We're also very concerned about the forming of attitudes in children, because their brains are still very malleable, their attitudes are very malleable, and the potency of an image is quite impactful on children. It is also impactful on adults. I don't mean to say that because we're concerned about children, we're not concerned about adults, because we do find the impact on adults as well. Even though we have a dramatic increase in child-on-child sexual assault and it's a great concern that children are looking at these kinds of images and then assaulting other children, our concern is also about adults assaulting children and adults assaulting other adults.
We think this is one of the most potent attitude producers that we can name. Given all those factors that produce learning, I can't think of anything else that could impact your sexual attitudes more than pornography, because of its pervasiveness, because it's massively toxic, and because of certain phenomena about how the brain works.
For example, there is research that says when women look at men in sexualized imagery, women use the part of their brain that is specialized for looking at humans and human faces—the facial recognition centre part of the brain—but when men look at women in sexualized imagery, they do not use that part of their brain. They do not use the part of the brain that is specialized for humans and human faces. They use the part of the brain that is specialized for the use of tools and objects, and then they use the rules that are applied to tools: if it breaks, throw it away—it's only as good as its usefulness.
Even brain phenomena are telling us that these are dramatically potent images and can produce attitudes, behaviours, triggers for attitudes, and beliefs that say, “I have permission to do this”, especially the belief that everybody is doing it. People will do what they think everybody is doing. The drive towards sexuality is very strong, and if you think everybody is doing it and nobody is getting hurt by it, then you are very likely to do it.
It's the same phenomenon you see when you legalize prostitution in a country. You have a massive increase in the number of males that will prostitute women: since it's legal, it must be fine, and we're all doing it, so we might as well do it. Followed by that, of course, you then have a dramatic increase in child sex trafficking because we don't enough prostituted women to meet that new demand. As soon as you have a belief that says it's okay, it doesn't hurt anybody, and everybody is doing it, people will do it. Pornography is the very best at producing that permission-giving belief.