With the Diddy trial winding down, pornography is in the spotlight, and the rapper’s apparent compulsion for explicit material puts him in bad company. What do Ted Bundy and Idaho murderer Bryan Kohberger, for example, have in common? An obsession with violent pornography.
Did Diddy allegedly abuse women and Kohberger murder people because of viewing violent pornography? We can’t be 100% sure, but when we see a correlation between these men’s alleged crimes and their obsession with pornography, it is something that has to be taken seriously.
Kohberger frequently stalked his victims and searched for pornography containing the words “drugged” and “sleeping.”
In the Diddy case, text messages from his his ex Cassie Ventura showed her telling the mogul, “I’m not a porn star,” related to his “freak offs” where he would hire male escorts and porn stars and try to recreate pornographic materials in his many homes.
Not every woman in the country is a porn star. Certainly not every aspiring singer such as Ventura. Not every college student, like the victims in Idaho. And not our nation’s children.
This past week, we saw the Supreme Court make a decision that was a win for states’ rights and protections for minors in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton. The deceptively named Free Speech Coalition took the Texas attorney general all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court over Texas’s age verification law.
The Free Speech coalition doesn’t defend the rights of nuns against Obamacare, it was nowhere to be found when Hobby Lobby went to the Supreme Court over abortion coverage, and last I checked it did not defend a Christian summer camp in Colorado from being forced to have transgender students sleep in the same cabin as their identity.
Why? Because the Free Speech Coalition isn’t a defender of the First Amendment at all. It is a nonprofit association for the U.S. sex industry and frequently fights laws regarding obscenity. It says its mission is to protect the rights of the “adult industry.” It is not in the business of protecting speech; it is in the business of growing the pornography industry and its entities. It has been at the forefront of fighting age verification laws for years.
The Supreme Court decision was a vital move in making sure states are able to exercise the ability to require private businesses with explicit content to have age identification barriers in place. Currently 24 states have such laws.
Not having protections in place to make sure minors do not have access to violent sexually explicit material is a hellish reality we cannot allow. This is dangerous for our society and for our nation’s children.
The National Institute of Health has looked at data showing that addictive pornography use is linked to triggering and recidivism in men in violent and domestic sexual assault situations. Since the 1980s, we have seen proof showing the negative effects of pornography on men, and now we have data showing the extreme risks to minors.
The following observations were noted regarding young adults exposed to pornography in a report via the Alaska legislature: ”Male subjects demonstrated increased callousness toward women. Subjects considered the crime of rape less serious …. Subjects became more interested in more extreme and deviant forms of pornography.”
Additionally, we know that groomers and predators will try to confuse children by exposing them to sexually explicit materials. But some of the most damning data say that “children under 12 years old who have viewed pornography are statistically more likely to sexually assault their peers,” according to the report.
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There is a seedy underworld of the pornography industry that does not care who is seeing its content, let alone being affected by it. These advocates for pornography remain silent instead of decrying and distancing themselves from men such as Diddy and instead of acknowledging the depressing involvement of sites such as Pornhub that, according to the Justice Department, “turned a blind eye” regarding content containing trafficked individuals and minors. Instead of supporting laws that protect children with age requirements or the Kids Online Safety Act, they choose to fight them.
Serving up dangerous materials that historically show negative effects on grown men, let alone children, is not a road we need to go down as a nation. It’s time for mainstream liberals to stand up and say enough is enough. If they truly support women, they should be defending the women coerced and abused by an industry that preys and profits from their emotional, mental, and physical abuse.
Elisha Krauss is a conservative commentator and speaker who resides in Los Angeles, California, with her husband and their four children. She is an advocate for women’s rights, school choice, and smaller government.
