A bit more than a year ago, we made public here on Public Discourse a
letter we had sent to the chief executive officers of our nation’s
largest hotel chains, respectfully asking them to stop offering
pornography in their hotel rooms. We said:
We are, respectively, a Christian and a
Muslim, but we appeal to you not on the basis of truths revealed in our
scriptures but on the basis of a commitment that should be shared by all
people of reason and goodwill: a commitment to human dignity and the
common good. As teachers and as parents, we seek a society in which
young people are encouraged to respect others and themselves—treating no
one as an impersonal object or thing. We hope that you share our desire
to build such a society.
Pornography is degrading, dehumanizing,
and corrupting. It undermines self-respect and respect for others. It
reduces persons—creatures bearing profound, inherent, and equal
dignity—to the status of objects. It robs a central aspect of our
humanity—our sexuality—of its dignity and beauty. It ensnares some in
addiction. It deprives others of their sense of self-worth. It teaches
our young people to settle for the cheap satisfactions of lust, rather
than to do the hard, yet ultimately liberating and fulfilling, work of
love.
One hotel chain, Marriott, informed us that they were “phasing out”
offerings of pornography in their hotel rooms. Another, Hilton, defended
its participation in the pornography business by appealing, dubiously
in our view, to libertarian principles. Others, so far as we can tell,
have ignored our plea.
We wish to reiterate that plea here, however, by holding up to the
American hotel executives the highly laudable actions of Petter
Stordalen, owner of Nordic Hotels, one of Scandinavia’s largest chains.
Mr. Stordalen, after becoming involved in international efforts to fight
the horrific practice of trafficking women and girls into sexual
slavery, announced that pornography would no longer be offered to his
customers. In a public statement explaining his decision, he said:
The porn industry contributes to
trafficking, so I see it as a natural part of having a social
responsibility to send out a clear signal that Nordic Hotels doesn't
support or condone this.
He’s right. The pornography industry is corrupt through and
through—inherently so. It should come as no surprise that it is
connected to something as exploitative, degrading, and dehumanizing as human trafficking. Bravo to Petter Stordalen for refusing to continue profiting from peddling the industry’s wares.
Of course, even if trafficking were not part of the reality of the
industry, good people should be opposed to pornography and unwilling to
profit from it. As we said in our letter to hotel executives:
We beg you to consider the young woman
who is depicted as a sexual object in these movies, as nothing but a
bundle of raw animal appetites whose sex organs are displayed to the
voyeurs of the world and whose body is used in loveless and utterly
depersonalized sex acts. Surely we should regard that young woman as we would regard a sister, daughter, or mother.
She is a precious member of the human family. You may say that she
freely chooses to compromise her dignity in this way, and in some cases
that would be true, but that gives you no right to avail yourself of her
self-degradation for the sake of financial gain. Would you be willing
to profit from her self-degradation if she were your sister? Would you
be willing to profit from her self-degradation if she were your own
beloved daughter?
The reality is, however, just as Mr. Stordalen depicts it. Human
trafficking is part of the reality. And it is time for his fellow hotel
executives to face up to that fact.
Indeed, it is time for Mr. Stordalen’s American counterparts to
follow his commendable example. If Nordic Hotels can demonstrate this
kind of moral and social responsibility, then there is no reason that
Hilton Hotels and the other large chains cannot. Let them stop trying to
deceive the public—and perhaps even themselves—with rhetoric about
respecting or even protecting their customers’ liberty. Pornography is a
social plague with horrific real-life consequences for real live
people—addicts, spouses, children, communities, girls and women
trafficked into sexual servitude.
At this late season of our nation’s experience with the social costs
of pornography there is no longer any excuse for supposing that porn is
merely a form of harmless naughtiness. Even the socially very liberal
nation of Iceland is moving to ban or severely restrict it by law.
Whatever one thinks of legal prohibitions or restrictions, everyone
should recognize that pornography is a moral and social evil that no
decent person would want to profit from or have anything to do with.
