Texas- The Power of Porn, a multimedia presentation in which a former pornography addict and a former porn star share their stories, has come to UT for two days to start a dialogue about the effects of pornography and the sex industry on society.
Gene McConnell, who has a personal history with sexual addiction, and former porn star Heather Veitch opened the event at Hogg Auditorium Thursday night with a short film asking UT students what they thought about porn. Answers ranged from "I don't know" to "disgusting" to "a wonderful invention."
"We think that pornography, and really all issues related to pornography, are important issues for college students to think about," said UT's Campus Renewal Director Justin Christopher, who helped organize the event. "And most haven't really formed conclusions about why they think it's good or bad, or wrong or right."
It hurts a lot of people in many ways and it affects their relationships, Christopher said.
"It brought up issues that a lot of people are too scared to talk about," said finance senior Michael Johnson. "It's good to open up a discussion on such a taboo subject, because these things have a ripple effect. They don't just affect the porn addict or the objectified women. They affect the people around them."
It is necessary to know what pornography communicates in order to know how it affects people, McConnell said. The cost of objectification is large in American culture, especially to women and children, he said.
"You look at pseudo-child porn where women are dressed as little girls, so it's considered legal material," he said. "The woman looks like she's 15 with ribbons in her hair and we have words like "Lolita" - sexy little girl - tossed around. What is that saying to our society, and is that a healthy thing?"
McConnell said his own addiction to porn, strip clubs and prostitutes began at age 12 and spiraled out of control to the point where he almost raped a woman.
"Porn eroticizes violence and those became my fantasies. I will not blame porn because I am responsible for what I did, but it did play a significant role in encouraging the violent fantasies I struggled with," he said.
Veitch said she faced a lot of self-image problems, working in an industry where everything was based on her appearance and she was constantly compared to other naked women.
"I want to give women the opportunity to see the long-term effects of being in the sex industry, and I also want to give the people who are consuming porn a real look into the lives of who they are consuming and the effect it has on them," she said. "I want them to understand what it feels like to be the person who is compromising themselves for a piece of paper."
Veitch said she had many female friends in the industry who passed away from struggles with alcohol abuse, drug addiction and suicide. She described herself as someone who made it out of that world had to come back and speak about the dangers of it.
She drew similarities between working in strip clubs and sexual abuse, because of the derogatory names women who work there are called and what they do with people they have no attraction to in exchange for money.
Anthropology senior Diane Nguyen said the presentation delved into important issues, such as the objectification of women.
"People don't think about how these things affect women. Porn is a problem," she said.
Porn exists to fill an emptiness in people's lives, and in American culture, people try to replace real relationships with material objects, McConnell said. Loneliness is the biggest incentive to buy porn, he said.
"We're not telling anybody what to do or say," he said. "I'm not their parent, nor is Heather - we don't want to be. But what we want to do is communicate an honest, straightforward, candid look of the impact in our own world."
The Power of Porn will host its second UT presentation at 7 p.m. Friday in Burdine 106.
