Later in the same essay, von Hoffman added:

Network television executives who deny the likelihood their programs can alter human behavior lie and they know it. All you have to do is listen to what these same gentlemen say to their advertisers. They boast, they brag, they bellow about what an effective sales medium their networks are ... how good they are at getting people to alter their behavior and part with their money.

The evidence on violence, the clinical, professional-psychologist-developed evidence, continues to mount. But in structure (and often in practice) what happens in the human mind and consciousness--and sex is depicted is

unconsciousness--when

no different from what happens when violence is depicted.

Two things happen: (1) some overly-impressionable viewers do act out what they have seen; (2) all the viewers are left with lasting impressions which sink into the subconscious and, if frequent enough (and for some persons, even if not frequent), these impressions influence and warp their entire attitude about life and about other persons. As Dr. Fredric Wertham put it in an article titled, Medicine and Mayhem (M.D. Magazine, June 1978, p. 11): Negative media effects do not generally consist in simple imitation. They are indirect, long-range, and cumulative. Violent images are stored in the brain, and if, when and how they are retrieved depends on many circumstances. It is a question not so much of acts as of attitudes, not of specific deeds but of personality developments.

One wonders about pornographic sadomasochistic videocassettes when he reads the comment later in Wertham's essay:

The saturation of people's minds with brutal and cruel images can have a long-range influence on their emotional life. It is an effect that involves human relations in fantasy and in fact and can become a contributing factor to emotional troubles and adjustment difficulties.

Certainly, before the Congress repeals all effective Federal Criminal Laws controlling pornography, it could call as a witness a man of Dr. Wertham's credentials (Consulting Psychiatrist at Queens Hospital Center, New York; formerly Associate in Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins Medical School; author of several books on the subject) and ask him to elaborate on this statement from the cited

essay:

With regard to sex, the explicit display of sadomasochistic scenes may have lasting effects. They may supply the first suggestions for special forms or reinforce existing tendencies. The whole orientation of young people with regard to the dignity of women is affected. By showing cruelty with erotic overtones, we teach that there can be pleasure in inflicting pain on others.

In this connection, the American Civil Liberties Union magazine, THE CIVIL LIBERTIES REVIEW (January/February 1978), p. 51, contained the highly pertinent article, 'Violent Pornography' & the Women's Movement. The essay summarizes the founding and work of a feminist group called Women Against Violence Against Women (WAVAW) "which grew out of organized opposition to the showing in Los Angeles

...

of "Snuff"--a film that depicted as entertaining

the murder and mutilation of a woman. Taking as a case in point a billboard ad for a Rolling Stones album, which ad depicted a beautiful scantily-clothed woman, her wrists, ankles and torso bound with heavy cords, her bare legs bruised and bleeding, but nonetheless saying, "I'm 'Black and Blue' from the Rolling Stone-and I love it!" the article describes WAVAW as

'an activist organization working to stop the gratuitous
use of images of physical and sexual violence against
women in mass media--and the real world violence against
women it promotes ...'

and quotes a member:

even

We think it's harmful in that it contributes to the overall
environment that romanticizes, trivializes and
encourages violence against women.

The author, an ACLU staff attorney, observes:

WAVAW probably cannot demonstrate that particular media portrayals are directly responsible for antisocial conduct, although it is not irrational to believe that the offending material may well have harmful effects. WAVAW claims:

'When millions of people see women portrayed
as victims day in and day out, an impression
is created that women are victims, that it's
safe, OK and in fact normal to pick on women
Furthermore, a lot of record advertising
uses images of violence to women in a joking
... manner --which ... trivializes and demeans
the very real pain that raped and battered
women suffer ...'

...

(Emphasis, by underlining, added.)

As

It is encouraging to see this serious libertarian journal publishing an article which acknowledges that still photos, even, on mere billboards and record album covers, can promote actual violence in "the real world" and that it is socially important to worry about the "overall environment."

But when the writer states that "WAVAW probably cannot demonstrate that particular media portrayals are directly responsible for antisocial conduct," she has fallen into a trap of her own making. The words particular and directly and demonstrate confine her--artificially--to a form of proof that in other fields no one demands, e.g., we do not insist on rigid empirical proof when we conclude that poverty "causes"--i.e., predisposes to--crime, or even that cigarette smoking or polluted city air causes cancer.

She appears to believe that there are no cases where the immediate and palpable impact of pornography is so obvious that any fairminded observer would have to say: "Looking at that stuff made him commit that crime."

However, ten years ago while on the Presidential Commission

on Obscenity and Pornography, I produced extensive documentation of the fact that in some cases, enough to be statistically significant, pornography does indeed cause crime. In my Memorandum Re Statistical Study of Relationship of Obscenity to Crime and Other Antisocial Behavior, directed to Chairman William B. Lockhart in a letter of August 11, 1969 (and reprinted in my Minority Report, September 30, 1970), I cited 26 cases, drawn from all over the country, where immersion in pornography immediately preceded serious sex crimes, many of which were admitted by the perpetrators to be enactments of pornography absorbed shortly before. Typical of some of the cases I cited:

Rape Case. Seven Oklahoma teenage male youths gang
attack a 15-year-old female from Texas, raping her and
forcing her to commit unnatural acts with them. Four of
the youths, two the sons of attorneys, admit being
incited to commit the act by reading obscene magazines
and looking at lewd photographs.

Assault. Male youth, age 13, admits attack on a young
girl in a downtown office was stimulated by sexual arousal
from a stag magazine article he had previously read in a
public drugstore, which showed naked women and an
article on "How to Strip a Woman."

Attempted Rape Juvenile Delinquency. A 15-year-old
boy grabbed a nine-year-old girl, dragged her into the
brush and was ripping off her clothes. She screamed
and the youth fled. The next day police picked him up.
He admitted that he had done the same thing in Houston,
in Galveston and now in San Antonio. He said his
father kept pornographic pictures in his top dresser

drawer and that each time he pored over them the urge
would come over him.

Rape Case. The Santa Clara County District Attorney
reported that one youth, after seeing a beatiful girl
kidnapped and held prisonor in a movie, carted off a
girl and held her for 18 hours while he forced her to
commit every act you can possibly imagine. In his home
police found nothing but this type of magazine.

Juvenile Delinquency - Sex Gang. A juvenile sex gang
involving boys seven to fifteen was discovered in Oklaho-
ma. An attorney representing one of the 15-year-olds
revealed the boy told him they had bought magazines at
various grocers and drugstore newsstands and were
incited by pictures of men committing unnatural acts and
men and women in lewd photos.

These are not just isolated cases. A recent study done by the Michigan State Police, using a computer to classify over 35,000 sex crimes which were committted in that state alone over a 20-year period, found that 43% were pornography-related.

These are the

cases where the perpetrator was apprehended. No one knows how many cases of sexual assault, lewd conduct, voyeurism, quasi-consensual perversion, bestiality, rape-murder and other crimes were motivated by pornographic immersion, but the authorities never apprehended the actor and thus could never obtain the materials that triggered his sick conduct. Nor do we know how many cases of sexual promiscuity, unwanted pregnancy and venereal disease are due to experimentation induced by the pornographic trash we euphemistically call "sexually explicit" material. But the iceberg below the surface is always far bigger than the tip we see above. (III) EVEN IF PORNOGRAPHY DID NOT CAUSE SEX CRIMES IN MANY CASES, THE PSYCHOLOGICAL HARM IT CAUSES MAKES IT A DEADLY THREAT TO THE FUTURE OF OUR SOCIETY AND JUSTIFIES STRONG LAWS AGAINST IT.