Pornography: Playing with fire Relationships pay the price Sunday, January 26, 2003
BY EARLENE MCMICHAEL
KALAMAZOO GAZETTE
With long, blond hair, a pretty face and a nice figure, 36-year-old Megan Clodgo of Texas Township is an attractive woman by any standard.
So when she discovered four years ago that her husband was addicted to pornography, she was perplexed and crushed.
Brent Clodgo's interests went far beyond peeking at girlie magazines. They included trips to strip clubs and other places -- and increasingly during his work hours as a traveling salesman.
"The addiction was so strong, I couldn't stop and I wasn't willing to tell anyone," he said.
He said he finally conquered his addiction after confiding in his pastor and relying on the help of his wife and his faith in God.
Adult entertainment is a billon-dollar growth industry. Experts say the advent of the Internet, which has made erotic and more hard-core material easier to access in private, is whetting America's appetite for pornography.
It's also an industry beset by controversy. Kalamazoo city officials recently drew strong protest when they approved moving several adult businesses to an industrial park off Sprinkle Road, much to the vocal dismay of the park's other tenants. Schools and libraries are under pressure to keep Internet porn away from children. Portage has used zoning ordinances to head off adult businesses from establishing there, and Texas Township is looking at similar measures. This month, the Grand Rapids City Commission approved an ordinance aimed at keeping adult businesses away from residential neighborhoods.
The unease with pornography and adult businesses is fueled by suspicions that it challenges mainstream values, undermines marriages and relationships and even leads to sex crimes. Although it's an industry protected by the First Amendment and opinions on the research are mixed about pornography's effects on behavior, critics cite stories such as the Clodgos' to show that adult entertainment is a scourge on society.
"My experience is, it's progressive," said Brent Clodgo. "What starts as an adolescent curiosity gives birth to full-blown addiction. You can't think straight. You sacrifice your wife, family and career for the next pornographic buzz."
Thriving market
Sex is everywhere -- in ads, in movies on the big and the small screens, and in pay-per-view movies in hotels.
The saying "Sex sells" has never been more true.
Just one example lies in the hotel industry. Some analysts maintain that the Westin and Marriott hotel chains, for instance, make more money from in-room, X-rated movies than they do from the sale of snacks and drinks in their minibars. That's according to a PBS special on pornography that aired last year.
With estimates of earnings between $4 and $10 billion a year, the pornography industry is viewed as a thriving market -- and mainstream corporate America is seeing profits from it.
With the Internet leading the way, other media are turning up the sex quotient to stay competitive.
Consider: AT&T's cable division, AT&T Broadband, distributes to its subscribers an explicit porn channel, the Hot Network, the PBS special reported. General Motors, which owns satellite service DirecTV, also carries pornographic channels, the report said.
Soon after the Internet was launched in 1983, the sex industry took off.
In the five-year period ending in 1992, the number of strip clubs nationwide roughly doubled, according to U.S. News & World Report.
And between 1986 and 2000, the number of hard-core porn titles to hit the market rose to nearly 12,000 in 2000, an almost six-fold increase, reports Adult Video News, an adult-entertainment trade publication.
A primary consumer group for pornography is boys between the ages of 12 and 17, according to the U.S. Attorney General's Final Report on Pornography, issued in 1986. And one in five boys and one in 10 girls had had their first exposure by age 12.
Some will not develop a habit.
Matthew McCormick, a 43-year-old married father from Otsego, says he is one of those. Having visited strip clubs and checked out pornographic magazines, he rarely indulges now -- and that, he says, is by choice.
"I'm too busy," said McCormick, though he said he supports the right to distribute pornography on First Amendment grounds. He said he occasionally browses through porn magazines at newsstands.
Researchers don't fully understand why some people will become addicted to pornography and others won't.
The National Council on Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity, the professional organization for therapists who treat sexual addictions, estimates that only a handful of American men -- 6 to 8 percent -- are sex addicts.
But the shame associated with addiction to pornography is not small.
"Rarely is the person doing it openly," said Roger Boyd, a Kalamazoo psychologist who has been treating people with sex addictions for 14 years. "It's almost always secretive. That's a hallmark of unhealthy sexuality."
Boyd said he has seen pornography ruin relationships, without regard to the couple's racial, economic or religious background.
At the same time pornography offers some benefits, said Erick Janssen, a researcher with the Kinsey Institute, a leading center for the study of human sexuality based at Indiana University.
Janssen said couples can use it for educational and mutual-enjoyment purposes. He maintained that it can also be "an innocent outlet" in relationships in which disagreement or disparity in sexual desire and interest occur.
For those who do not have partners, it is a way to get sexual pleasure without sexual disease, he said.
He said pornography can also have a clinical use for individuals who experience difficulties with sexual arousal, sexual desire or sexual orientation.
Yet he said he foresees that the Internet may result in more couples experiencing sexual problems -- among them lessened sex drive if one partner increases sexual self-pleasuring practices because of pornography.
"That will happen more and more in the future," Janssen said. "The Internet affects sexuality in ways that we don't know yet."
He is optimistic, though, that society's sex life will eventually get better. "I think people will learn to deal with this humongous availability of pornography on the Internet and find ways of integrating it or keeping it out of their relationship."
A link to crime?
Pornography supporters say pornography hasn't been proven to turn its consumers into sex offenders.
But the statistics are disturbing.
One 1988 study found 86 percent of rapists regularly use pornography, and 57 percent admitted imitating pornographic scenes in the commission of their crimes.
Michigan State Police discovered a similar trend upon reviewing its sexual-assault files for a 20-year period that ended in 1979. It found that pornography was viewed just prior to or during the crime in 41 percent of its 38,000 cases.
And research has shown that pedophiles often use pornography -- especially child pornography -- as "proof" to their young victims that what they're doing is normal. It is also used to lower the youngsters' inhibitions.
Meanwhile, some cities have found a link between crime and pornography use. Several land-use studies have found that the incidence of sexual and other crimes increase when adult-entertainment establishments are concentrated in a single area.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed, siding with municipalities that are sued for enacting zoning ordinances aimed at curbing the spread of "red-light" districts.
Harmed relationships
Studies suggest at least that pornography use can have a negative effect on partners' attitudes toward one another in intimate relationships.
In 1989, Dolf Zillman of Indiana University and Jennings Bryant of the University of Houston released a study on the effects of soft-core pornography on the perception of value in marriage.
The study found that porn use led both men and women to be less satisfied with their partners' affection, physical appearance, sexual curiosity and sexual performance. Increased acceptance of sex without emotional involvement was also observed.
"Some people can get carried away, if you have the wrong mix of ingredients in terms of people's personality and background," said the Kinsey Institute's Janssen. "That will be the minority, and we don't even know if those people would not engage in sexual behavior (without pornography)."
For the Clodgos, though, Brent's pornography use did cause trouble. He said that after his confession, he and Megan, who have four children, separated for a brief time.
Megan Clodgo recalls that her husband's disclosure initially led her self-confidence to plummet.
"Was I lacking something?" Megan said she would repeatedly ask herself. She said, though, that as she got a better understanding of the nature of sexual addiction, she stopped beating up on herself.
"It wouldn't have mattered if I looked like a model," she said. "This went on before we were married."
Brent Clodgo, who is now 36, traces his pornography use back to age 10. That's when, he said, he and a few neighborhood kids ogled a girlie magazine.
By age 12, he'd found an older male relative's hidden stash of pornographic videos and magazines. From there, his interest in pornography graduated to strip clubs and more.
Boyd, the psychologist, said women take their partners' addiction to pornography "as a personal rejection." Meanwhile, he said, the men will say they still love their wives. "In men's minds, they are not rejecting their partner," Boyd said.
Brent Clodgo said he had to quit his job, which required travel and a lot of time spent alone, in order to heal himself. Along with the job, he said, he eliminated anything in his life that would tempt him to stray again.
He also no longer carries cash, and he meets weekly with two close male friends who serve as his "accountability partners."
The Clodgos, who are making their story public to offer hope to families suffering in silence, say they realize not every couple will be as harmed by pornography as they were.
But, they said, as they sat side by side on their living-room couch, there's one thing they know: Their relationship is stronger than ever. They credit having rid their lives of pornography.
"It's better than it was the first 10 years," Brent Clodgo said of his marriage, which began in 1988. "In a strong marriage, where you have a good sexual relationship as God intended it to be, I don't see a place for immorality."
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