Porn made her living hell worse
Pornography made her captor more violent, Elizabeth Smart said in a video posted online Friday.
Produced by the anti-porn advocacy group Fight the New Drug, the 5-minute video delves into how Smart’s convicted kidnapper, Brian David Mitchell, would “just sit and look” at various “hard-core” porn magazines.
“I can’t say that he would not have gone out and kidnapped me had he not looked at pornography,” Smart says in the video. “All I know is that pornography made my living hell worse.”
Smart was held captive for nine months in the Utah mountains after Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Eileen Barzee, pulled the then-14-year-old Salt Lake City girl from her bed at knifepoint in June 2002. He continually raped her, Smart said, but assaulted her more frequently after he had been looking at porn.
“It just led to him raping me more, more than he already did — which was a lot,” she says in the video. “Looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him. Having sex with his wife after looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him. Then it led to him finally going out and kidnapping me. He just always wanted more.”
And there’s no better “more” than raping a kidnapped child. Now that is porn. Living the dream.
I noticed that Jezebel picked this up earlier:
http://jezebel.com/elizabeth-smart-says-her-captors-porn-obsession-made-he-1785543386
Their comment: “Whether porn is systematically destroying the moral fabric of America is a conversation for a different day.” Because of course that’s exactly what Smart was saying.
Fucking funfems. I mean, why even bother reporting this if that’s your take? If all you do is quote Smart recounting her misery, with a side comment about how porn’s not so bad, then there’s nothing more to your post than straight-up voyeurism.
Wow. That’s shocking even for Jezebel.
“systematically destroying the moral fabric of America” is a HUGE claim, and not something one would naturally go to from one woman having it make her life worse.
How about it starts a discussion on whether it makes it more likely that women will receive sexual harassment? How about we ask if men who watch porn feel more entitled to sex and angrier at women for not providing it? How about we ask if it gives men unrealistic ideas about what women want from sex, how to handle relationships, or even what the men themselves should see as a positive sexual experience?
I’ve mentioned before that in middle school, when I was only 11, boys started forcibly groping me, talking dirty to me, shoving porn under my nose, etc. They picked up the idea *somewhere* that that was how you treat someone who is sexually attractive. It was before the internet, but porn was still readily available as videos and magazines.
Currently the first comment on that jezebel story:
Where do I even fucking begin?
Smart’s abductor used porn to ‘stimulate’ himself in order to assault her. This is her report, and there’s no reason to leap to any assumption of her being mistaken.
Still, the discussion shouldn’t drown out the overwhelming part that Mormon patriarchy, right-wing ‘purity culture,’ and systematic disempowerment had in making Smart particularly vulnerable to this crime.