Members of the Los Angeles County Commission for Women heard testimony about peoples’ encounters
with porn at a hearing on April 22, 1985. This account appears in In Harm’s Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings (p.357-359).
Testimony of B. J. Cling
I am a clinical psychologist in private practice in Los Angeles… I’m also about to graduate from UCLA Law School, and I have done a post-doctoral fellowship at USC in the Department of Psychiatry and Law. Following that I was on the clinical faculty there for two years. In my part of practice, and more specifically, in my work at USC I worked with sex offenders, mostly child molesters and flashers, and I also evaluated a number of rapists…
I would like to say that, as a psychologist, I was frankly unaware of the enormous part that pornography is playing and has played in the minds of sex offenders who I evaluated. And this is because, at least for me, it was only when I went to UCLA and took a course in which this problem was addressed, that I began to think back to the use of pornography with these men who I had evaluated, because as a psychologist this was never discussed. We didn’t even look for it. So it was only when it was told to us incidentally that we discovered it, and it wasn’t until I recently started thinking back that I realized there was a lot of it, and that it’s grossly underestimated.
For example, one of the many child molesters who I evaluated told me that his modus operandi was to have young girls, six and seven years old, he would befriend them. He was a man who was about forty. He would befriend them, and he would have them come over to his house and he would pay them to clean his house, you know, a quarter, a dollar. And he would casually put around pornography on the living room table, and then he would open it up for them, and then he would try to get them to pose for it, like they were in the movies…
Another example, actually this comes from my private practice. There are several patients of mine who habitually use pornography and have severe sexual problems. One is, as a matter of fact, a homosexual who uses constant violent pornography to excite himself, and it is impossible for him to now make love with his lover, who he loves. It’s only possible for him to have violent sex with people he doesn’t know.
Another man who uses pornography at least twice daily, who’s a fine upstanding citizen, finds it impossible to relate to women in any normal way. And it is my belief now that this has to do with the constant recurring of these sexual images in pornography that has taught him what sexuality is all about, which he finds impossible to have with a normal woman…
…I feel that psychologists, and I plan to help educate them, [must] become aware of the part that pornography is playing in a sex offense.
See also:
Victor Cline: “Pornography’s Effects on Adults and Children”
The fourth phase was an increasing tendency to act out sexually the behaviors viewed in the pornography, including compulsive promiscuity, exhibitionism, group sex, voyeurism, frequenting massage parlors, having sex with minor children, rape, and inflicting pain on themselves or a partner during sex. This behavior frequently grew into a sexual addiction which they found themselves locked into and unable to change or reverse–no matter what the negative consequences were in their life….
Testimony in Minneapolis: Ice cream man uses porn magazine to interest children in sex
I remember an interesting case in which an ice cream man, a Good Humor man, always kept an open magazine by him as he drove along, and the kids would look at it. And he would use that as some kind of manipulative technique to involve the people into talking about sex or getting interested in sex, as a comment: have you ever seen anything like this before, or have you ever done anything like this previously…
Exposure to Pornography as a Cause of Child Sexual Victimization
The incest started at the age of eight. I did not understand any of it
and did not feel that it was right. My dad would try to convince me
that it was ok. He would find magazines, articles or pictures that
would show fathers and daughters or mothers, brothers and sisters
having sexual intercourse. (Mostly fathers and daughters.) He would say
that if it was published in magazines that it had to be all right
because magazines could not publish lies… He would say, “See it’s
okay to do because it’s published in magazines…”
Certified Sex Therapist Marty Klein Wants You to Believe Porn Is Harmless
“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…”
Victim’s “Precocious Knowledge of Sexuality” Blocks Child Rape Conviction
His defense lawyer, David Hoose, argued the girl’s precocious knowledge
of sexuality created a reasonable doubt as to whether her accusations
against Jaundoo were accurate.
“The child was exposed to a lot of information about sex at an
inappropriately early age,” Hoose said in a telephone interview
Tuesday. How or by whom she was exposed to this information is unclear,
he said…
When the victim testified four years ago, she said Jaundoo would
sometimes give her a dollar after making her engage in sex acts with
him, and showed her a pornographic video and magazines. She also
testified Jaundoo said her mother would beat her if she told anyone
about the sexual abuse.
Porn’s “Verbatim” Accounts of the Pleasures of Child Sexual Abuse Don’t Square with Reality
The novelized accounts of incest are fantasy, but the promotion of lies about women and incest, the propaganda…serves to justify incest and insensitivity to survivors of incest. And, of course, incest itself is not fantasy…
These fallacies/fantasies (lies) have a distinguished lineage. For when
Freud decided that the accounts of incest (which he first believed)
were in fact nothing but the overheated fantasies of adolescent girls,
he shifted the onus of responsibility from adults to children. Incest
then became a question of wishes, fantasies, and impulses on the part
of children toward their parent, not acts engaged in by adults.