The 1,400-word article, titled “The Porn Divide,” focuses on anti-porn activists who are seeking new tactics to fight the online adult industry, which they see as “wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality.”
In the embargoed piece, John Harmer, a Utah-based auto executive and former politician who's been fighting porn for 40 years, says one of his group’s weapons is scientific social research.
“[I]'m convinced we'll demonstrate in the not-too-distant future the actual physical harm that pornography causes and hold [online adult business owners] financially accountable,” Harmer told the Associated Press. “That could be the straw that breaks their back."
Harmer also said that he is counting on more federal obscenity case to be pursued, as well.
"We don't think it's a lost cause," Harmer said. "It's the most profitable industry in the world."
According to tracking firm comScore Media Metrix, the online adult industry is worth $12 billion a year, there are 4 million adult sites and that 40 percent of Internet users in the U.S. visit adult sites each month.
In the article, Harmer and others argue that the pervasive amount of adult material on the Internet is “mainstreaming” and legitimizing porn and accompanying products.
But adult industry attorney Paul Cambria disputes their thesis.
"The form of entertainment is no problem,” he said. "There are individuals who are going to react abnormally to normal material, but it's not a problem for the average person."
Cambria argued that for every couple driven apart by porn, there are others whose relationship is enlivened.
The article also goes on to compare the addiction of online adult content as addictive as crack, and that it is a facilitator of divorce.
Mary Anne Layden, a psychologist and addiction expert at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Associated Press that many of her patients, rather than improving their sex lives with porn, suffer sexual dysfunction.
"The Internet is the perfect delivery system for anti-social behavior — it's free, it's piped into your house," she said. “Internet porn is probably the biggest miseducation system we can devise in terms of sexuality, misuse of women."
Phil Burress, who leads the Cincinnati-based conservative group called Citizens for Community Values, also weighed in.
The self-described former addict said he had hoped that the Bush administration would reverse Clinton White House policy and step up prosecutions of online adult obscenity cases as well as child porn cases.
But, so far, Burress isn’t enchanted.
"Five years into this administration, they get an F," he said.
