Many men of power and prominence have been caught downloading dirty stuff onto their computers.
Michael Soden, head of the Bank of Ireland, resigned in 2004 after admitting he accessed pornography on his office computer.
A former dean of Harvard University’s Divinity School, Ronald Thiemann, had to resign nine years ago after authorities found adult sexual images on his university-owned computer.
A police officer in Madison, Wis., was suspended without pay last year for perusing pornography on an office computer.
Authorities now allege former Judge and Denver City Attorney Larry Manzanares has joined this group by downloading pornography onto a laptop computer that he is charged with stealing from the government.
“These are people who would not have walked into a pornography shop in their neighborhood,” said Mary Anne Layden, director of the University of Pennsylvania Sexual Trauma and Psychopathology Program. “But the Internet is anonymous.”
There is vigorous debate among pornography researchers about why people take the risk – and what the consequences are.
Some do it because Internet pornography is free, experts said. Or because they’re bored or anxious. Because it’s quick, others said, and because it’s addicting.
“It really is, in many ways, a mood-management type of device,” said James Weaver, a researcher with the Center for AIDS Research at Emory University in Atlanta.
“It’s a way to distract yourself very effectively from the pressures of your day – cheaper than gambling, less illegal than crack, not as problematic as trying to keep a bottle of Jack Daniels in the desk,” Weaver said.
Drug use and alcohol use, Weaver said, lead to changes in the reward system of the brain – causing physical dependence on a substance.
“There’s no evidence pornography does that,” he said.
Trapped in porn cycle
But if pornography doesn’t meet the medical definition, it is “addictive” in the common use of the word, said Gail Dines, chairwoman of American studies at Wheelock College in Boston.
Dines said she’s dismayed by what she hears from college-age men.
“They can’t stay away from pornography – and they want to,” Dines said. “They come to me virtually in tears.”
Dines said she’s concerned that legal sites draw users into viewing illegal, violent and degrading material, including child pornography.
“I’ve interviewed men who start at legal, pseudo-child pornography sites with women who are maybe 18 but look younger,” she said. “That legitimizes their interest in children, it normalizes it, and they move on to illegal sites.”
Research demonstrates that people become “habituated” to sexual pictures and movies, Weaver said.
“When they don’t find them exciting anymore, they start seeking out something else,” he said.
A plummet in attitude
The University of Pennsylvania’s Layden said her research has shown an association between pornography and negative attitudes toward women – including a willingness to solicit prostitutes.
Nearly 90 percent of the male college students she’s surveyed over several years view porn on the Internet, Layden said.
About one-quarter of those said they had visited a prostitute or would someday. That group viewed more pornography, more frequently, than students who said they would never pay for sex.
Pornography’s message is powerful, Layden said.
“Looking at pornography, you’re aroused, and we know from other research that you learn things better, deeper, longer in the presence of arousal,” she said.
“Then take the messages in pornography – it’s about body parts, it’s about violence, it’s about group sex, it’s about exploitation. And on the Internet, increasingly, it’s about degradation and humiliation.”
Staff writer Katy Human can be reached at 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com.
