night.”1Schiro’s behavior was a function of pornography. Pornography got him drinking, and once he was drunk and his inhibitions were lowered he felt compelled to act out the fantasies he had seen in the X-rated book stores. When Schiro and Mary Lee moved to Evansville, his behavior got worse. He began to beat her, at one point knocking her two front teeth out. By the late fall of 1980 he was all but out of control. When Lee was at work Schiro would take her two-year-old son Willie to the Evansville mall and use him as a prop for panhandling, saying that he needed the money to feed his child. He would then take the money and spend it at adult bookstores. Sometimes he would spend $20 on one session at what he called the “quarter movies.” These were the peep shows at the adult bookstores. For a quarter Schiro could see two or three minutes of a 15 minute film loop. The contents of the quarter movies were generally the most hard core of all the offerings at the adult book stores. When Mary Lee once asked Schiro where he had got the idea for a particularly bizarre form of sexual behavior, he answered by saying that he had learned it from these film strips.
In early December Schiro told his employer at Tri-State Repair, Robert Wheeler, that he had seen one of the women living at the house across the street come out to get the mail clad only in a pajama top and panties. The scene was the type of thing that Schiro never forgot. Over the next two months the image sank into his pornography-saturated psyche and emerged later as a fantasy that demanded action. He had made up his mind that he was going to rape the woman who lived across the street from where he worked. By February 4 the fantasy had become irresistible. According to the testimony of Mary Lee, Schiro said that when he woke up he just knew that something was wrong. He said the feeling got stronger and stronger, that he became afraid that something bad was going to happen.
Schiro spent the day of February 4, 1981, slowly being drawn into his own pornography-inspired obsessions. He was being inexorably transformed into an actor in his own quarter movie. Throughout the day on the job Schiro intoxicated himself by inhaling an industrial solvent. After leaving
work at 2:30 in the afternoon, he went to a local tavern where he stole a pint of whiskey. He then took the whiskey to an X-rated book store and consumed it as he initiated his ritual of perusing first the magazines and then working his way back; to the harder-core quarter movies. Dr. Frank Osanka, a psychologist who specializes in child abuse and pornography, testified at Schiro’s trial that the quarter movies were in general more sado-masochistic, more rape-oriented, and more violent than the generic movies at adult bookstores. As Schiro became more intoxicated, his behavior became correspondingly more belligerent. At one point he ran out of quarters and went for change, exposing himself to the cashier. The woman attendant gave him his change, and he went back and purchased some more movie time. The next time he ran out of quarters, he returned to the cashier still exposed but this time was belligerent about it. This time the woman threw out. At this point he began making his way toward a house at 1210 Tennessee Street to keep his appointment with the woman who had gone out to get the mail in her pajama top and panties.
He never found her. He found her roommate instead. Laura Jane Lueb-behusenhad put on a robe for the evening. She was having a mixed drink and watching television, planning to take a bath and then go to bed. She had moved to Evansville from Ferdinand, Indiana, a small town fifty some miles off to the northeast. She worked as a truck driver for Charles Chips. She was a lesbian and living with the younger, prettier woman Schiro had seen from his work place. Her name was Darlene Hooper. She worked as a hostess at the Executive Inn in Evansville. She had been married and, in fact, was to spend the night of February 4 with her ex-husband. There is evidence that the lesbian relationship between Hooper and Luebbehusen was threatening to break up. In a note found in the trash can after the murder, Luebbehusen wrote to Hooper: “Honey, I do love you and don’t want to leave either. So what we have to do is quit fighting. I love you, Laura.”2At 9:30 PM Schiro knocked on the door of 1210 E. Tennessee. “My car broke down,” he said to Luebbehusen. “Can I use your phone? I want to call my dad.”
“Sure,” said Laura Jane, and she let him into the house.
Had Mary Lee had the benefit of reading the Lockhart Commission Report, she would have known that “exposure to erotica had no impact upon moral character”3 and that “the increased availability of explicit sexual materials [in Denmark, at least] has been accompanied by a decrease in the incidence of sexual crime.”4 She also mighthave learned that “available research indicates that sex offenders have had less adolescent experience with erotica than other adults.” In sum, she would have learned that “empirical research designed to clarify the question has found no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youth or adults.”
Since Mary Lee did not have the benefit of reading the Lockhart Commission Report, she ended up doing empirical research of her own and this entailed getting beaten repeatedly and having her two front teeth knocked out as Schiro’s behavior degenerated into the savagery that pornography generated passions create. Her testimony contains first hand observation of how pornography inspires behavior by arousing the passions to the point where they are no longer under rational control. Mary Lee observed “the same pattern,” which began with the “[pornographic film] loops,” followed by liquor and dope and then deviant sexual behavior. Once the pattern got established, it was impossible to predict Schiro’s behavior. “Like if we would be talking, having conversation or watching TV or something, all of a sudden he would be really angry, like I said something that he didn’t like or I don’t know but just boom and he was mad.” It was a unpredictable moments like that that Mary got her two front teeth knocked out. At another point Schiro gave her bruised ribs and a black eye. At another point he bit her and then chased her down the street. “It was horrible,” she recounted to the court. “It was like he was possessed. ... It was almost an inhuman laugh and he kept saying, ‘you can’t get away from me.’”6In his more lucid moments, Schiro seemed aware that he had become the thrall of his own disordered passions. During one of his assaults on Mary Lee, he would repeat to her, “you are making me do this. I don’t want to do this, but I can’t stop, and you are making me do this.”7
Lee’s testimony gives a graphic account of the bondage that pornography creates in its victims.
“He knew that people said it was wrong and he knew that someone who was normal didn’t do these things and he didn’t want to do them. He just couldn’t stop though. Something would get inside of him and there he would go. He had no control over it though because he hated doing it. He would cry and say, ‘why do I do these things? Help me stop. What can I do to quit this. I don’t want to do this anymore.’ He wanted to be like the guy next door, you know, with the car in the garage and the dog. I hate the things that he had done but I can’t say I hate Tom because I know that he is sick. He couldn’t stop doing the things he did.”
The same pattern repeated itself in the encounter with Laura Jane. After gaining entrance to the house by lying about his car, Schiro persuaded her to have consensual intercourse. Then after waking, he became enraged at her for no apparent reason and began beating her over the head with first a bottle and then an iron, Laura Jane continued to struggle until Schiro strangled her. Then he dragged her into the living room of the house and sodomized her corpse. While doing this he was, according to Lee’s testimony, “crying the whole time and saying, ‘God, please stop me. Don’t let me do this. Please help me. God, I just can’t quit.’”8Schiro’s trial received some attention at the time of the Meese hearings
on pornography in the mid-’80s. In general, however, the testimony of those whose addiction to pornography led to murder and other crimes was generally suppressed by the media which sought to portray masturbation to pornography as not only harmless but also as an expression of freedom. Something similar happened to the testimony of mass-murderer Ted Bundy, who told Dr. James Dobson hours before Bundy was executed that pornography led him to do what he did. The editor of the Evansville newspaper told me after handing me a copy of Schiro’s autobiography that pornography had no effect on behavior, even though Schiro and his girlfriend said the exact opposite. This suppression of the truth continues for a number of reasons. First of all, because the publishing industry is now heavily involved in pornography, and it is not in their interest to explain to the public that they are in the business of enslaving people. Secondly, the great myth of the enlightenment is “liberation.” If it could be shown that the sexual liberation brings about bondage, then those who use the term to their advantage would be powerless to control behavior. Finally, no one wants to admit that passions can get out of control because it contradicts the central Promethean myth of the Enlightenment. Just as Ben Franklin harnessed electricity for mankind’s benefit, so the sexual revolutionaries have liberated sexual energy from the moral law for the same end. To say that “liberated” passions were imperious masters who enslaved those who unleashed them would be to deny the most sacred tenet of the Enlightenment thinker. Therefore, evidence which supports that proposition is suppressed.
Thirteen hours after Schiro arrived at the door, Darlene Hooper discovered Laura Jane’s battered body just inside the front door of their house on the living room floor. Rigor mortis had set in. The body’s face and hair were covered with blood. A blood-stained pair of jeans was lying a few feet away. A ski jacket and insulated undershirt were pulled up around the neck of the victim, who had been raped while alive, beaten over the head with a whiskey bottle and an iron and then strangled. The body had also been raped and sodomized after death. Given Schiro’s state of mind and given the internal logic of pornography, it was only a matter of time until somebody got killed. Death runs like a leitmotif through all pornographic practice. Necrophilia is only the logical extension of the tendencies already there. There are those who get killed by asphyxiating themselves while masturbating; there are those who murder their victims, particularly children, because they are afraid of getting caught; there are those who accidentally kill their victims in the process of some bondage routines, and there are those like Schiro, who, according to psychologist Frank Osanka, “saw just enough of the simulated sex and murder situations that he just had to try it himself.”9“After several times in my interview with him,” Osanka continued, “I Finally concluded that he knew he was going to kill this woman when he went in there, and so I just said to him, ‘Did you intend to kill her?’ and [he said]
lYes.’ He was fairly consistent on that. And when I asked why, he would say that he had never done that before.”10
Thomas Schiro’s behavior could be predicted from the type of pornography he had internalized. His life paralleled the trajectory which pornography had traveled since his birth in 1961. Sometime during 1967, the same year the Lockhart Commission on obscenity and pornography was formed, six-year-old Tom Schiro discovered some films owned by his father. One of them was called Bedtime; it was a World War II-vintage pornography film. Accounts on how Schiro became acquainted with the film vary. Schiro claims his father showed it to him. The father claims that Schiro discovered it on his own. One thing is certain; once Schiro saw the film, he never forgot it. It never lost its fascination for him. In fact, when he moved in with Mary Lee fourteen years later he insisted on showing it to her. She remembers it as an old film that “was broken into a million pieces. I think he said it came from World War II... but he said he had been looking at it for years. “ According to Osanka, “Bedtime is a film that depicts a man and a woman in bed in various acts of sexual involvement. The significant point of the film is that the camera keeps coming back to the woman’s face.
“The woman’s face consistently is one in which she is looking as if she is feeling uncomfortable, and she is looking as if she is in pain, and she is looking as if that this is a disagreeable experience and at the same time her body is reacting in enthusiastic fashion. The fact that the camera kept going back and forth between the genital contact and her face gives the impression that her body was so enthusiastic in the sexual contacts but her face was distorted or angry or in pain so you get the impression that she’s enjoying pain from the sex.”'1 It was a lesson in sex education that young Schiro never forgot. When pressed on the issue of the woman’s face, Osanka conceded that she could be conveying distaste or even boredom as much as pain. The point is that the six-year-old Schiro was confronted with material he had no way of understanding. There was nothing in his experience that could act as a check on his conclusions. There was no one to interpret this film as a sordid simulacrum of the real meaning of human sexuality. The film became the explicator of sex for Schiro. This lesson was only confirmed later on as Schiro became exposed to progressively more violent and perverted examples of pornography. The stimulus was so powerful it caused Schiro to act in a certain way, causing life to imitate art. Once Schiro internalized the film as his first most powerful lesson in sex education, his behavior became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sex meant violation and pain, but Schiro concluded that the victim enjoyed the experience nonetheless. Schiro’s experience once he began to act out his fantasies only confirmed him in his pornography-nurtured view of sex.
According to Osanka,
what has occurred with Tom happens in many pedophiliacs, that is the individuals who habitually abuse children, that is that he had a psychosex-drive, halting as a result of premature unguided exposure to erotica before he was physically or psychologically ready to integrate that into his personality. Much of his subsequentsexual behavior, sexual aggression is repetitive of the film. For example, peeping here is not a great deal of difference between peeping in windows, which are a screen, and masturbating and watching a film and masturbating. *
Schiro’s life provides a textbook-like illustration of the trajectory that pornography addiction takes in an individual’s life. Schiro’s life became a quest for erotic materials, from nudist-type picture magazines of the type one would find in drug stores to sneaking into X-rated drive-in theaters, where he could watch the sado-masochistic movies and snuff movies, in which people are portrayed as being killed through sexual assault. According to testimony to Osanka, Schiro enjoyed these movies immensely, taking particular pleasure in the pain he could see on the victims’ faces. Schiro came of age when the stream of pornography in this country was increasing to a flood-tide. It was his misf ortune to be swept away by it and the misf ortune of his victims to be swept away with him.
Schiro saw his first hard-core sado-masochist film in 1971 at the age of eleven. As with Bedtime he could retain the details of what he saw years afterward. He recounted to Osanka at least ten years later scenes of extreme violence, women being raped and knifed, men being flagellated. It was obvious to Osanka that he enjoyed recalling these particular scenes. ‘They are important to him,” the psychologist told the court during Schiro’s trial, “because of the disorder he is suffering. He is overpowered by this need for orgasmic release, which he had conditioned and developed over a period of years, and the only release is through more and more bizarre forms of masturbation. For example, in relating the number of rapes and the specifics of the rapes he would say that very often by the time he broke into a home he would not have an erection, and so he would have to lie on the floor and use his picture books in order to be able to get an erection in order to be able to go into the next room to start the ritual of hovering over the body of the victim in order to ejaculate in the face of the victim. The whole practice of ejaculating on the victim is a recurring theme in pornography today. He very specifically likes those parts of the films when he watches the peep shows.” Schiro was by no means only indebted to hard-core material as his educator in depravity. He claimed that he learned the technique for breaking into homes to commit rapes from the made-for-television movie called Cry Rape.
The crucial fact of Schiro’s life was that pornography influences behavior. It functions as an aid to masturbation. Even more significant though is the fact that when these pornographic images got incorporated into Schiro’s masturbatory f antasies, they demanded to be acted out. Acting out is the only way that the addict can find the stimulation he needs to complete his act of masturbation. According to Osanka, “most people who look at pornography over any extended period masturbate in conjunction with the material. People don’t masturbate to train magazines or baseball magazines, but they do to pornography magazines. What happens is that the masturbation coupled with the visual image places the individual in the situation to the point where in some people it goes past fantasy to the point where people really believe that they can achieve those types of thing and there’s an increased desire for acting them out. Since he started so early, all sexuality is masturbation to Schiro. With the women he’d rape he’d have a hard time unless he was masturbating.”13Edward Donnerstein, an authority on pornography and sexual aggression, testified at Schiro’s trial that “there is a direct link between exposure to certain types of pornography, particularly images that are aggressive in nature - in fact images which Mr. Schiro was exposed to very, very early and found very sexually stimulating - and increases in calloused attitudes about rape, increases in the belief that women desire and enjoy being raped and increases in a willingness, in fact, to say one would commit rape and also increases in aggressive behavior against women.... Mr. Schiro believes in fact the victim finds these types of aggressive acts very pleasurable.”14According to Donnerstein, Schiro “viewed pornography which showed rapes of women, pornography which showed sadistic acts against women and against men and pornography which is showing masochistic very aggressive types of acts, and he consistently said in interviews that he finds those very, very sexually arousing so sexually arousing particularly in the instances where he was drinking that he literally wanted to, if he could, rip the page out and rape the woman or have intercourse with the woman on the page, but since he couldn’t he would seek out an unwilling victim.”15
In spite of its flaws and the fact that the Congress which brought the commission into being rejected its findings, the Lockhart Commission report was widely disseminated throughout the liberal media establishment as “proof’ that pornography was harmless. The recommendation that existing laws be repealed, along with the fact that prosecution of obscenity cases virtually ceased, created the impression in the public mind that the obscenity laws had infact been repealed. Clive Bames epitomizing the liberal reaction to the commission in the very act of disseminating its results could conclude that “women are the underprivileged sex when it comes to erotica and that this underprivilege derives from male supremacy.”16 The conclusion was that more smut would make America a better place.
LIBIDO DOMINANDI
Sexual Liberation and Political Control
E. Michael Jones
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