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Pornography -- Sex or Subordination?



In the late Seventies, America became shocked and outraged

by the rape, mutilation, and murder of over a dozen young,

beautiful girls. The man who committed these murders, Ted

Bundy, was later apprehended and executed. During his

detention in various penitentiaries, he was mentally

probed and prodded by psychologist and psychoanalysts

hoping to discover the root of his violent actions and

sexual frustrations. Many theories arose in attempts to

explain the motivational factors behind his murderous

escapades. However, the strongest and most feasible of

these theories came not from the psychologists, but from

the man himself, “as a teenager, my buddies and I would

all sneak around and watch porn. As I grew older, I

became more and more interested and involved in it,

[pornography] became an obsession. I got so involved in

it, I wanted to incorporate [porn] into my life, but I

couldn’t behave like that and maintain the success I had

worked so hard for. I generated an alter-ego to fulfill

my fantasies under-cover. Pornography was a means of

unlocking the evil I had burried inside myself” (Leidholdt

47). Is it possible that pornography is acting as the key

to unlocking the evil in more unstable minds?

According to Edward Donnerstein, a leading researcher

in the pornography field, “the relationship between

sexually violent images in the media and subsequent

aggression and . . . callous attitudes towards women is

much stonger statistically than the relationship between

smoking and cancer” (Itzin 22). After considering the
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