After a few months of debate on whether or not Utah would be considering porn a public health crisis, the state has finally pulled the trigger. Governor Gary Herbert signed a resolution earlier this week declaring porn a public health crisis.

While this bill does not in any way inhibit porn usage in the state, it does call for the:

Recogni[tion of] the need for education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level in order to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the citizens of Utah and the nation.

However, that education, prevention, research, and policy change could be difficult considering the state hasn’t laid out any kind of legislation or proposal as to what to do about this epidemic. In addition, the resolution doesn’t allot any kind of funding toward anti-porn education or anything of the sort–so how is this resolution helping with the so-called epidemic at all?

This resolution was created by one of the state’s Republican Representatives, Todd Weiler, with the goal of increasing awareness of the potential dangers of porn. Weiler claims that he wants default internet settings to be changed in order to make viewing porn more difficult than it currently is. The senator maintains that he is not trying to ban porn in the state of Utah, but rather make it less accessible for children and teenagers. Weiler was quoted saying that:

If a library or a McDonald’s or anyone else was giving out cigarettes to our children, we would be picketing them, and, yet, our children are accessing pornography on their tablets on these sites and we seem to be OK with that.

He is very concerned with how accessible pornography is on the internet because it leads to the corruption of children and young teens:

This is a $7 billion industry. Help us protect children from your evil, degrading, addictive, harmful substances. If adults want to do that, that’s their choice, but we’re talking about developing adolescent minds of our nation’s future.

Even after being mocked repeatedly when they first announced the state’s plan in January, the Utah legislature and governor are sticking to their guns and standing firmly by their decision to have porn listed as a public health crisis. Senator Weiler and Governor Herbert, along with several others, firmly believe that pornography is a danger to society because of how addicting it can be and the consequences that can come with a porn addiction.

One thing is for sure, if Utah wants to decrease porn usage in the state, they may as well just block the entire internet because, as we all know, porn is the one thing the internet is really made for!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJvdGcb7Fs

Alexandra Simone

Alex Simone is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street and a student at The George Washington University, studying Political Science. She is passionate about law and government, but also enjoys the finer things in life like watching crime dramas and enjoying a nice DC brunch. Contact Alex at ASimone@LawStreetmedia.com

The post It’s Official: Utah Declares Porn a Public Health Crisis appeared first on Law Street.

I came across an article on Reddit (yes, college boys in my large lecture class, I know how to use Reddit too) with a headline claiming that Utah was banning porn. At first, I was shocked. Was this a joke? Could they actually enact legislation to ban pornographic material across an entire state? Isn’t there some kind of freedom of speech issue there? So, I started to read up on this law and Utah’s porn history–it’s all thankfully less NSFW than you might anticipate.

Here are the facts: Senator Todd Weiler, a state senator in the great state of Utah, introduced legislation this past week in attempt to have the state consider porn a “public health crisis.” Ironically, this is kind of along the same vein as what happened with the Zika virus recently, but on a smaller scale since it would only be statewide. The main concern Weiler seems to have is how accessible porn is becoming, especially to young teens, as he claims it “perpetuates a sexually toxic environment.” The proposed bill lists around 18 points describing the negatives affect that porn could have on society including, but not limited to, marriage failure, the fact that it treats women as objects, and that it can impact brain development and cause addiction.

So, Utah is not quite banning porn. Senator Weiler seems to be more interested in getting the potential negative effects on everybody’s radar; in fact, one of the specifically stated goals of the bill is to do just that:

This resolution recognizes the need for education, prevention, research, and policy change at the community and societal level in order to address the pornography epidemic that is harming the citizens of Utah and the nation.

To be fair, this whole thing may be a little overblown. “Epidemic” and “public health crisis” seem like strong words to be using when we’re just talking about porn, right? Honestly, after looking at some of the data behind porn addiction in the U.S., it seems like it’s a pretty scary reality for some people. On top of addiction, according to some studies, the average age of exposure to porn may be as low as 11 years old, which certainly doesn’t seem like a good thing.

Utah in particular has has an especially interesting history as far as porn is concerned. In 2005, Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. signed H.B. 260 into law, which essentially required internet providers to block pornographic websites at the request of consumers and heightened penalties for distributing porn, especially to minors. Then, in 2009, a man by the name of Benjamin Edelman conducted a study on which states consumed the most porn and why. The results? Almost every way you look at it, Utah came out on top, whether it was users per thousand people, per thousand homeowners, or per thousand broadband users.

In 2013, satire sites made fun of Utah by spreading a story that one of its cities had implemented a 30-day in jail minimum for first offense porn watching. The best part of this satirical news? People believed it, and, for a while, the nation thought Utah had really implemented jail sentences for watching porn–which is obviously ridiculous. The good news for Utah residents is that their laws to decrease porn use and subsequent embarrassment for being the country’s highest porn consumer led to some overall changes, and they have now slid back down the scale to a more moderate consumption of adult videos per capita–as you can see below in a graphic drawn up from Pornhub data in April of 2014.

All in all, I don’t really think this bill is the draconian First Amendment violation that it originally appeared to be. What Utah is trying to do is educate people on the potentially harmful effects that porn can have on children, teens, and even adults (when they get too attached). The senator seemingly has the stats to back up his claim and porn problems seem to be a lot more prevalent in our country than I ever really assumed they were, so maybe some public awareness could be a good thing. Then again, with the attention grabbing and misrepresentative headlines this legislation has been getting, I expect this bill to have some stiff opposition.

Alexandra Simone

Alex Simone is an Editorial Senior Fellow at Law Street and a student at The George Washington University, studying Political Science. She is passionate about law and government, but also enjoys the finer things in life like watching crime dramas and enjoying a nice DC brunch. Contact Alex at ASimone@LawStreetmedia.com

The post Is Utah Really Trying to Ban Porn? appeared first on Law Street.

Users looking to post a nude photo or video to Reddit will soon have to do something they’ve never done before–get consent!

Reddit is taking a stand against revenge porn and sexual exploitation by making revisions to its digital privacy guidelines that will become effective March 10. The user-curated news and social networking site is banning sexually explicit images or videos where those photographed or filmed haven’t given their permission. These changes come as a somewhat delayed response to Reddit’s major role in the massive iCloud hack of celebrity nude photos in August.

Yesterday morning Reddit executives addressed their mission to protect users’ digital privacy in a post writing:

Last year, we missed a chance to be a leader in social media when it comes to protecting your privacy — something we’ve cared deeply about since reddit’s inception. At our recent all hands company meeting, this was something that we all, as a company, decided we needed to address.

No matter who you are, if a photograph, video, or digital image of you in a state of nudity, sexual excitement, or engaged in any act of sexual conduct, is posted or linked to on reddit without your permission, it is prohibited on reddit. We also recognize that violent personalized images are a form of harassment that we do not tolerate and we will remove them when notified

The “missed chance” the post is referring to was when a subreddit called “TheFappening” was created to link to curate all of the criminally obtained images procured in the 2014 celebrity photo hack. Some of the celebrities targeted included Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and Olympic gold medalist McKayla Maroney, whose images may have constituted child pornography since they were taken while she was reportedly underage. The subreddit garnered thousands of followers in just one day and stayed live until September 6 when it was banned by the site after being widely chastised.

The whole nude photos leak controversy definitely led to some backlash against Reddit, including this entertaining flowchart by New York Magazine:

Should we ban that subreddit? A flowchart by Reddit admins: http://t.co/RhS9wKEyI1 pic.twitter.com/Tz54dsWdr8

— New York Magazine (@NYMag) September 9, 2014

But all that’s changing. Now, if you feel like you have been a victim of involuntary pornography a new section added to Reddit’s privacy policy asks you to send an email to contact@reddit.com with a link to the image or video in question and they will “expedite its removal as quickly as possible.”

The real question is whether or not other social sharing sites will join Reddit in improving their digital privacy policies. Tumblr will be one of those sites to watch, as it was also used to distribute the controversial and illegal leaked nude photos. While the site nicely urges members to not upload sexually explicit content in its community guidelines, it essentially operates as a unofficial porn site in many ways–nude photos and videos are regularly and eagerly shared. Adopting a policy like the one Reddit is looking to implement would drastically change its microblogging platform and potentially anger users. Still a precedent needs to be made to protect both women and men from having their personal photos become public either unknowingly or unwillingly.

Alexis Evans

Alexis Evans is an Assistant Editor at Law Street and a Buckeye State native. She has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism and a minor in Business from Ohio University. Contact Alexis at aevans@LawStreetMedia.com.

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The advent of social media networks introduced endless applications, opportunities, and hundred of thousands of attention-seeking men and women searching for that new fix, that something different. Nowadays, with television shows broadcasting adulterous affairs and advertisements screaming sex, one questions whether the provocateur’s nature is encouraged in the United States. Read on to learn about the ways in which our society addresses, promotes, and deals with adulterous behavior.

Is it just me, or is sex everywhere?

From Showtime’s hit show “Masters of Sex”, to the “Game of Thrones” saga on HBO, nudity and passion play on our society’s imagination. Scandal reigns supreme in the monotonous lifestyle of working, paying taxes, and drinking endless Iced Venti Americanos. No one will openly condone cheating, but infidelity is pervasive; it’s something that’s constantly talked about in modern society.

In 2010, the National Opinion Research Center inquired into the percentage of men and women cheating on their spouses. The percentage of men involved in extramarital affairs remained steady, around 21.6 percent. However, the infidelity rate amongst married women rose to about 14.7 percent. This jump was attributed to more women joining the workforce and obtaining jobs requiring them to travel.

But why shift any blame? Perhaps allocating responsibility isn’t a working testament to the truth about infidelity. Maybe people just get tired of each other and hope for a change. Gary Neuman quantified his studies of adulterous men in his book “The Truth About Cheating” in 2008. He provided that about 1 in 2.7 men cheat on their wives. He blamed male insecurity.

The majority said it was an emotional disconnection, specifically a sense of feeling under-appreciated. A lack of thoughtful gestures. Men are very emotional beings. They just don’t look like that. Or they don’t seem like that. Or they don’t tell you that.

But is the driving force behind adulterous men purely insecurity driven? And can a woman’s indiscretions be explained by working more, or in different places? That may have once been the case; however, in modern years, our marriage discussions have shifted from treating bedrooms sacredly, to coffee-shop chit-chat and salon banter. Perhaps you’ve never witnessed it, or don’t frequent barbershops and Starbucks, but, what if George Clooney in “Out of Sight” was right? What if that moment passing someone on the street transforms wayward thoughts into scandalous realities?

Is infidelity easier today?

It’s 2014, and apps such as OkCupid and Tinder exist. Today, “swiping,” has erased the formal face to face contact typical to traditional relationship notions. With a flick of a finger one can generate an obscene amount of potential lovers, both hopefuls and hopeless prospects. It takes no longer to find someone than the time it takes to inconspicuously avert your eyes from the married neighbor’s wife, after the husband notices you “creeping.”

A simple Google search for “apps for cheating” generates countless articles, magazine excerpts, and ratings of new phone applications easily designed and ranked to help one cloak mischievous manners. Apps like Ashley Madison, SnapChat, and Black SMS, not only encourage infidelity, but make discovering it much more difficult. On the other hand, applications for exposing a cheating spouse, like ThaiSpy and CoupleTracker, make catching one affordable and accessible. Incidentally, the internet provides a tech black market, allowing one to fulfill scandalous desire and retain anonymity. Is it really a surprise, that Millennials, thrust into technology’s embrace, are showing symptoms of a swelling infidelity rate? Technology has injected itself into the relationship process, and it shows no signs of stalling. For example, a new survey published by IBISWorld, a Santa Monica market research firm, discussed the implications of mobile dating, yielding that approximately one third of new marriages start online.

Societally, we are going to increasingly meet more of our romantic partners online as we establish more of an online presence in terms of social media,” says Caitlin Moldvay, a dating industry senior analyst for IBISWorld in Santa Monica, Calif. “I do think mobile dating is going to be the main driver of this growth.

But, what does this have to do with infidelity? Perhaps, not much at all, but could the way people meet and explore their sexual inclinations dictate modern cultural trends? If meeting Casanova becomes easier, is it easier to cheat? That could make sense.

Contrarily, research conducted by Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, rebuts this presumption. In his independent study published in the American Sociological Review, he found that 22 percent of new couples met online; however, these couples were twice as likely to marry as those who met offline.

 Couples who meet online are more likely to progress to marriage than couples who meet in other ways.

He explained this phenomenon by pointing out that dating sites typically arouse interest in people genuinely seeking marriage as their goal. Although his results seem noble, they remain dubious because internet-formed relationships are still in their infancy stages. Delving deeper into research shows that infidelity mostly occurs after 5-7 years of the marriage or when a child was born. Therefore, although online couples are initially happier, studying their long term speculations may be premature, considering the relative new-ness of social media and online dating. Nevertheless, both ideas suggest that taking a look into our nation’s divorce rate may shed some light on the issue.

Is infidelity the reason behind our surging divorce rate?

Statisticians rank the United States as having the sixth most divorces in the world. Although the specific divorce rate is relatively unknown, it is speculated that around 40-50 percent of all marriages end in divorce. However, this statistic does not account for the complexities surrounding marital difficulties. For example, the largest rate of divorcing men and women are between the ages of 20-24–37 percent for women, and 39 percent for men:

“f you just ask whether infidelity is going up, you don’t see really impressive changes. But if you magnify the picture and you start looking at specific gender and age cohorts, we do start to see some pretty significant changes.

David C. Atkins, an associate research  professor at the University of Washington Center for the Study of Health and Risk Behaviors, studied the infidelity rate among married couples and discovered that although the divorce rate has not risen significantly, particular age groups, including newly married couples and couples over 60, are cheating more often. He cites the availability of pornography on the Internet as a motivator for younger couples, and the prevalence of remedies treating erectile dysfunction for older couples. Moreover, the modern trend deemphasizes sex as the primary driving force of infidelity. Instead, intimacy and openness with one’s new flame boosts the infidelity rate. This idea was qualified this year in a new study published in a journal, Evolutionary Psychology, which recruited 477 adults: 238 men and 239 women. The study asked all participants two questions:

Which would distress you more: Imagining your partner enjoying passionate sexual intercourse with another person or imagining your partner forming a deep emotional attachment with another person?

Interestingly the results varied, depending on who you asked. Men were most distraught about physical infidelity and women by emotional cheating. Thus, examining all the reports above presents us with a trend that shows a possible gender-specific irony: 1) Men do not always appreciate a spouse’s physical infidelity; however, men usually cheat due to emotional insecurity, and 2) Women do not  always appreciate a spouse’s emotional attachment, but can be attracted to a man’s sexual prowess. Although, our nation’s mushrooming divorce rate isn’t directly attributable to infidelity alone, a question remains as to why infidelity is so ubiquitous today.

What effects do social networks have on infidelity?

Today, we are constantly connected. Many people maintain activity on one or more social networks or maintain “friends,” many of whom they haven’t spoken to in years: friends, exes, people they don’t know, or people they would like to know. Face to face relationships are no longer as mainstream as they used to be. But what role does our ability to connect with people from all over the world play in expansive relationship betrayal?

Researchers at Indiana University studied the connection between social networks and relationship availability. The study coined the term “digital cheating” and investigates suspicions about relationship demise by social networks. It found that people keep Facebook and other outlets to monitor the availability of their romantic/sexual prospects and whether or not they are in a committed relationships. Their breakthrough suggests that modern networking trends illustrate adults breaking from meeting new people, and instead, holding on to old flames, or as they called them, “Back-Burners.” As the study explains:

We use the term back burner to describe a desired potential or continuing romantic/sexual partner with whom one communicates, but to whom one is not exclusively committed. Although communication with back burners is not new, modern technology affords novel channels (e.g., social networking applications and text messaging) that individuals are using to connect with back burners.

Additionally, the study found that some partners in adult relationships maintain romantic or sexual conversations, on average, with two people other than their significant other. Interestingly, this trend is gender neutral, resulting in a similar average rate for both men and women. Although the larger pool of prospects and digital back-and-forth are not necessarily dispositive of physical wrongdoing, these findings lend credence to the English idiom that there really are plenty of fish in the sea.

Conclusion

Perhaps the loyal spouse today shouldn’t blame his or her philandering partner. Modern philosophies describing today’s adultery clash with old-school promiscuity notions, which ascribe different reasons for extramarital affairs. Maybe infidelity by one spouse is just a byproduct of emotional yearning. Although cheating compromises the values of one spouse at the expense of another’s selfishness, our society mimics this trend by condoning infidelity for some, while celebrating it for others.  For example, our infamous double-standard provides that philandering men will mostly receive “props” from their “boys,” while unfaithful women are labeled with the love chords of revulsion. Even though both sexes may be equally guilty in entertaining back-burners for that just-in-case moment, it seems unfair to brand one sex with the Scarlet Letter celebrated by the other. Nevertheless, the problem might not lie between or among the sexes, considering this issue permeates every facet of modern life, such as our phones, homes, and television shows. Maybe it has now just become a part of today’s life.

Resources

USA Today: Study: More Than a Third of New Marriages Start Online

Computers in Human Behavior: Using Modern Technology to Keep in Touch With Back Burners

Evolutionary Psychology: Explaining Sex Differences in Reactions to Relationship Infidelities

Bloomberg: More U.S. Women Report Cheating on Their Spouses

Infidelity Facts: When Does Infidelity Occur?

Huffington Post: Why People Cheat: 12 Differences Between men and Women

CNN: Besides Sex–Other Reasons Men Cheat

Evangelos Siozios

Evangelos Siozios is a student at New York Law School focusing on family law and real estate transactions. He is a 2012 Baruch Honors College Graduate whose interests include writing, exercising, and solving TV mysteries. Contact Evangelos at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Infidelity in the United States: Why is the Trend Growing? appeared first on Law Street.

Model Mayhem is an online modeling site used by aspiring models to network, find jobs, and share photographs. It was just ruled that a lawsuit against it and its parent company, Internet Brands, Inc, will be allowed to move forward, after a young woman, Jane Doe, sued the site for negligence.

Jane Doe had been using Model Mayhem for its intended purpose — networking — when she was contacted to travel to Florida for an “audition.” There she met Lavont Flanders Jr. and Emerson Callum who drugged her, raped her, filmed the attack, and put it online, marketing it as “pornography.” Their plan was intrinsically tied to the ability to be able to use Model Mayhem to contact the aspiring models.

Flanders and Callum have since been convicted for their horrendous crimes in Florida court. Both of Miami, they stood trial in 2012. They were each found guilty of a hefty 12 consecutive life sentences for sex trafficking. Five of the victims were involved in Flanders and Callums’ trials, but it’s not clear whether the Jane Doe from the current suit was one of them.

According to Jane Doe’s suit, the site knew about Flander and Callums’ actions since 2010, but failed to disclose or provide any kind of warning to its users. The parent company, Internet Brands Inc, had sued the developers of Model Mayhem for failing to disclose that Flanders and Callums’ actions may lead to civil suits, something Internet Brands, Inc. claims should have been told to them when they purchased Model Mayhem in 2008.

What’s disturbing about that first suit is that Jane Doe was apprehended, sexually assaulted, and filmed in 2011. Which means that the website where her assailants found her knew that there was potential for something like this to happen for months before she was ever contacted. That’s not just terrifying — it’s certainly grounds for Jane Doe to argue negligence. And in the civil suit she filed against Internet Brands, Inc., that’s exactly what she argued.

She filed the suit originally in California, and the suit was dismissed under the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in the late 90s in an attempt to regulate the spread of internet-based pornography. On the most basic level, it attempts to make sure that children don’t see explicit content on the internet by regulating the ways in which sites are allowed to disseminate that kind of content. More relevantly to this case though, is Section 230, which states,

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

In lay terms, what that essentially means is that you can’t be sued if someone uses your website to, for example, distribute pornography.

This was the law that the original court used to overturn Jane Doe’s case. However, in an appeals ruling released this week, the decision was overturned. Judge Richard Clifton, of the Ninth Circuit, decided that Section 230 did not apply. He was part of a three-judge appellate court that decided the case can proceed. Clifton wrote that Jane Doe’s case isn’t barred under the act because,

Jane Doe’s claim is different, however. She does not seek to hold Internet Brands liable as a ‘publisher or speaker’ of content posted on the Model Mayhem website, or for Internet Brands’ failure to remove content posted on the website. Flanders and Callum are not alleged to have posted anything themselves.

The case will move forward, and with good reason. What Internet Brands Inc, did was reprehensible, and Jane Doe paid the price for its mistake. The company deserves to be held accountable, and this case is certain to make waves as it is indeed allowed to move forward.

—

Anneliese Mahoney (@AMahoney8672) is Lead Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

Featured image courtesy of [Chris Jagers via Flickr]

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Case Against Online Modeling Site Involved in Rape to Move Forward appeared first on Law Street.