“Violence and
pornography, which is a felony against the human spirit, are the atrocities of
despair” Dr. Koop explained, adding, “The people who commit them have an
appetite for outrage. They devour what we cling to as civilized life.”[4] And, they are devouring our public libraries,
creating a “hostile environment” for normal women, children and men.
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Dr. Koop called for opposition to violent and pornographic
media due to the influence of these stimuli upon the fantasy life and the real
life “action” of millions of vulnerable adults and children.
The billions daily invested by advertisers in campaigns to
change behavior toward their product and analyzed for sales success or failure
provide ongoing empirical and statistical proof that that media imagery shapes,
directs and redirects much of human behavior.
Such empirical and statistical proofs are fully recognized
within the mass media effects, marketing and advertising, professional
literatures. The fact that mass media information alters conduct in the
direction of the media messages, for good, ill or evil, is not amenable to
serious challenge in any legitimate discourse.
Echoing
Koop’s warning of the harm from such stimuli, “Harmful Matter” is found as §
313 in the
The
code stipulates that if something is “commercially exploited by the defendant
for the sake of its prurient appeal, that evidence is probative…and can justify
the conclusion that the matter lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or
scientific value for minors.[5]
….
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While the “taken as a whole”
stipulation in “Harmful Matter” clearly applies to minors, it is relevant to
mention that neurologically, each image is a “whole,” containing a
beginning, middle and an end, hence any film clip, photograph, cartoon,
illustration
is a “whole” largely independent of accompanying print
information.[6]
Extensive
data on “harmful matter” are contained in this investigator’s findings of Images of Children, Crime and Violence in
Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler, 1986 (left), and 1989. See attached Executive Summary of that
report as well as the “Literature Review” which provides an vast literature
review of findings on the effects of “erotica/pornography” including “Mass
Media” research on “Children, Television and Aggression,” cartoons, photographs
and the content analysis methodology.
Post 1986 these finding of “harmful matter” have all been fully and
fatally substantiated.[7]
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The Attorney
General’s Report on Pornography (July 1986) fully documents the effects of
violent and “non” violent media as copy cat crimes affecting vulnerable youths
and adults. Moreover, hearings at the
federal and state levels on pornography harms are only exceeded by similar
hearings on television and media effects on juveniles, juvenile crime, juvenile
sexual promiscuity and the like. The
Surgeon General’s commission report on television and behavior in 1972 and
again in 1982 concluded that television was a major factor in facilitating
youthful violence.
Ten years later, in 1992 the American
Psychological Association, commonly known for its libertarian views, delivered
its findings on television in Big World,
Small Screen, confirming the thousands of prior studies which found that
viewing violent television content was predictive of children and adults
engaging in increased levels of violence.
Of course, all of these studies controlled for alternative variables and
found violent images to be a critical predictor for violent conduct.
THE
HARD WIRED BRAIN
The last few decades of research have produced massive
discoveries in the field of neurology.
The brain scientists have clearly established the fact that every human
really has two brains: the “left” and the “right” hemisphere. The right
hemisphere is often called our “emotional” brain and the left our “thinking” or
rational brain. Studies in split-brain behavior established the rush of
pornography as a neurochemical response experienced primarily by the right
brain.
“Every second, 100 million messages bombard the brain
carrying information from the body’s senses.”[8] Only a few of these are heeded by “the
conscious mind.” Only the most important—or exciting—sense information gets
through. This suggests why pornography has such an
impact on people—young and old. When one reaches a state of emotional arousal
faster than the body can rally its adaptive reactions, a form of stress
follows.[9]
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Briefly, the male body is designed to respond—or adapt—to blatant
female coital signals by engaging in sexual intercourse. Anything that
increases sexual stress (e.g., sexual signal, sexual shame, sexual fear)
triggers known physiological, psychopharmacological mechanisms.
In an instant, anxiety mobilizes the
brain to marshal the body for defense in this emergency. Crime, remember, must generally be imagined
first, largely in the right brain hemisphere (brain image left[10]) where
it is practiced over and over in the mind before attempted on real life
victims.
WHILE “THE
DECADE OF THE BRAIN” IS OVER….
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The
90s were declared by the U.S. Congress “The Decade of the Brain.” What we learned about our executive organ
from our expensive brain research facilities fully confirms the body of
empirical observation passed down to us from biblical times, confirmed cross
culturally and even across species and codified in our old common law.
However
briefly placing this discussion in the broader history of knowledge, we are, as
always, in battle over theologies. Much
of this is addressed in my latest book, Kinsey,
Crimes & Consequences, in which the history of changes in the laws
covering obscenity via the American Law Institute’s Draft Model Penal Code of
1955 are discussed in detail.[11]
As
noted, the Greeks argued that violence and sex belonged “off stage,” while the
Mosaic Law, warned in Deuteronomy 4:15, “Take ye therefore good heed unto
yourselves—lest ye corrupt yourselves—and
make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or
female.”
“
AN EVENT WHICH LASTS HALF A SECOND WITHIN FIVE TO TEN
MINUTES HAS PRODUCED A STRUCTURAL CHANGE”
The argument in defense of full
access to deviant, toxic media is one of “choice” and that one can “turn off
the dial” if one is offended by actors portraying scenes of copulation, sexual
battery or simple sexual posturing and soliciting, as in prostitution. However,
the human brain has not rational mechanism with which to “chose” or not to
“chose” to see something that reaches their brain-mind-memory, long before they
can know what they are seeing, become offended and reach to turn off the
offensive image. Dr. Daniel Goleman's
groundbreaking book, Emotional Intelligence, finds that by the time you
reach for the dial the image has made its way into your short or even long term
memory:
A visual signal first goes from
the retina to the thalamus, before it is translated into the language of the
brain. Most of the message then goes to
the visual cortex, where it is analyzed and assessed for meaning and
appropriate response; if that response is emotional, a signal
goes to the amygdala to activate the emotional centers.”
But a smaller portion of the
original signal goes straight from the thalamus to the amygdala in a quicker
transmission… of an] emotional response before the cortical centers have
fully understood what is happening.”[12]
Neurologist David Galin wonders which hemisphere
will…gain control of the shared functions and dominate overt behavior”?[13]
Neuropsychologist A.R. Luria provides the answer that serves as the thesis of
this paper:
[P]rocesses of excitation taking
place in the waking cortex obey a law of
strength, according to which every strong (or biologically significant) stimulus evokes a strong response,
while every weak stimulus evokes a weak response:[14]
And,
as the brain knows no present, the experience “conjures up images of scenes
witnessed...in the past,,[15] even a
fleeting second or two of observation.
As neurologist Gary Lynch of the
What we're saying here is that an event which lasts half a
second within five to ten minutes has produced a structural change that is in
some ways as profound as the structural changes one sees in [brain] damage.[16]
This rudimentary neurological
observation by Lynch, addresses the brain's processing of visual stimuli in the
award winning program series, “The Brain: Learning and Memory,” broadcast by
The Annenberg/CPB Collection.[17] Lynch’s research is critical for any
evaluation of today’s toxic media--images versus print and “speech.” Understanding media effects is neither
“liberal” nor “conservative,” but a matter of life and death.
The
“PROPAGANDA
MUST BE ADDRESSED TO THE EMOTIONS AND NOT TO THE INTELLIGENCE”
So,
it should not surprise to find that our modern variants of Hitler’s Nazi youth
are racist, anti-Christian, misogynists who use the Nazi insignia and laugh as
they point at and gun down unarmed young girls.
The Nazi youth, under Hitler’s demonic influence, were taught that their
parents’ morality and religious beliefs were old fashioned and useless and that
killing was their right as super-men.
The press reports now confirm that
most of the suburban teens who have killed unarmed school children are
followers of Hitler and Marilyn Manson, the self-described satanic rock
musician who musicalized Hitler’s fascist creed. How then did Hitler create the Nazi
youth? As you read Adolph’s method for
building heartless killers, ponder today’s toxic images. He said:
Propaganda
must be addressed to the emotions and not to the intelligence and it must
concentrate on a few simple themes.... with lurid photographs of the.... sexual
and physical.[18]
The “lurid photographs of the....
sexual and physical” dominating our entertainment landscape certainly fit
Hitler’s requirements. But there is a more intimate similarity between the new
killers and Hitler’s youth. German
“sexologist,” Wilheim Reich reported how those “lurid pictures” were used: “Nazi youth.... practice self-excitement by
means of pornographic pictures at fourteen years of age; perform coitus under
archways, in cellars or alleys”.[19]
Mere black and white pictures
programmed these Nazi youths into their heterophobic, fear based future
conduct. Their pornography was “soft,”
commonly experienced in their later teen years, and primitive by today’s
standards. Modern sadosexual
image-makers create a “virtual reality” far beyond anything humans normally
experience--a “clear and present danger” in restructuring the human brain.
“[F]EELING IS A STIMULUS TO MUSCULAR ACTION....IDEAS ACT AS
MOTORS”
The
prefrontal cortex, our rational “command center,” largely works to maintain
health and control the psyche.[20] Even in 1889 scientists understood that media
images stir the “feelings” (right hemisphere) of viewers often leading to
copycat action by bypassing the left, rational brain hemisphere. That is, neuroscientists have evidentially
established the fact that exciting images penetrate the brain's right
hemisphere, triggering visceral, red-alert responses that inevitably subvert
the more difficult left-hemisphere tasks of reason, debate and dialogue.
[F]eeling
is a stimulus to muscular action....ideas act as motors....[and] It may be
laid down as a rule, that, if any two
mental states be called up together, or in succession, with due frequency and
vividness, the subsequent production of the one of them will suffice to call up
the other, and that whether we desire it or not.[21]
As biologically stimulating imagery
immediately elicit right hemisphere responses and as the emotional brain
overwhelms left hemisphere reasoning and cognition, speech is subverted by these stimulating visual
media experiences. Richard Restak writes
on inhibition and the healthy brain:
Inhibition
rather than excitation is the hallmark of the healthy brain.... If all the
neurons in the brain were excitatory we would be unable to do something as
simple as reaching out for a glass of water.[22]
Popular films such as “Basketball
Diaries,” “Matrix,” “Natural Born Killers,” (NBK) and “Southpark,” much
television and visual data on the Internet, violent and sexual video games, are
“excitatory” anxiety-provoking brain experiences. Real life fall-out supports the conclusion
that earlier laws prohibiting such excitatory/anxiety provoking stimuli were
based on sound empirical observation.
Many vulnerable people psychopharmacologically altered by violent and/or
sexual stimuli, do harm themselves and/or others.
“IN A MATTER OF SECONDS…A MODEST
SIGNAL, A WORD…CAN...LEAVE A TRACE THAT WILL LAST FOR YEARS.” [23]
Experience confirms what Science magazine reported. “Maintaining normal brain function....
requires a delicate balancing act: too much neuronal activity can be as bad as
too little.” [24] The more thoroughly inhibitory transmitters
are in control during youth, the grater the opportunity for the child’s
developing brain to learn and grow--normally.
To that point, allowing the still vulnerable “plastic” brains of
children and youth to be exposed in libraries, schools, book stores,
restaurants or any other venue, to toxic, psychopharmacologically arousing
pornography must be totally reevaluated.
Consider the effects of Internet pornography in the library or of films
like BD and NBK on angry, young boys who see no difference between wrong or
right, moral or immoral, when brain researcher Gary Lynch, says:
in
a matter of seconds, taking an incredibly modest signal, a word.... which is in
your head as an electrical signal for no more than a few seconds can...leave a
trace that will last for years. [25]
David Gottlieb reported in Scientific American, that one of the
most important functions of the nervous system is to inhibit human excitation:
“nerve cells not only excite their neighbors but also inhibit them.... to
prevent a runaway spree of neural firing.”[26] Such a “runaway spree of neural firing” would
occur experiencing library pornography, Marilyn Manson’s music, BD and NBK,
violent or sexual video games, pornography or other television materials.
Says Gottlieb; inhibitory
transmitters are so "widespread in the brain and spinal cord they must
fulfill a significant function.”. In his
Public Broadcasting System production,[27] Mind & Body (February 1993), Bill
Moyers examined how deeply felt emotions affect health. The destructive impact of emotionally
freighted sadosexual media is surely what our forebears feared about
“entertainment,” even without the current technology of movement, color, and
“virtual reality.” “States of mind like
sadness may have a counterpart hidden within the brain.”[28]
“ANYTIME
WE FEEL…THINK…IMAGINE ANYTHING…ACTIVITY IN THE BRAIN…IS
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We feel films and other visual media organically, reprocessed chemically and electrically in our brains,
minds, memories and bodies. A recent
study of “smells of joy versus fear” found viewing the movies “Ace Ventura, pet
Detective,” and “Indiana Jones and the
“Although
it seems intangible, anytime we feel anything, anytime we think anything,
anytime we imagine anything, there is activity in the brain that is taking
place in the body at that time. That
activity can then lead to a cascade of changes in the body that have an impact
on health.”[30]
Modern
brain scanners provide evidence of the increasingly baleful effect of common
media imagery on psyches and conduct.
Writing in Endangered Minds, Why
Our Children Don't Think, educational psychologist Jane Haley, again
demonstrates the obvious. As the human
brain--especially when young--"is plastic.... large areas of uncommitted
brain tissue can be molded...to the demands of a particular environment.”[31]
AND,
THE
Playboy’s own sex and violence agenda long funded
The American Library Association and its Freedom to Read,[32]
campaign. Such a conflict of interest becomes significant when the
Viewing
coarse, graphic, violent or sexual pictures structurally shapes and alters the
child brain/mind/memory, with brain tissue “molded” by excitatory, anxiety
provoking media.[33] For roughly four decades our children have
been guinea pigs for “entertainment” brain experiments. The disastrous results are seen all around
us. They can no longer be denied.
That the
ALA is in direct conflict with the majority of the tax paying public is visible
by studying not only the hostile reactions of the polity to the current ALA
turning our public libraries into local dirty book stores monopolies, but to
the concerns of the public regarding the media as “harmful matter” which should
not be provided to vulnerable adults or youths.
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The reader
is directed to Dr.
These public concerns are fully supported by the scientific
data while the denials of the pornographically connected
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Guns have not changed in their ability to kill. American youths carried guns for generations
without killing one another. Moreover, the media silence about the outrageous
1994 reports from the Department of Justice of 12,000 rape and sex abuse reports “inside
school building or on school property.” jumping to
19,000 such reports in 1999 does not implicate “guns” as the
weapons of violent attack.[34] The causal effect of our toxic media on
children, parents, teachers, legislators, doctors, and the overall polity does
explain the increased level of social toxicity.
Writing in Stop
Teaching Our Kids To Kill, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman and Gloria DeGaetano
document the long road of effort to curtail the irresponsible mass media in its
love affair with “harmful matter,” graphic sex and violence. The authors issue “A call to action against
TV, Movie and Video Game Violence.”
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The two charts at left documenting the exponential increase
in juvenile crime and violence is taken from their book.[35] My research establishes these U.S. Department
of Justice data from 1965 to 1995 as much lower than the real rates of sexual
and non-sexual crimes by and against children.[36]
The sharp increase in crime among girls is clearly not a
function of more available “guns” but a function of other forms of
environmental toxins—often identified by the research as toxic media. Recognizing
“obscenity” as inappropriate violence as well as inappropriate sexual content,
note that on March 24, 2000, Congressman Joseph R. Pitts (R-PA) spoke on the
floor of the US Congress regarding the dearth of obscenity prosecutions (all 93
US Attorneys were replaced by Attorney General Reno), saying that:
“Pornographers
in this country make more money than rock and country music COMBINED.”
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“Pornographers
bring in more dollars in a year than all Broadway productions, all theater
shows, all ballet, jazz and classical music COMBINED…. The Supreme Court has
ruled that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. Federal law
prohibits interstate transportation and distribution of obscenity.”
“Yet…in 1997
there were but SIX prosecutions by ALL NINETY-THREE U.S. Attorneys. The cause and effect between pornography and
crime is clearly established. Rape and
child abuse are only the worst consequences of this filth. The President must enforce the law” (Emphasis
in the original).[37]
In his 1983 book The Media Monopoly, Ben Bagdikian
reports:
“Editorially, corporate causes almost invariably become news
media causes. Among the most commonly
suppressed news items each year are stories involving corporations that are
reported in minor publications but are not given serious attention in the major
media.”[38]
Well, corporate pornography is documented as a billion dollar commercial
enterprise, financially allied with most major media outlets. The original New York vs. Ferber
decision to legalize child pornography appeared only in one small NYT
story while the pornography used in rapes and murders seldom gets reported by
the major media. Corporate pornography
influences communications as well as some legislators and the judiciary at
least as much as did J.P. Morgan’s 1915 steal interests. We now know that
pornography renders women and children
CALL FOR A
MORITORIUM ON DISTRIBUTION OF VIOLENT AND SEXUAL IMAGERY
Given the long history of inequality women have suffered
because of their sex, and based upon the principles fully articulated in
America’s founding law orders, women and children's rights should outweigh
those of the accused entertainment, sex and violence industry elite.
Women and children, as equal citizens of these
(1) respectful,
honest portrayals as people with hearts and souls, problems and dreams by the
media--not as sex or violence objects nor as aggressors of violence and/or of
ridicule; (2) protection by law of the psychological sense of privacy that now
is violated by “exhibitions” of sexual privacy for voyeurs in public forums:
(3) a healthy, non-exploitive environment conducive to personal growth; and (4) the
presumption that a casual relationship exists between the sado sexual media environment
and the growing incidence of child abuse, physical and psychological rape,
unless fully proven otherwise.[39]
These rights must be weighed against the relative right
of the violence-sex industries to produce violence and pornography for fun
and/or profit and the relative 'right' of the captive consumer to consume
hostile, misogynistic and anti child propaganda.
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Denial of these human rights by the entertainment
industry and by the
“SESAME” AND LIBRARIAN ELITES
SESAME,
“Survivors of Educator Sexual Abuse and Misconduct Emerge,” is “A voice for the
Prevention of Sexual Exploitation, Abuse, and Harassment of Students by
Teachers and Other School Staff.” The
group includes both direct victims of educator abuse and their families,
organized to inform Americans about the toxic fallout from giving unquestioned
authority to those in positions of educational guidance over children.”
During an era of serous sexual addiction and
dysfunction, estimated by some at as high as 50% of our male population and a
smaller but significant number of our female population,[40]
allowing any adult to provide sadosexual, violent or sexual information to
children, places those children at risk.
An informed and sophisticated distrust of any who would
give children such material is vital to children’s health and welfare. When the material given to the child by an
educator (“librarian”) is that which could not legally be provided by another
adult to the child under law, to those concerned with child protection, such a
provider of “harmful matter” becomes suspect.
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As seen, left, SESAME provides extensive documentation
for the charge that direct sexual assault of children has become too common
within the education establishment, an establishment which includes the school
and public library. Up to 18% of boys
and 80% of girls self-identified as sexually abused for one survey reported in
the Journal of Education Research,
including 14% who claimed sexual relations with an educator.
Whether these numbers are exaggerated
or not, educator sexual abuse is a
major problem, increasing with the mainstreaming of pornographic stimuli. Based on the foregoing as well as this
latter concern, there is no longer any justification for special rights for
librarians to expose children to “harmful matter.” See endnote 28 addressing Abraham Lincoln’s
definition of and law restricting sexually explicit materials as well as the
discussion of New York vs. Ferber
(1982) for the unlimited access called for by elite “speech” advocates,
endangering children’s health, welfare and liberty.
A five-year moratorium on all exhibitions of all sadosexual, sexual and violent themes and removal of all such existing themes from public space is called for to ascertain the increase or decrease in sexual harassment, rape, incest, child pornography, the transmission of sexually transmitted diseases, murder, rape-mutilation-murder and the like. State and federal authorities, subject to review and analysis, should keep full records by a publicly selected group representing all sides of this life and death debate. </