NCSE Racking Up Old-School ‘Victories’ in a New-School World

By Coleen Singer at Sssh.com Porn For Women and Couples

On the website for the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCSE), the organization formerly known as “Morality in Media,” there’s a page on which the anti-porn organization lists its “victories.” 

The list amounts to a handful of conquests, which include getting some retailers to place ‘blinders’ over copies of Cosmopolitan magazine and the group’s most recent triumph, persuading Hilton Worldwide to jettison pornographic movies from the on-demand viewing options available to Hilton guests.

To hear the NCSE tell it, Hilton’s policy change is a momentous occasion, a signal of the company adopting the NCSE’s various claims about the detrimental effects of pornography.

“Many hotels have long been concerned with human trafficking that could occur on their properties, and since pornography contributes to the demand for sex trafficking, Hilton’s decision to remove their pay-per-view pornographic movies is a significant step in the right direction,” the NCSE said in its statement. 

“In addition to the links with trafficking, pornography also contributes to sexual violence, child exploitation, and lifelong porn addictions,” the NSCE continued, faithfully repeating its mantra that porn is the proximate cause of everything from rape and secular progressivism to Legionnaire’s Disease and godlessness. “It is praiseworthy that Hilton is willing to listen to its customers who are concerned about the harms of pornography, and to reject profiting from sexual exploitation.”

This Just In: Most Hilton Locations Offer Wi-Fi

Setting aside for a moment the NCSE’s inflated claims concerning porn as Prime Vector of Utter Socio-Cultural Ruin, the thing I find most striking about the organization’s recent victories is how completely irrelevant they are to any serious effort to combat sexual exploitation, or for that matter, how little they accomplish when it comes to the NCSE’s real agenda, which is to severely limit, if not eliminate, the distribution of pornography.

Whatever the NCSE might think about Cosmo, it’s obviously not a porn magazine, no matter how hard people like Dawn Hawkins and Pat Trueman try to convince people to the contrary. It’s a women’s magazine – one I have no interest in reading for the most part, but a women’s magazine, nonetheless. The ‘good news’ for people who don’t want their kids reading Cosmo is by the time their kids reach an age where they would even be slightly interested in reading it, they will have figured out there’s a countless number of free internet porn sites out there, over which nobody has figured out how to put a black plastic shield.

This brings us to the Hilton announcement – and just how beside the freaking point is their new policy, both with respect to the distribution of porn and Hilton hotel guests’ consumption of thereof. 

Unless I’m missing something, Hilton has not also announced cutting off Wi-Fi access in its rooms, or the introduction of internet content filters on its hotel networks, or posting Morality Assurance Guards in the hallways outside of guests’ rooms, where they can listen for suspicious grunting and moaning.

Absent such measures, I have some news for all those folks applauding Hilton’s policy change: Hilton guests will still befoul their sheets with regularity, using online porn as inspiration – or, if they’re total luddites, portable DVD players and laptops equipped with DVD drives.

And The Real Reason Hotels Drop Pay-Per-View Porn Is… (Drumroll, Please)

Hilton is not the first hotel chain to drop porn from its on-demand options, nor will it be the last, but the reason has little to do with lobbying from social conservatives and a lot more to do with money.

Not surprisingly, in part due to the rapid increase in people using their mobile devices to consume content, pay-per-view sales at hotels have dropped dramatically over the years. Some people in the hospitality industry have gone so far as to suggest the traditional TV on-demand model is on its last legs, soon to be replaced by in-room streaming options.

When Marriott opted to drop porn from its on-demand options in 2011, the organization then known as Morality in Media declared that a victory, too. What MIM didn’t mention at the time, understandably, was that Marriott had already seen a 39% decline in pay-per-view revenues in the years just prior to the policy change.

Informal poll time again: Please raise your hand if you believe Marriott or Hilton would have dropped porn if their on-demand porn sales had been headed in the opposite direction at the time. 

(I can’t actually see you, obviously, but I know if you’re reading this post, you can’t be literally brain-dead, so I’m going to assume absolutely none of you just raised your hand….)

Onward, Irrelevant Soldier!

If this is how the NCSE plans to win its putative war against sexual exploitation, my hunch is they have a very long, very futile fight in front of them. 

Judging by their ‘successes’ to date, I’d say by the time these people figure out internet porn exists, fans of adult entertainment will be watching dirty movies on high-def viewing screens which have been embedded directly into their forearms (for added convenience and portability, naturally).

It’s almost enough to make me feel sorry for the folks over at the NCSE – except then I remember they have a habit of claiming things like because of porn, “sexual violence is on the rise in our military, colleges, families and on the street,” when, in fact, crime stats strongly suggest the opposite is true.

This brings me to a final thought, one of which crusaders of various stripes might want to take heed, whether their chosen “war” targets drugs, porn, terrorism, or any other noun: Constantly lying, obfuscating and exaggerating to the extreme doesn’t actually forward your cause.

Put another way, in order to read Cosmo (yes, even just its cover), a person has to be able to read in the first place – and when people can read, the means of figuring out the NCSE is full of shit is always right there at their fingertips…. Unless the next step in the NCSE plan is to persuade Hilton to get rid of its guest’s fingers, too?

Coleen Singer is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com, where she often waxes eloquent about sex, porn, sex toys, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. She is also the editor and curator of EroticScribes.com and a film producer at BDSM site, Wasteland.com. When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.

Visit Coleen at Sssh.com for more kinky sex news and original movies for Women and Couples.