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 of personality

developments.

Thus Wertham notes

What is true of violence is also true of scenes of animal sex. As practitioners of hypnosis have demonstrated, the subject, under hypnosis, can be made to "regress" to infancy even; and as he travels back mentally through his personal history, he can recall specific scenes and experiences which had long been dormant in his subconscious. that negative media effects are long-range and cumulative, that images are stored in the brain--if ordinary childhood experiences such as the first day of grammar school or even losing a toy, how much the more scenes of sexual torture or rape? On one level, it is quite true that we never fully forget what we have learned; it is also true that visual experiences constantly repeated and reinforced penetrate the subconsciousness and become part of the very psychic being of the person.

The clinical psychiatrist Dr. Melvin Anchell has written:

The adverse effects of audiovisual obscenities permitted in today's entertainment media are sexually devastating to children and adults. The belief that pornography is unsuitable mental fare for children but harmless for adults is illogical. It is like saying a human being suddenly becomes immune to poison at age 18. (Newspaper article, A Psychiatrist Looks at Pornography, emphasis added.)

Dr. Anchell goes on to point out that a young person absorbed in pornography frequently "fails to make a mature adjustment. He remains stunted in self-love which is satisfied with immature forepleasures."

Pornography embellishes the physical sex life of free lovers and
perverts who find it difficult to fulfill their complete sexual
needs. But complete sexuality is more than a physical relationship.
To be life-sustaining, human sexuality must encompass the mind
as well as the body. The affectionate component is as important
as the physical. Without companionship and affection, the sex
act alone produces frustrations that can lead to serious sexual
maladjustments. Free lovers and sexual deviants are in a constant

state of conflict with themselves.
onto others with sadistic vengeance.

They project their conflicts

Though I could continue in this vein, I believe that the point has been proved beyond cavil: the devotee of pornography is--literally-psychologically sick.

Now, by withdrawing any Federal laws against the already monstrouslylarge magazine/film/videotape porn industry, the Congress will hasten the expansion of what already is--literally--a psychologically sick generation.

This is no longer a question of how the man down the street entertains himself in private. It is now a question whether my other neighbors and I have a right to quarantine and prevent the spread of sickness in our neighborhood.

It is also a question whether my children will attend schools where some of the teachers have made themselves psychologically sick.

It is also a question whether the TV producers, the magazine editors and writers, and even some of our political leaders might, over the years and because the dam that was the law has burst, make themselves psychologically sick.

Unless one believes in widespread schizophrenia, it makes no sense to say that people can be psychologically sick in one area of their lives--the intimate area of sex and attitudes about it--but will be ordinary, normal, healthy, good people in other areas. As an American citizen, I will be harmed in a thousand subtle and some not-so-subtle ways, if some of my neighbors, and their children, and the local school teachers, and some of those who create our public entertainments, and some of those who run our government--if these people become psychologically sick.

Because some people seem incapable of perceiving psychological or moral contaminants to what, in a broad sense, one might call our spiritual

environment, I will conclude this section by returning merely to my pornophile neighbor. Consider his influence: My teenage daughter while babysitting chances to turn on his videotape player and views scenes of strapping women raping men my junior-high-school-aged son is invited

by the neighbor's two older boys to pore over the father's poorly-concealed basement collection of manuals on autoerotic stimulation ... during a party for the neighbor's college-age children the main entertainment, talked about for months afterwards by everyone in attendance, are sadomasochistic films.

Perhaps our government, which subsidizes both the growing of tobacco and research on cancer, will increase its appropriations for merital health, to address the psychological problems of the porn addicts. Regrettably, after-the-fact palliatives will not cure the moral contamination typified by a case given by Dr. Anchell in the article already quoted:

Marty, age 17, came to me for treatment of his recurrent head-
aches. My experience as a father and as a physician practicing
psychiatry has given me a certain rapport with teenagers; and it
was not long before Marty discussed with me his real problem.

It had begun four years previously when Marty was in junior
high. The son of affluent, professional parents, he was not
only a bright student but was popular as well. One afternoon
another 12-year-old boy invited Marty and a group of school-
mates, boys and girls, to come to his home to view a movie
which his parents showed at grownup parties. Since every
young person's ambition is to prove that he can act like an
adult, he had an eager audience while he played host during his
parents' absence.

The movie turned out to be hard-core pornography, graphically
depicting sexual intercourse along with every type of perversion.
After the initial embarrassment, the majority of the children were
completey seduced. They attempted to outdo the adults in the
movie then and there.

By the time he entered high school, Marty told me, his earlier
promiscuity had ceased because he no longer "got a kick out of
it." His problem, he said, was that he was impotent. For
sexual stimulation, he now needed drugs. At present, he is a
school dropout, finding release in drug-induced sexual fantasies.

Is there any hope for Marty to return to a normal life? It is
most improbable. You cannot stretch the bones of a dwarf. A
dwarf's subnormal size is due to premature closure of the bones
in childhood. Marty's impotence was due to his sexual growth
having been stunted before mature development occurred in
adolescence...

I ask the Congress whether it will accept responsibility for tragedies comparable to Marty's which its abdication will indirectly cause:

Marty's experiences with pornography sated him with sex before
the process of idealization was established in his relations with
girls. As a result he holds girls in contempt. His unresolved
affectionate longings have built up a continuous succession of
frustrations. His bitterness and disappointment with carnal sex
devoid of spiritualization have created such a reservoir of hate
for females that his sadism is almost fiendish. He has gradually
reverted to satisfying physical sexual needs entirely through
voyeurism and sadism. His greatest delight is in having orgastic
responses after beating his female cohorts. Sadistic pleasures
have spilled inwardly into himself, and he is gradually destroy-
ing his life with drugs.

Marty was a victim of pornography.

An unnecessary victim. His

case proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that it does matter how people entertain themselves. His case also shows the terrible harm in lax

law enforcement in this area; a fortiori, the harm that will befall us if there is no law enforcement against pornography for adults. For the key to his case was: that hard-core porn film depicting sexual intercourse and perversion. It was manufactured by adults for commercial gain. It was probably advertised through the mails. It was almost certainly shipped in Interstate Commerce. Equally certainly the profits it generated went in large part to Organized Crime, to subsidize more evil films to make their twisting way through the semi-underground of the adult bookstores and peep shows and up at last through ad and mail to the neighborhood of "affluent, professional parents."

(4) MODERN PORNOGRAPHY IS A THREAT TO THE FAMILY.

Pornography as it exists in the United States in 1979 is an education system. Or, I should say, it is an anti-education system. As the classical educators used to say in quite a different context, it "educates the whole man." The people who buy through the mails the instruments and pictures advertised in the magazines have enrolled in the correspondence schools of pornography: pay your money and receive a new lesson each month for private study in your own home. The people who subscribe to HUSTLER and the other self-consciously and deliberately-pornographic magazines are building a library of the Great Books of Pornography, chapter by chapter. The people patronizing the peep shows and "adult" bookstores are attending the schools of pornography. The people who buy the new home films and videotapes are students of the visual aid approach to education.

The porn sex clubs and interstate rings of child-transportation-for-sex syndicates teach through laboratory experience and vocational learn-by-doing techniques.

This anti-education system is at war with everything our nation's public and private school systems have tried to teach since the beginning of the country.

For as the political scientist, Dr. Reo Christenson, said in the article already quoted: "We should first explain what porno says to its customers." Its message is that sex is divorced from love, commitment, morality and responsibility; that it is a purely animal act, no more and no less; that it is unrelated to privacy; that deviant sex is the most adventurous and exciting sex; that women's importance is to be found in their genital organs which are fair game for whoever wishes to exploit them; that irresponsible sex has no consequences--no venereal disease, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, premature marriages, psychic traumas. Some message!

The home and the school are also involved in communicating an educational message to the next generation. It is a message that is far more than the