Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen: The Benefits of Porn & Why Staring At Breasts Is Good For Your Health3

by Brad Warner

I just moved into a new apartment in beautiful Akron, Ohio. Don’t be sad. It’s OK. I like it! Anyway, the previous tenant apparently subscribed to Psychology Today magazine and neglected to either cancel or forward her subscription. So I got the latest issue, dated April 2011, and on the cover an article inside is advertised with the rather lurid headline, “Smashing a Taboo: Does Porn Protect Kids?”

The quote they chose to pull from the article and print in big red letters above it is even more shocking. It says, “Reported cases of child sex abuse dropped markedly after kiddie porn was legalized.”

The quotation refers to the Czech Republic; Milton Diamond, a sexuality researcher from the University of Hawaii was keeping an eye on reports of sex crimes in that country before and after laws decriminalized sexually explicit materials. Diamond noted that when the Czechs made it legal to produce and distribute digitally created kiddie porn, “cases of child sexual abuse immediately dropped markedly.” He says that “the simple expedient of masturbation” keeps children from being used as “substitute subjects.”

However, there isn’t a crystal clear one-to-one relationship. Sociologist David Finkelhor, head of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire noted that sex crimes against children were already declining in the Czech Republic before the decriminalization of porn. Furthermore, many who do commit sex crimes against kids also possess child pornography. “But,” he says, “we don’t know whether that plays a role or reflects the same predilection.” A more detailed report than the one printed in the magazine appears on the Physorg website.

This study, by the way, comes right on the heels of another study in Germany that seems to indicate that *staring at women’s breasts makes you healthier. I could’ve told them that! It’s always worked for me. (According to the Fox “News” report below, “The authors of the study recommend that men stare at breasts for 10 minutes a day.”)

Leaving the thorny issue of kiddie porn aside, the more basic notion in the Psychology Today article that porn in general might be a factor in reducing sex crimes is very interesting to me. Based on my own experience, I can see how this might be the case.

When my marriage was breaking up and I was still trying to preserve it, I used to use porn in a way that relates to this. There were times I found myself facing a situation wherein I might be tempted to go out and try to charm some woman into sleeping with me. But I knew that would obviously not be good for my already shaky relationship with my wife. Without being too graphic about my solution, it involved, let’s say, “doing extensive research” of websites like the one you’re looking at right now until I felt that I had come to a conclusion that would make me less likely to be interested in flirting with anyone.

So it makes sense to me that studies would seem to show that pornography, rather than endangering women and children by making us men more sexually predatory, actually can protect them by making us a bit more docile.

Porn is not going to go away. Only the complete collapse of human civilization could make that happen. And I hope that’s not on the agenda any time soon. Barring that, porn is only going to become more prominent and more available. More and more taboos will be broken and eventually become acceptable.

Now it seems possible that porn may serve a useful function in society. This is also encouraging news. While I am sure there must be cases where someone has been inspired to commit a crime by something they saw in a piece of porn, this doesn’t mean much. Charles Manson was inspired to go on a killing rampage by The Beatles’ White Album. It would appear that, as with the White Album, more people are inspired to peaceful action by porn – and the ones who are inspired to violence have other issues anyway.

I’m sure the anti-porn people will be able to find other studies to prove that they’re right. By my own intuitive sense of things is that these studies are correct. So if anyone gives you a hard time about your SG subscription tell ’em scientific studies say it’s good for you!

Brad is on tour right now and may be in your area. To see where Brad will be speaking next visit his blog.

Brad Warner is the author of Sex, Sin and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between as well as Hardcore Zen, Sit Down and Shut Up! and Zen Wrapped in Karma Dipped in Chocolate. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff that you can click here to see.

You can also buy T-shirts and hoodies based on his books, and the new CD by his band Zero Defex now!