I'm just returning from California, where the headline on the local news every night has been the horrific story of Audrie Pott. She is the Silicon Valley teen who killed herself last fall after three teens sexually assaulted her while she was unconscious and then posted photos of the crime on Facebook. While this incident is being compared to the Ohio football players convicted of sexually assaulting a girl and then sending around a picture of her, there is even more to find disturbing in this new case. Obviously the online aspect of this incident is secondary to the actual assault. But what it demonstrates is that the boys involved had no desire to cover up their actions.
How did we arrive at the point where three 16-year-old boys thought to sexually assault an unconscious girl and then assumed that no one would have a problem with it? In a book called Premarital Sex in America, published a couple of years ago, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker discussed the tremendous influence of pornography on actual sexual relationships. Not only do men (and boys) get ideas for sex from porn -- the authors offer the example of women shaving or waxing in order to please men -- but the authors argue that porn cheapens actual intercourse.
"Porn has given rise to requests for unusual sexual practices, plenty of which are one-sided. . . ." The idea that these boys would even find sex with a girl who is literally unconscious to be desirable is sickening, and I can't help but wondering whether exposure to pornography might contribute to this.
