Activists clash on effects of porn

NEW YORK — The industry's VIPs mingle at political galas and Super Bowl parties. Their product is available on cell phones, podcasts and particularly the Internet — there it's an attraction like no other, patronized by tens of millions of Americans.

It's pornography. And if you're a consumer, Utahn John Harmer thinks you're damaging your brain.

Harmer is part of a cadre of anti-porn activists seeking new tactics to fight an unprecedented deluge of porn that they they see as wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality. They are urging federal prosecutors to pursue more obscenity cases and raising funds for high-tech brain research that they hope will fuel lawsuits against porn magnates.

"We don't think it's a lost cause," said Harmer, an auto executive and former politician who's been fighting porn for 40 years.

"It's the most profitable industry in the world," he said. "But I'm convinced we'll demonstrate in the not-too-distant future the actual physical harm that pornography causes and hold them financially accountable. That could be the straw that breaks their back."

The activists' adversary is a sprawling industry that, by some accounts, offers more than 4 million porn sites on the Internet, that in the United States alone is estimated to be worth $12 billion a year. A tracking firm, comScore Media Metrix, says about 40 percent of Internet users in the United States visit adult sites each month.

Porn products are featured at popular sex expositions and retail chains such as Hustler Hollywood. Major hotels provide in-room porn, and adult film stars are now mainstream celebrities. Mary Carey attended a VIP Republican fund-raiser in Washington in mid-March; Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" hit the best-seller lists, and she hosted a racy pre-Super Bowl party in Detroit in February.

As much as there is national consensus on the evils of child pornography, there is none whatever on porn featuring adults and marketed to them. It's more pervasive than ever, yet activists and experts disagree bitterly over the extent of harm it causes.

"The form of entertainment is no problem," said Paul Cambria, general counsel for the porn industry's Adult Freedom Foundation. "There are individuals who are going to react abnormally to normal material, but it's not a problem for the average person."

For every couple driven apart by porn, there are others whose relationship is enlivened, Cambria argued. He dismissed contentions that porn is highly addictive or brain-damaging.