Statement of Daniel Linz, Ph.D., Professor of Communication and Law and Society University of California, Santa Barbara Response to Testimony before the United States Senate, Subcommittee on Science, technology, and Space of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation on The Science Behind Pornography Addiction
My name is Daniel Linz. I received my Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I share a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and the Law and Society program at the University of California - Santa Barbara. My research for the last 25 years has involved scientifically testing the social psychological assumptions made by the law and legal actors in the area of the First Amendment and freedom of speech. This work spans the topics of media violence, pornography and other sex-oriented entertainment. My work on pornography and its effects on human behavior has been relied on extensively by the National Academy of Sciences, a private nonprofit society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research and appears in their recent publication, "Youth, Pornography and the Internet." It has come to my attention that The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing on "The Science Behind Pornography Addiction" on November 18, 2004. My understanding is that the Committee has allowed a two-week response period. I would like to take this opportunity to respond to the testimony of the several witnesses who testified before the committee. It is my opinion that that a one-sided view of the "science" behind the notion of pornography exposure as addictive has been presented to the Committee. I would like to take the opportunity to present what I feel is a more objective overview of the state of scientific research than that expressed by the witnesses who appeared before the Committee.
The testimony of Dr. Judith Reisman
Dr. Reisman makes the claim that: "Thanks to the latest advances in neuroscience, we now know that pornographic visual images imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process. This is true of so-called 'soft-core' and 'hard-core' pornography. And once new neurochemical pathways are established they are difficult or impossible to delete." Later she asserts: "These media erotic fantasies become deeply embedded Š addicting many of those exposed." It is indeed a psychological fact that many powerful messages and ideas leave strong memory traces. This is in no way unique to pornographic images. Dr. Reisman fails to distinguish the nature of strong memory traces resulting from other experiences from pornography in her work. She appears to believe that once the viewer is exposed to enough pornography he or she loses the capacity to reason or make intelligent judgments about the messages being conveyed in pornographic material and that other memory traces from equally or more profound experiences are overwhelmed by exposure and subsequent "addiction" to pornography. There is no scientifically credible evidence for her ideas.
[etc]