PORNOGRAPHY SHOULD BE BANNED

It is a multibillion dollar industry, easily to be accessible by adults, adolescents and kids, its
addiction percentage is extremely high. It is not a video games or cigarettes or movie. It is
Pornography. Pornography is defined as an explicit content that from various form that is intended
for sexual arousal. Pornography may be presented in variety of media including books, sculpture,
sound recording, phone calls, text messages and video. Based on Forbes 2017 analytic report, it is
found that visitors from Pornhub website were 28.5 billion per year with an average of 81 million
visitors per day. This is a serious concern and it is impossible to ignore. Due to this, pornography
by any means should be banned. Pornography should be banned based on these three effect;
changing people’s behaviour, high in sexual interest and rewire brain function.

Excessive pornography is constantly linked to affecting one’s behaviour. Pietrini Sánchez

(2016) expressed in her paper that recent porn footages encourage harmful stereotype towards the
female gender, including under-age children, which in turn, increase brutality towards the female.
She also states that pornographic contents are also translated as the spreading of hate towards
woman, where these materials enable the plantation of misinformation in one’s mind by swaying
their thinking and manipulating both, in her words “behaviour and attitude of men’. These
statements blatantly suggest the effect of one being exposed to pornographic materials can do to
the mind of the viewer, shaping both their attitude and behaviour into misogynistic stereotypes,
where the female gender is not viewed as human but as sexual objects. Bourdie (1989) states in
their infamous interview regarding “symbolic violence”, being a virtue which does not exist
without the presence of an accomplice. He continues stating that gender domination has perceived
logic by men affected through misogynistic thinking, making it feel as though the feeling is
normalized and part of a lifestyle. Exposure to sexual contents can accelerate symbolic violence
thinking as these materials already mistaken viewers to fantasize females as nothing but object to
satisfy the sexual pleasure. Furthermore, excessive violence could be manipulated from watching
pornographic materials. Steven Balmen (2010) wrote in his paper, stating that Ted Bundy, the
notorious American who was famed for being not only a wanted serial killer but were also labelled
as a rapist and necrophilia. The famed murderer attacked and killed multiple females during the
1970’s and expressed a comprehensive fixation with pornographic materials which contains
violence, expressing them as his stimulation to commit the horrendous acts and killings he
committed. This clearly proves pornographic materials is a drive, a stimulant for unstable
individuals, which if left unattended, could produce more individuals such as Ted Bundy which
would continue to terrorize woman in the coming days.

Another reason why pornography should be banned is because greater use of pornography
would result an interest in engaging in such sexual behaviours. A research by Bridges et al (2016),
found that people who watch porn can become more aggressive and demeaning while performing
the sexual act in the real life. The study examined the relations among gender, pornography
consumption, and 20 sexual behaviours observed in common pornography where the participants
were grouped according to specific sexual behaviours as the (a) aggressor (e.g., hair pulling,
spanking, or choking), (b) target (e.g., being spanked or choked), or (c) uncommon and/or
degrading sexual activity (e.g., male ejaculation in female partner’s mouth, anal sex, double
penetration, and butt-to-mouth). Results indicates frequents user are more likely to have tried or
have an interest in trying sexual behaviours most frequently seen in pornography. Furthermore,
due to excessive exposure to pornographic materials will also leads sex trafficking, rape and child
pornography (pedophiles). The porn industry took a risky way by producing and distributing
pornography content involving the victims of sex trafficking. A lot of women have been kidnapped,
abused, drugged, threatened, and were forced to do sex slavery (FTND, 2018). Apart from that,
child pornography is a part of the sex trafficking and this also serious issues of child sexual
exploitation that has the similar impact with the we view situations involving physical sexual
contact with other people. Besides, there are some evidences that people who have experience high
level of sexual stimulation during childhood or experienced sexual abuse during their past
childhood life may have a strong association between childhood and sexuality. As what Dr.
Catherine Mackinon said that viewing pornography is an “experience of bought sex and thus it
creates a deprivation to continue to earn and portray, and act out what is seen.” Pornography, she
says, is “advertising for trafficking, not just in general but also in the sense that traffickers and
pimps use pornographic images of victims as specific advertising for their ‘products’. From that,
we can conclude that exposure to pornography has a high probability to develop sexual interest to
whom is addicted from it, which enables the acts leading to human trafficking, rape and child
pornography. Viewers could also be affected to changes in their personality, becoming more
violent and demeaning during sexual intercourse with their partner in the real life.
 Some studies have shown that watching porn may rewire watcher’s brain by altering its
function and emerged the addictive behaviour in watching pornography. Research by Voon et al.,
2014, has found a strong evidence of sensation in obsessive porn user where it caused dopamine
to be released as it triggered brain activity in sex addiction which it similar was as addicted with
[1][2]
. Sensitization is hyper-reactivity to cues that leads user to desire to watch and is deliberated
to be the core addiction-related brain change) and this causes the brain to need more dopamine
since dopaminergic response produces from watching a pornography content (Borreli, 2015).
Apart from that, the German researchers found that the amount of a person watching porn
correlated with level of changes in the brain where the more they watched the lower the activity
was in their brain’s reward centers after sexual images were flashed on a screen (Borreli, 2015).
Other than that, watching pornography will affect memory and interfere user’s concentration. Laier
et al (2013) discovered that internet erotic can reduce working memory which resulting a desertion
of relevant environmental information and thus disrupt one’s decision making. In his study, he has
undergone an experiment on 28 healthy individual where he tested them with 4 different sets of
picture which one of it was pornographic. Participants also rated the pornographic pictures with
respect to sexual arousal and masturbation urges prior to, and after, pornographic picture
presentation. The results showed that their working memories did interfere due to the pornographic
viewing and that greater arousal improved the drop. Lastly, spoiling yourself in pornography could
destruct the way you think and thus warps your affection because you will think that women or
men as a sex objects which to satisfy your sinful lust rather than a fellow image (Carson, 2016). It
also will affect the conscience consciousness of what you actually believe is right and wrong
because when you indulge yourself with pornography it desensitizes your conscience. Therefore,
it is possible that excessive pornography can affect user’s brain and causing it to change.

In summary, explicit content can be accessible anytime and anywhere, and this is a serious
problem that may affect our future generation. We must ban pornography before it turned the
society become more worst. Therefore, NGOs should collaborate with government to overcome
this problem among our future generation. Such campaigns and awareness program are good
example to fixed the situation and producing a new generation that are free from pornography
criminal. Government also should take part in blocking all the website that contain pornographic
and other unsuitable content. Not to forget, that parents also play an important role in shaping,
educating and also monitoring their children in the use of the internet in their daily lives, so that
this pornographic problem can be curbed before it getting bad. Pornography is the sign of
unhealthy society and now is the time to act.

REFERENCES

Borreli, Lizette. 2015. ‘Watching Adult Films Alters Brain Activity Similar to Drug Addicts,
Alcoholics: The Pornographic Mind.’ Medical Daily, August 12.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/watching-adultfilms-alters-brain-activity-similar-drug-addicts-
alcoholics-347224.

Bourdieu, P and Wacquant, L. (1996): An Invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity

Bridges, A. J., Sun, C. F., Ezzell, M. B., & Johnson, J. (2016). Sexual Scripts and the Sexual
Behaviour of Men and Women Who Use Pornography. Sexualization, Media, & Society, 2(4),
237462381666827. doi:10.1177/2374623816668275

Laier, C., Schulte, F. P. & Brand, M. (2013). Pornographic picture processing interferes with
working memory performance. Journal of Sex Research, 50, 642–
652.10.1080/00224499.2012.716873

n.a. (2018). The Inseparable Link Between Porn & Trafficking: Porn is harmful to those who
watch it, and to those who create it. Fight The New Drug. Retrieved April 28, 2018 from
https://fightthenewdrug.org/the-internet-can-be-a-very-unsexy-place-we/

Pietrini Sánchez, M. J. (2016). Some Ethical Considerations about Pornography Regulations.

Tópicos, Revista de Filosofía, 211. doi:10.21555/top.v0i0.792

Steven Balmer., J.R. (2010) The Limits of Free Speech, Pornography and the Law, Postgraduate
Student, School of Law, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen Student L. Rev. 66

Trueman, P. A. (2014). Porn creates demand for sex trafficking. National Center on Sexual
Exploitation (The Miami Herald). Retrieved April, 28 2018 from
https://endsexualexploitation.org/articles/porn-creates-demand-for-sex-trafficking-the-miami-
herald/
Voon, V., Mole, T. B., Banca, P., Porter, L., Morris, L., Mitchell, S., … Irvine, M. (2014).
Neural Correlates of Sexual Cue Reactivity in Individuals with and without Compulsive
Sexual Behaviours. PLoS ONE, 9(7), e102419. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0102419

Wacquant, L. J. D. (1989). Towards a Reflexive Sociology: A Workshop with Pierre Bourdieu.

Sociological Theory, 7(1), 26. doi:10.2307/202061