Noli Irritare Leones

I hope this title isn’t too racy for my Facebook feed.

Susie Bright had a Facebook link to a blog post at the NY Times about Mary Eberstadt’s “Is Pornography the New Tobacco?” Eberstadt’s thesis is that in the 1950s, porn was morally condemned while smoking was ubiquitous, while now smoking is morally condemned and porn is ubiquitous, so, porn producers, watch out, people may not always be as accepting of you as they are today. Since Susie Bright’s as porn friendly as Mary Eberstadt is porn unfriendly, it’s not surprising that her Facebook friends’ comments on the link are all from people who disagree with Eberstadt.

One of her commenters remarks:

Sometimes I wish they’d call it “the masturbation industry” instead of “the pornography industry”. Then, just do a search and replace, and see if the argument still holds.

I was going to just make a quick comment like, “you can’t imagine how weird that substitution would sound to all the people who cheerfully masturbate up a storm but dislike visual porn,” but Facebook told me to try again later, so I decided, screw it, I’ll make a much more wordy post instead of the quick comment.

Defenders of porn often draw this kind of rhetorical equivalence between porn and masturbation (elsewhere on the net, I’ve seen, “What do you expect me to do? Not masturbate?”), because, if you’re porn-friendly, it makes anti-porn arguments sound all the sillier. After all, who doesn’t masturbate? Who could see anything wrong with masturbation?

In fact, “porn is immoral and so is masturbation” and “porn is immoral but masturbation is just fine and dandy” are both fairly common views, and I don’t think either of them is really undercut by doing that “masturbation industry” substitution for “porn industry.” If you think masturbation is bad, too, well, maybe as an individual non-premeditated thing it could be only a venial sin, but having a whole industry devoted to promoting it is bound to seem seedy. And if you think masturbation is just fine but porn isn’t, the obvious answer is, “who needs porn to masturbate” (and in all probability, you yourself don’t).

Still, I’m going to try the experiment, go through Eberstadt’s actual listing of the harms done by porn (which notably doesn’t include any statements about porn harming the people who perform in it, just people who view it and people who are married to people who view it), and see what happens to her arguments if I substitute “masturbation” for “porn.”

Despite that synergy, however, there is evidence that pornography does cause harm to at least some people. Consider, for example, its apparent widespread interference in the workplace. According to a 2007 survey by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Journal, 65 percent of corporations now use pornography-detecting software, up from 40 percent in 2001. According to that same study, fully 84 percent of the 30 percent of bosses who said they fired someone for internet misuse cited pornography as the reason why. These facts alone strongly suggests that pornography consumption is both compromising at least some office work on a large scale, and also becoming a risk factor for at least some employees in job loss.

Substitute “masturbation” and you get an argument that masturbating at work will get you fired. Indeed it will, at least if you do it where your coworkers can see you. And a company that just let people masturbate in front of their coworkers would probably be risking sexual harrassment lawsuits. Fortunately, the number of people who masturbate where their coworkers can see them is small.

Indirect evidence from other sources, such as divorce cases and reports by clergy and therapists, also suggest that pornography can cause harm. Consider the increasing role played by internet pornography in divorce proceedings. According to a meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, for example, 62 percent of the 350 attendees said that the internet had been a significant factor in cases handled that year — and that was in 2002, well behind today’s levels of pornography consumption. Numerous pastors and priests and ministers and therapists have reported that pornography use is now the leading cause of marital trouble and breakup they encounter as counselors.

“Consider the increasing role played by masturbation in divorce proceedings.” I’d be surprised. Unless something else is going on alongside the masturbation, masturbation tends not to lead to divorce.

Third, the claim that pornography causes harm to at least some users can be also be inferred from the fact that some people will go out of their way to avoid encountering pornography, including by paying for software that blocks it. In this way at least some potential consumers signal tacitly their own decision that pornography is potentially injurious….

Most people don’t need to go out of their way to avoid masturbation, because mostly people take care not to masturbate in the presence of others (save for certain consensual activity between spouses or lovers). But it’s true that, if they had to, a lot of people would go a good deal out of their way to avoid seeing people masturbating with whom they have no desire for sexual involvement.

What I get from substituting “masturbation” for “porn” is: a) Porn is different from masturbation, since people tend to be more public about their enjoyment of porn than about, well, actually having other people see them masturbating (and this kind of messes with the rhetorical usefulness of using acceptance of masturbation to promote acceptance of porn), and b) Mary Eberstadt is making a sort of “second-hand smoke” argument against porn; out of all the possible harms she could attribute to porn, she’s picking the ones that involve unwilling people being subjected to it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 18th, 2009 at 8:38 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.