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Email: "Expert Says Demise of Big Tobacco Provides Roadmap to Victory over Porn"

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BY LifeSiteNews.com By Peter J. SmithWASHINGTON, D.C., July 5, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – How does America, considered the porn capital of the world, get rid of the scourge of pornography? Simple, one expert in the field tells LifeSiteNews.com (LSN): make pornography as socially unacceptable as smoking cigarettes, and pave the way for laws and litigation to finish off the billion-dollar smut empire.LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) spoke with Dr. Mary Anne Layden, an expert in treating those addicted to pornography, after a congressional briefing in the Capitol Visitor’s Center on enforcing obscenity laws in mid-June. Layden, who is co-director of the Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program at the Center for Cognitive Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, said the methods used by activists to take down the tobacco industry offer pro-family advocates and their allies a roadmap to drive the stake into the porn industry.Fifty years ago, the United States had a culture where “lighting up” was pervasive and glorified on the silver screen by stars like Humphrey Bogart, Frank Sinatra or Grace Kelly. Today, smoking largely has a social stigma thanks to aggressive anti-smoking efforts that led to strict anti-smoking laws, such that smokers can barely find a restaurant or bar that will let them have a cigarette with a coffee or beer. “So we are going to expect that what we did with cigarettes, we can do with pornography,” explained Layden. The first step in the fight against porn, Layden explained, is to get clinicians and doctors to start saying publically and loudly that pornography is a problem that is destructive, just as they began saying years ago that “our patients appear to be dying from cigarettes.”The second step is to get reporters and researchers to write articles explaining what the clinicians are saying about the harm caused by pornography.In terms of cigarettes, she said, “we got the reporters to write articles, then we got the researchers to come in, and we stopped listening to the Tobacco Institute researchers who lied to Congress and said it’s not addictive and not harmful, because they were throwing away all the studies that said it was.”Progress is already being made in this department, she said, as “we have got researchers who are doing research now and more research is being done on the brain responses [to porn].”  The third step is where the lawyers come in. Just as lawyers were necessary “to sue for people who were being damaged by cigarettes,” it would be necessary to get their assistance to sap the financial life out of the billion-dollar porn empire.“So we got to get the lawyers to do civil suits and criminal suits; we have got to get the government to give money for the Department of Justice,” said Layden, “so that we can have more criminal cases.”“If all of these people get together – the [doctors], the reporters, the lawyers, the government, the researchers – if all of them get together, we can do the same thing to [the porn industry] that we did to cigarette smoking,” concluded Layden.Therapy, But No Detox for Porn AddictPornography is a real and present danger in U.S. society, Layden told LSN. The damage it wreaks is especially terrible, she continued, because there is no way to “detox” or eliminate the images from an addict’s system. “With a traditional addiction treatment – if you are treating a cocaine addict, or heroine addict – you send them to detox,” explained Layden.  “With the porn addict, we can’t get the porn out of the system; we’ve got to treat you while the addictive substance is in your system and will still be in your system forever.”Layden stressed that even so, there is enormous hope: therapy does help people recover from their pornography addictions and lead successful and fulfilling lives.“People do get well. I have patients who get well,” she emphasized. “It’s hard, it’s long, it’s a relapsing disorder, but they do get well. They get reasonable lives, they have marriages that are good, they can raise children, they can be godly men, they can have careers. They do get well.”The techniques that she and other experts in the field use are designed to help diminish the impact of pornographic images (for instance, the “one-second bounce” technique helps recovering addicts avoid looking at pornographic images they might accidentally encounter) and help individuals retrain their minds to replace associations made with porn images with wholesome images. “While the images are still buried in the brain, and can come back unbidden, she said, “it gets better in terms of their being able to control it.”“But it’s a two year process even with motivated people. We can do it, but we [have] got to prevent more,” said Layden.She added that men all over the country are being “bombarded” with pornography, especially what she calls the “pornography of everyday life” found in Victoria’s Secret magazines and suchlike. It is a problem that civil society must take decisive action against, she said, because clinicians are overwhelmed.“We can’t fix this problem by pulling them one out of the river at a time and keep them from drowning. We have to go upstream and see who is pushing them in.”See related coverage by LifeSiteNews.com:Coalition Says Illegal Porn at ‘Epidemic Proportions,’ Demands Feds Take Action http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/jun/10061704.htmlSteve Jobs Says iPad Revolution Means ‘Freedom from Porn’http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/may/10051811.htmlThe Social Costs of Pornography http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/mar/10032313.htmlHijacking the Brain — How Pornography Works http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10020205.html'Pornography Harms' Website Launched http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2010/feb/10021801.html http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/expert-says-demise-of-big-tobacco-provides-roadmap-to-victory-over-porn/

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