Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana, or ROCK (second link is to their Facebook profile), is a special case for PAPER in that they are well-funded (they get an awful lot of attention from Southeast Christian Megachurch) and gaining success. While cordial, ROCK does not seem to be interested in a dialogue.
ROCK’s slogan is Building stronger communities and families, which they think is possible by eliminating adult businesses from the Louisville area. If you’ve been in Clarksville since 2004, you’ve probably seen one of their billboards:
ROCK’s current billboard
According to this interview with ROCK’s president, they’ve helped drive the number of adult businesses in the Kentuckiana area from “over 200″ to 67. (Exactly what adult businesses are included in this survey and how much of Kentuckiana and Indiana were included was not specified.) Much of this is due to an zoning ordinance change ROCK was involved with.
ROCK seems to have two projects at the fore right now. One is dragging Clarksville’s Theatair X through court, for “staying open past 1 a.m… holes between the [peep show] booths, inadequate lighting, doors on the booths and not having a straight vision from the desk to the booths.” Though the citations on Theatair X are legitimate, PAPER asks why some of the restrictions on adult businesses are still in place, namely the hours ordinance. What is the logic of not allowing a business to stay open after 1 AM?
They’re also in court to get an In God We Trust plate for Kentucky. Fairly fast and loose with the First Amendment, we say. We’ll keep you posted on how this goes—let’s hope the suit gets dismissed, and if not, the ACLU of Kentucky is linked here.
Okay, ROCK is a bunch of evangelical Christians harrassing porn stores and trying to get silly tokens of faith from the state. What’s the big deal? Why pay attention to them?
ROCK is not content only to point out if an adult business slacks on certain rules or drive around with vanity plates. They demonize porn. Claims from their website, from an article on what to tell store managers to guilt them into not stocking porn:
1. By selling pornography, you are enabling addictive behavior.
PAPER’s reply: if you take a good look, the majority of those talking about addiction to porn are sex-negative folk, usually affiliated with some fundamentalist or evangelical form of religion. Psychologists actually have no such diagnosis as “porn addict.” What breeds an obsession with pornography is sexual repression. People who report an inability to stop looking at porn are not addicts—they’re discovering a really thrilling side of life they’ve been told is wrong or dirty. It’s unsurprising that they can’t seem to stop looking. Remove the repression, and remove the “addiction.”
2. By selling pornography, you are contributing to the breakup of marriages and families.
PAPER’s reply: no doubt, marriages do sometimes end because of sexual issues. The problem is far more complex than porn, however—consider how many relationships fare perfectly well despite one or more members consuming porn. Rather than simply blaming porn, PAPER would ask those struggling with sexual issues in their relationships to consider the real underlying issues.
3. By selling pornography, you are helping to lower community standards of decency.
PAPER’s reply: this is stupid. When have you ever seen nipples or genitals on display to a general audience in the Louisville area?
4. By selling pornography, you have alienated a large percentage of your customer base by pandering to a decided minority.
PAPER’s reply: depends on the neighborhood. Stores won’t continue to stock product that doesn’t move.
Besides the shallowness of their arguments, ROCK makes some nasty claims about porn. From their blog when asked to demonstrate that porn is actually bad:
That’s a tough one. Sort of like if you’d asked me to demonstrate that cancer is bad for you. In other words; I don’t know where to start. You could go to Dr. Judith Reisman’s web site, for starters. You could go to the Indiana state police web site and type in the address to Theatair X on their registered sex offenders map; you’ll find over 300 registered offenders within a 20-mile radius. You could look up the dozens of court cases around the country (including ones in Kentuckiana) in which courts have upheld the contention that sexually-oriented businesses require severe health and zoning restrictions due to their very nature and the deleterious effects they have on surrounding neighborhoods. Of course, a lot of the evidence for the malignancy of porn is by definition harder to come by: Broken marriages, abused children, rape—heartbreaking stories of people who are understandably reluctant to go public.
ROCK doesn’t have to prove the malignancy of pornography. It’s self evident. Our mission, in part, is to make people aware of its devastating impact, and to reign in its influence as much as legally possible.
See this article for a good debunking of Reisman’s credentials and note that Theatair X has a lower number of sex offenders in the neighborhood than comparable cities. Also note that regulations on adult businesses can range from the sensible to the stringent—and few people are willing to defend porn, because of the sex-negativity still so rampant in our society.
Perhaps most important is ROCK’s claim that porn is encourages or causes abuse. First, absolutely no sane person condones sexual exploitation of children. PAPER finds child porn and child abuse abhorrent. Pornographers are required to have proof of adulthood for their models, too; those who don’t are breaking the law. Second, it is flatly untrue that porn causes rape. From an Australian study:
It is generally agreed that these studies have demonstrated that rapists tend to use less pornography—either violent, or non-violent—than control groups, and that, on average, they come from more sexually repressed backgrounds and are exposed to pornography at a later age.
Article about a study further corroborating that availability of porn reduces rape, and the text of another study with similar results.
ROCK has no science to stand on for their arguments. At best, they offer anecdotal evidence and simplistic, sex-negative reasoning, and at their worst, they (unwittingly) tell flat-out untruths and foster sexual repression. Yes, the adult industry is imperfect, but it’s not going away. PAPER stands for pragmatic policies to protect sex workers and to inform consumers. We wish we could say the same for ROCK.
