Anti-porn advocates not surprised by Dayton shooter's penchant for sexual violence, 'pornogrind'
The gunman in the Dayton, Ohio mass shooting, Connor Betts, was the lead singer in a "pornogrind" metal group, reports say, and their songs celebrated sexual exploitation and violence.
Betts, who shot and killed nine people and injured 27 Sunday was a member of a group called Menstrual Munchies, a three-person band that performed across the Midwest, according to BuzzFeed News.
The connection between the use and celebration of sexually violent porn and a mass shooting is not surprising for those who work to expose the harms of pornography and the social ills to which it contributes.
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"Consuming pornography certainly plays a supporting role in men committing violence against women. That is because pornography creates in the mind of the viewer what sociologists call 'permission giving beliefs,'” Laila Mickelwait, director of abolition at Exodus Cry, a prostitution abolitionist organization in the Kansas City area of Missouri, said in an email to The Christian Post Tuesday.
Such beliefs give "permission" to act out when it comes to sexual intrusion, assault and rape, she explained, citing the work of Michael Milburn, Roxanne Mather, and Sheree Conrad, whose findings show that males who were shown scenes that sexually objectified and degraded women and were then exposed to media that depicted rape indicated that the rape victim experienced pleasure and “got what she wanted.”
"A 2015 meta-analysis of twenty-two studies from seven countries also found that the consumption of pornography was significantly associated with increases in verbal and physical aggression. Media is unquestionably powerful. Advertisers know this. If visual media wasn’t a potent influencer of thought and behavior, would companies continue to pay multiple millions of dollars for advertising slots during the Super Bowl?" Mickelwait continued.
"Media influence is a studied and researched force, exerted with a message, resulting in measurable change. This relationship has been described as the 'media effect.' Immunity from the effects of visual media simply does not exist, and pornography is certainly no exception."
The "pornogrind" group's songs featured extremely graphic titles and lyrics which contained brutal sexual abuse and necrophilia themes, including sexual abuse of a teenaged corpse, reports say.
"Pornogrind" is considered a subgenre of heavy metal music called grindcore; the subgenre is characterized by words and thematic content that makes light of sexual violence, delivered for maximum shock value.
The 24-year-old shooter, who died at the scene Sunday, has a history making light of sexual violence. Reports also indicate he reportedly made a "hit list" and a "rape list" several years ago when he was in high school and was suspended.
"What is wrong with us? We invite evil to colonize our imaginations, and we are shocked when it makes itself horribly manifest in deeds like El Paso and Dayton," commented conservative author and Orthodox Christian Rod Dreher, writing on his blog at The American Conservative Monday.
"We won’t even defend ourselves from this stuff, not collectively. You who have eyes to see and ears to hear, come out of this death-wish civilization, while you still can. Something very, very dark is coming," he added, speaking of the ongoing degradation of American culture.
Gail Dines, a longtime advocate against the porn industry and radical feminist scholar, was not surprised by Betts' obsession with sexual violence given the bleak reality of a porn-saturated culture and the massive industry behind it.
"Why is the media only talking about pornogrind when we have a multi-billion dollar porn industry that has become the main source of sex ed for boys all over the world?" Dines, who is also the author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, inquired on her Facebook page Tuesday.
"Singling out Betts is a sneaky way to avoid stating the obvious: he is an over-conformist to the porn culture, not a deviant. Brace yourself for lots of Betts becoming the norm," she warned.
