in the
anti-porn world. They believe that lust is dangerous; that working in
pornography is shameful; that no one could make a rational decision to
participate in it; and that doing so somehow robs women of their
adulthood. Oh, and that there’s always a great alternative to being in
porn. What would Anna Nicole be if there were no porn—Secretary of
Agriculture? Professor of astrophysics? Or just one more average jane,
working the nightshift at 7-Eleven and hating her life?

But the real highlight of Janet’s nastygram is this: “I am not
surprised that you arrogantly only see this from a man’s point of view.
Why not call your website
Womenarenothingmorethan-
abodyformyselfindulgentpleasure.org.”

Ah—now she gets to the problem: I’m a man. And so I can’t possibly
enjoy, respect, or like women. I’m a man, and so I can’t be thoughtful
about sex and gender. I’m a man, so my desire for pleasure is obviously
selfish and aggressive. Janet, I’m sorry you live in such a terrible
world.

But Janet, I’m afraid that you’re no feminist, and you seem, well,
too lazy to think. What you’ve done is just as bad as dismissing a
woman’s opinion as “just a woman being emotional,” or “women just don’t
get it,” or “she’s just premenstrual.” If we want to get beyond “women
only think with their hormones,” we have to get past “men only think
with their penises.”

Since you don’t know me, and obviously haven’t bothered to read my
work, maybe you’ve missed my actual blind spot—if I desire the
victimization of women, maybe it’s because I’m Jewish, or left-handed.
And if my piece were written by a woman—how would you account for the
attitudes you find so appalling?

We live in a time where science is considered just one more opinion,
and having strong feelings is equated with being well-informed. Put the
two together, and meaningful discourse is impossible. The result is
public policy that makes things worse: abstinence ed, Amber Alert, the
battle over Emergency Contraception.

By dismissing someone’s well-researched thoughts as merely the
predictable artifact of their gender, you dishonor women, men, and
thinkers. You disqualify yourself from any important conversation.
You’re just talking about your fear and anger.

Some of us are having a serious discussion about the fate of the world. Please don’t change the subject.

———

On March 9, we decided to let Dr. Klein know Janet was not alone, so we sent him this email:

Dear Dr. Klein,

Janet’s views deserve a bit more consideration than you seem inclined to give them. The victims of porn are real, numerous, and varied (see our Impact of Porn category) [link modified here for readability].

I believe these selections from our FAQ at NoPornNorthampton.org get at the heart of the problem (emphasis added):

You just want to roll society back to the way things were in the 1950s, or maybe the 1650s, don’t you?
No. The sexual revolution and other developments since the 1950s have brought important gains, such as more opportunities for women and more rights and respect for the GLBT community. At the same time, today’s society has problems. Rates of divorce are persistently high, with troubling impacts on children. Rates of sexually transmitted disease are “a major public health challenge”. About one-half of all pregnancies are unintended. Rates of domestic violence and child sexual abuse are high. Domestic violence and sex crimes go unreported on a large scale.

We don’t want to roll back the clock and give up the changes that were good. We want to preserve these gains while moving forward to address the current problems. Porn is part of what’s holding our society back. It portrays sexuality in a way that generally ignores the problems and risks or even makes fun of them. The messages of porn can and should be countered with more complete and accurate information about sexuality and relationships.

We appreciate that there is a long-standing romantic vision that if we can only dispense with all ‘unnatural’ social restraints, a sexual utopia will envelop the world. Unfortunately, the reality is when you dispense with all restraints, the strong come to oppress the weak. This is exactly what we’re witnessing between porn producers and performers, between porn shops and communities, and between porn viewers and victims.

The wisdom lies in deciding which social restraints to loosen, which to leave alone, and which to strengthen, not in abandoning them altogether…

Being anti-porn really means you are anti-sex, does it not?
We are not against sex. We are against mindless sex, abusive sex, sex without regard for issues like love, fidelity, commitment, pregnancy, disease and children.

Porn shows actions between consenting adults. Do you have a right to criticize them?
There is evidence that porn can be addictive and harms many viewers, but let’s go further. Let’s look at your assumption of “consensual behaviors”. Today’s pornographers seem to have less and less use for this convenient screen around their activities:

“The look in her eyes tells us that she would like this bondage session to be over pretty soon. Forget it, girl!”

Punishment Porn: “Whether-She-Wants-It-Or-Not”

Martin Amis, “A rough trade”:

A single issue of Adult Video News (April 2000) yields the following. Last October porno star Vivian Valentine attended the XXX-Treme Adults Only vacation in Mexico sporting the black eye she copped from Jon Dough on Rough Sex (Anabolic Video).

“I have no regrets or bad feelings about it,” she said. Regan Starr who worked on the second film in this “line”, Rough Sex 2, had a different take. “I got the s**t kicked out of me,” she said. “I was told before the video–and they said this very proudly, mind you–that in this line most of the girls start crying because they’re hurting so bad…. I couldn’t breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn’t stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, ‘Turn the f***ing camera off’, and they kept going.”

Arguments for and against porn are just matters of opinion. Why force your opinion on others?
Porn and adult businesses have physical effects on the real world that have been extensively studied. That changes the matter from an academic debate about opinions to confirmed facts that people need to act on.

The notion that people freeing themselves from self-restraint would lead to a sexual utopia might have been plausible in the 60s, but it’s laughable now.

Marriage is an outdated practice, so there’s no harm in Capital Video promoting free love and infidelity in their films, is there?”
The harmlessness of marriage-free living would certainly be news to many children of divorce. Barbara Whitehead presents excellent analyses of this issue in The Atlantic:
“The Love Family ideology has no theory of permanence or binding obligation. It is oriented to adults’ interests and satisfactions because it emphasizes freedom of individual choice. You can pick the one you love and ditch the one you no longer love without a backward glance. That’s great for adults, but children don’t have the same freedom of choice or the same enthusiasm about moving on. From a child’s standpoint the Love Family ideology is inadequate because it offers no basis for permanence in family bonds and commitments. When these bonds are lost, children suffer emotionally, especially in their ability to trust. We’ve set up a failure-to-commit factor for the next generation.”
–Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “What We Owe”, The Atlantic, February 1997 (may require a paid subscription)

“According to a growing body of social-scientific evidence, children in families disrupted by divorce and out-of-wedlock birth do worse than children in intact families on several measures of well-being. Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor. They are also likely to stay poor longer. Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families. A 1988 survey by the National Center for Health Statistics found that children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems. They are also more likely to drop out of high school, to get pregnant as teenagers, to abuse drugs, and to be in trouble with the law. Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.

“Contrary to popular belief, many children do not ‘bounce back’ after divorce or remarriage. Difficulties that are associated with family breakup often persist into adulthood. Children who grow up in single-parent or stepparent families are less successful as adults, particularly in the two domains of life–love and work–that are most essential to happiness. Needless to say, not all children experience such negative effects. However, research shows that many children from disrupted families have a harder time achieving intimacy in a relationship, forming a stable marriage, or even holding a steady job.”

–Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, “Dan Quayle Was Right”, The Atlantic, April 1993, reprinted at the Catholic Education Resource Center

Doesn’t your campaign smack of elitism?
Why no, the reverse is true. The most visible porn advocates have been
saying that freedom of speech is so important, it trumps all other
things people might value, such as a safe neighborhood, one that’s
comfortable to walk around in, economically prosperous, where people
won’t be harassed or solicited for sex.

Porn advocates appear to be indifferent to the suffering of ordinary people, whether it’s porn workers with STDs, spouses of porn addicts, or cities whose downtowns can’t grow due to the presence of an adult business. Despite mounting evidence of the social harms of porn,
the porn advocates assert they simply know better what’s good for
America, and that the people can’t be trusted to impose the slightest
regulation on adult businesses or soon we’ll all be burning books.
There’s no evidence that adult-use regulations in Hollywood, New York
or Boston have led to censorship, but the real world seems to matter
little to porn advocates. That’s elitism.

We can also look at this from a power perspective. Who has access to millions of dollars, fancy prep schools, exotic cars, expensive lawyers, Ivy League MBAs and luxury homes? The porn merchants. On the other side, vulnerable young porn workers, small towns with limited resources, parents busy raising children. Who are the elite in this situation?

———

We look forward to Dr. Klein’s reply, hopefully something more substantive than this casual swat he published from one of his readers in February:

Correspondence: Manipulation in Massachusetts
Reader Sandra Seaman writes,

Clicking through a google ad for a website suggesting that “Porn Hurts Women” took me to a page dedicated to the eradication of “adult” businesses in a town, based on secondary effects claims. Since this town is nowhere near me, I don’t feel that I’d be particularly effective in any public support of the business owner. However, I thought perhaps any readers of yours near Northampton, Massachusetts might be concerned about this particular brand of zealotry.

Indeed, www.NoPornNorthampton.org wants to keep an adult store out of the town. They repeat the same tired arguments–opinion, emotion, irrelevant claims (“pornographers are just in it for the money”), and the old story that porn leads to child molestation. No science. No data.

And not enough integrity to say, “We can’t prove that this store will hurt our community or our kids, but it makes us feel really, really nervous. We want to feel better, so we want to take away their right to operate a legal business, and take away our neighbors’ rights to patronize this legal business.” That could be the basis of an honest conversation, instead of making up scary stories about how looking at pictures of adults having sex turns people into child molesters.

If it’s data you want, Dr. Klein, we invite you to start reading these dozens of studies about the impact of porn, these testimonies about porn’s harm to marriage and children, then peruse these studies about secondary effects. You can call it “erotica”, but today’s porn is rife with abuse. It is not a sufficient rebuttal to just wave your hands and say all this evidence is “demonstrably inaccurate”. If it is, we need to see a lot more demonstrations.

We can’t let the Dr. Klein’s doublespeak pass without further mention. For him, child porn is “children’s eroticism” and abusive practices are “erotic predilections”. Dr. Klein’s approach is one of the most invalidating we’ve ever encountered. People and communities report suffering from porn and he responds with ridicule rather than compassion. It’s remarkable for someone who holds himself out as a therapist and a trainer of clinical skills.

We are concerned that victims of abuse could hesitate to seek help for fear of encountering people like Dr. Klein, who would cheerfully throw them back into the lion’s den, with the admonition that they should enjoy being devoured. It’s no wonder that sex crimes and domestic violence are heavily underreported.

See also:

National Feminist Antipornography Movement
“…even the toughest women–women who at rape crisis centers routinely
deal with sexual violence–find the reality of pornography so difficult
to cope with. No matter how hard it may be to face the reality of a
rape culture, at least the culture still brands rape as a crime.
Pornography, however, is not only widely accepted but sold to us as
liberation….

Now on Sale at Amazing.net (explicit language)
Darkside
David and Jennifer have a marriage on the
rocks. In desperation they seek out a marriage counselor who proposes a
revolutionary new method of therapy. David and Jennifer have free reign
to cheat on each other for the next 24 hours. Their sexual inhibitions
are set free and their fantasies fulfilled as they visit The Dark Side.

Recap: How Things Stand, and What You Can do
Porn addiction
is a well-documented phenomenon that breaks up families. At a 2003
meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of
the 350 divorce lawyers who attended said Internet porn contributed to
more than half of the divorce cases they handled.