Dr. Helen: Is Control over Porn Really about Control over Men’s Sexuality?
Some thoughts:
First, we have surely had enough of laws against this because it “leads to that.” Such laws are almost always predicated on fantasy, are covertly founded on unsavory, anti-Constitutional agendas, and quite frequently cause an increase in undesirable consequences: in the behavior targeted for reduction, in the destruction it supposedly causes, and in the trustworthiness of law enforcement and the judicial apparatus. So from both Constitutional and utilitarian perspectives, a law banning or restricting porn because it “leads to” rape, or marital dissolution, or the Boston Red Sox in the World Series yet again, is right out.
Second, there is no imaginable argument by which discussions and depictions of sexual activity can be separated — politically, artistically, scientifically, or any other way — from discussions or depictions of any other event or idea. Porn has a deep history; what’s changed about it is that it’s now available through high-tech channels that the Victorians didn’t have. What has a shallower history by far is feminist harridans looking to castigate and demonize men for masculinity-linked behaviors. From Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon forward, militant gender-war feminism has been the moving force to criminalize porn.
Note also: The Victorian culture of Nineteenth-Century England, which was supposedly the pinnacle of sexual repression, featured a great deal of sex-for-hire. Porn was available then, though it was much harder to come by and didn’t arrive over Pay-Per-View or the Internet. Yet at a time when the population of London was a little over one million, London’s prostitutes entertained Londonian men at an estimated rate of 2,000,000 per week. So subtracting porn from our milieu, or making it harder to acquire, is certainly no guarantee of marital stabilization.
