Pornography -- Sex or Subordination?

In the late Seventies, America became shocked and outraged

by the rape, mutilation, and murder of over a dozen young,

beautiful girls. The man who committed these murders, Ted

Bundy, was later apprehended and executed. During his

detention in various penitentiaries, he was mentally

probed and prodded by psychologist and psychoanalysts

hoping to discover the root of his violent actions and

sexual frustrations. Many theories arose in attempts to

explain the motivational factors behind his murderous

escapades. However, the strongest and most feasible of

these theories came not from the psychologists, but from

the man himself, “as a teenager, my buddies and I would

all sneak around and watch porn. As I grew older, I

became more and more interested and involved in it,

[pornography] became an obsession. I got so involved in

it, I wanted to incorporate [porn] into my life, but I

couldn’t behave like that and maintain the success I had

worked so hard for. I generated an alter-ego to fulfill

my fantasies under-cover. Pornography was a means of

unlocking the evil I had buried

inside myself” (Leidholdt

47). Is it possible that pornography is acting as the key

to unlocking the evil in more unstable minds?

According to Edward Donnerstein, a leading researcher

in the pornography field, “the relationship between

sexually violent images in the media and subsequent

aggression and . . . callous attitudes towards women is

much stonger statistically than the relationship between

smoking and cancer” (Itzin 22). After considering the

increase in rape and molestation, sexual harassment, and

other sex crimes over the last few decades, and also the

corresponding increase of business in the pornography

industry, the link between violence and pornogrpahy needs

considerable study and examination. Once the evidence you

will encounter in this paper is evaluated and quantified,

it will be hard not come away with the realization that

habitual use of pornographic material promotes unrealistic

and unattainable desires in men that can leac to violent

behavior toward women.

In order to properly discuss pornography, and be able

to link it to violence, we must first come to a basic and

agreeable understanding of what the word pornography

means. The term pornogrpahy originates from two greek

words, porne, which means harlot, and graphein, which

means to write (Webster’s 286). My belief is that the

combination of the two words was originally meant to

describe, in literature, the sexual escapades of women

deemed to be whores. As time has passed, this definition

of pornography has grown to include any and all obscene

literature and pictures. At the present date, the term is

basically a blanket which covers all types of material

such as explicit literature, photography, films, and video

tapes with varying degrees of sexual content.

For Catherine Itzin’s research purposes pornogrpahy

has been divided into three