I was riding my bike home from work the other day when I came across a billboard emblazoned with the phrase, “PORN KILLS LOVE/FIGHT FOR LOVE,” along with a website,
www.pornkillslove.com. I live in a severely economically depressed area, mostly Latino, where I imagine that fretting over skin flicks plays second fiddle to concerns like paying the rent or feeding a family (Lord knows we don't ever get to do both), so I didn't pay it too much mind, thinking the sign to be a one-off from some local church group. I mean, who else could it be? Non-religious people don't give a shit about things like porn until religious people tell them to, whether because of God or in spite of him.
It wasn't until I saw the same billboard across town in an affluent, predominantly white community that I began to smell just how much Jesus juice might be involved in plastering these signs up, and that there's might be a helluva lot more of them. Turns out I was right; there's at least a hundred of them peppering the highways and byways of the San Francisco Bay Area, and that number is definitely on the rise.
It turns out the “Porn Kills Love” campaign is sponsored by an anti-pornography group calling themselves “Fight The New Drug,” (FTND) and true to form, their roots lie deep in the heart of the Mormon church. Their founder, Clay Olsen, is a former BYU student and Mormon missionary, who turned PornoCop in 2009 after his cousin was released from prison for committing, and I quote: “crimes of a violent sexual nature.” This cousin, according to a recent article in The Daily Dot, “attributed his violent impulses to his longtime addiction to pornography.” Surprise, surprise: one of the faithful has a sexual impulse problem. At any rate, it seems that, with a poster child no firmly in hand, Olsen had ample motivation and ammunition with which to begin his crusade, and here we are.
Both The Daily Dot and The Daily Beast have done some excellent reporting on the group's astonishing rise in popularity, which you can read about here and here. In the meantime, here's the Reader's Digest version:
First off, FTND's claims about “porn addiction” are bullshit, obviously. The group primarily cites quasi-religious sources like Mormon neurosurgeon and author Donald Hilton in their reference materials, a man whose work in the subject of “porn addiction,” has not only never been peer-reviewed, but is entirely self-published and low-budget as fuck. Furthermore, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a.k.a. the Bible Of Modern Psychology, does not recognize “porn addiction” as a real problem any more than it recognizes a belief in Jesus as one, and probably never will. In fact, a recent study conducted by Case Western Reserve University that was peer-reviewed shows a strong correlation between a belief in "porn addiction" and a belief in God. Imagine that...
Let's face it: Fight The New Drug is run by a bunch of Mormon dudes (and a lady, because diversity!) who use the organization's claims as cover to function as the Porn Police for Jesus and Joseph Smith. Most notably among them is FTND's director of research Dr. Jason Carroll, who's hobbies also include fighting gay marriage all the way up to the Supreme Court. Other luminaries include Gail Dines, the anti-porn activist who once claimed that porn actors “don’t make love in pornography, they make hate,” as well as University Of Pennsylvania women's studies professor Mary Anne Layden, who was quoted in The Washington Times as saying women who enjoy porn are more likely to be victims of nonconsensual sex. Here in the Bay Area, the scars from the battle over Prop 8 are still fresh; for Fight The New Drug to sick Dr. Carroll and his cronies on us again so soon after is particularly audacious, even for the God Squad. But they'll never stop; they don't know how.
For religious conservatives, pseudoscience is shaping up to be the next major front in the culture war, especially on the Internet. In an increasingly secularized, pluralistic society, fire-and-brimstone tactics don't work as well as they used to. Groups like Fight The New Drug are learning from the mistakes of their predecessors, opting to appeal to people's guilt instead of their outrage by using bogus factoids and irreligious testimonials rather than outrage and scare tactics. Both accomplish the same end, but as a lie of omission, the former has become much more effective these days at getting the message across. Invoking the God of Abraham just isn't cutting it anymore, but who doesn't love a good 12-step program?