WELLINGTON, N.Z. – Nothing brings politicians and political activists together like expressing grave concern about the impact of pornography on modern society. Few, if any, other issues have the same potential for creating agreement between the socially conservative religious right and the anything but conservative feminist left.

In this case, I’m not talking about the American religious right and feminist left. I’m talking about them in the context of New Zealand, where a broad coalition of officeholders, activists and others who fancy attending symbolic press conferences have signed a petition calling for “an expert panel to investigate the public health effects and societal harms of pornography.”

Issued by the socially conservative organization Family First New Zealand, the case for the petition reads quite a bit like the nonbinding resolutions passed by several state legislatures in the U.S., in that it includes a brief catalog of the horrors purportedly caused by porn.

According to the website for the petition,

Social scientists, clinical psychologists, biologists and neurologists are now beginning to understand the psychological and biological negative effects of viewing pornography both online and through the media and video games. They show that men who view pornography regularly have a higher tolerance for abnormal sexuality, including rape, sexual aggression and sexual promiscuity. Prolonged consumption of pornography results in stronger perceptions of women as commodities or as “sex objects.”

Pornography has a damaging effect on intimacy, love, and respect and at its worst, leads to sex role stereotyping, viewing persons as sexual objects, and family breakdown. Research has also shown that children who are exposed to pornography develop skewed ideas about sex and sexuality, which lead to negative stereotypes of women, sexual activity at a young age, and increased aggression in boys.

While it’s true studies have been published making the above claims, it’s not particularly challenging to find other studies that contradict them. Nuance is not exactly a common thing to find in a petition forwarding a specific political or social agenda, though, so it’s no surprise it doesn’t make its way into Family First’s press materials, either.

At any rate, part of what’s interesting about this petition is the list of groups that have joined Family First in calling for the panel of experts to be created, which includes members of the Green Party, the NZ National party, New Zealand First, the Labour party and the Maori Party.

While members of Parliament from these parties joined Family First spokesman Bob McCroskie on the steps of the parliament building to signal their support for the petition, it’s clear McCroskie and Family First are taking the lead in pushing for the panel to be formed.

“A lot of parents are concerned about what their children are able to access,” McCroskie said. “And often they don’t go looking for porn; the porn comes looking for them. Many families don’t want the porn industry determining the values of their kids.”

Even as she stood in solidarity with McCroskie, Green MP Jan Logie seemed to hedge her bets a bit with respect to the sweeping conclusions Family First clearly has already arrived at concerning porn’s harms, even without the benefit of feedback from a panel of experts like those called for in the petition.

“We wouldn’t necessarily in the Greens be having a starting point of assuming all erotic representations of sex are bad,” Logie said.

Looking over the Family First website, you can understand why Logie would want to make it clear her party isn’t marching in lockstep with Family First on all issues regarding sex, porn, sex education or the thorny area of gender identity.

As for Family First, its petition may be about hardcore online porn, but one look at the group’s web page dedicated to criticizing Fifty Shades of Grey (the very first link listed under the website’s “Issues” tab) and the group’s opposition to depictions of any sort of “kink” becomes abundantly clear.

On the page, the group quotes at length from a “letter to young people” about Fifty Shades penned by American psychiatrist Dr. Miriam Grossman, who proudly describes herself as being “100% MD and 0% PC.”

Grossman’s letter is filled with well-founded categorical claims like “A psychologically healthy woman avoids pain. She wants to feel safe, respected and cared for by a man she can trust. She dreams about wedding gowns, not handcuffs.”

You hear that, women who don’t want to get married, and therefor presumably do not dream about wedding gowns? You’re not psychologically healthy. (Hey, someone Family First considers an “expert” wrote this, so it must be true.)

The biggest question I have about this petition has nothing to do with who supports it, though. What I wonder is what happens if the panel of experts finds there’s no real evidence porn causes the harms claimed by Family First?

My hunch is the coalition assembled by McCroskie will forestall this possibility by cherry-picking among the desired “biologists, neurologists, counsellors and other professionals” to select only those who have already expressed the sort of expert opinions sought by Family First. After all, if you want to find a neurologist who’s a bit outside the mainstream of his or her field to weigh in with dire assessments of porn’s bad influence, such people aren’t hard to find.

What if the coalition doesn’t engage in such selective expert-finding, though, and the panel ends up producing results that call into question Family First’s claims about all the calamities caused by porn?

This brings us to another of my hunches: we won’t be seeing a press conference on the steps of Parliament on that day.

Image © Bruce Tuten.