I was part of a jury, the trial is over and a verdict of 'guilty' was reached as based on the facts presented to us.
The crime involved the sexual exploitation of children. This guy had on his phone, interspersed among 8,000 images of himself (yes, of his dick), his car, and [legal] gay porn, were 20 images of illicit material depicting and showing the actual abuse of children- in that way...
As part of our duty as jurors, we had to watch examples of this material. I looked away when I could, but in order to fairly ascertain the guilt or innocence of this person before us, I made myself watch what were mostly videos and a few still images.
This was disturbing to me for many reasons, and I could've followed some on the path of excusing oneself from their civic duty by stating my own trauma, or how it'd be too traumatic to see the abuse of children, etc... But I like how one fellow juror put it, a lady, who said that "We're here to do a job, and check ourselves at the door." She basically was saying, It's not about us, but the greater good.
Some takeaways:
1. Porn is escalatory in nature. The novelty of p-viewing, when the dopamine receptors are too fried to 'get off' on one's normal tastes, one begins to escalate- as this man did.
2. In the porn-world, there are always victims, whether or not the genre is legal. The victims may be actors, portraying victimhood, or they may be actual willing participants who enjoy what's happening- but they're all victims. Victims of a low self-esteem that they fail to value themselves as being worth more than being degraded. Or they're victims of a voracious demand for their material. Or, the viewers are victims of a multi-billion dollar industry that takes advantage of a man's brokenness and wounding.
3. The victimhood of the porn-industry, even as it insulates itself from the more horrific and illegal genres, nonetheless promote the dissolution of the family unit, which leads to the direct abuse of children- eventually. It's like my friends who used to glorify pot smoking, but let me pull back the curtain and you can see the deadly nature of the bigger drug dealers who kill each other to compete in getting the drug 'to market'.
4. The particular genres to which we may be exposed to (even if legal) numb us, dull us, redefine us and make us something less than human, even- and often- bestial. Two separate occassions I passed this person in the same public restroom, the defendant. The first time he looked at me, and I at him (before his case was decided). We exchanged no words, but my 'feel' of him was that he was callous, a monster, a beast- and not a man. This was not me pre-judging him, but a spiritual 'feel' of him- seeing a soul-less man looking back at me, instead of two humans looking at each other in a mirror... I saw no soul, no humanity.
Knowing the specifics of this case, this guy eats, breathes, and lives pornography (the legal kind), but after awhile, his tastes altered, and the legal kind (as gross and vile as that was) was not enough.
