Jewish Author– ‘Let go of the puritanism, Pornography is good for women, leads to less rape and sexual assault’

ed note–Jes’ a lil’ reminder that it–the eternal Judaic war against Gentiledom–takes on many forms.

In the Middle East, it is waged with bullets and bombs, whereas in the West, the Jews poison Gentile society slowly through their control of media, entertainment, culture, etc.

Batya Ungar Sargon

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing in recent weeks over the dangers of pornography. In a big New York Times Magazine piece, Maggie Jones interviewed a bunch of teenage virgins and found that their closest approximation of what sex would be like came from pornography.

“I would just do it,” one of the boys told Jones of having anal sex without asking permission, leading Jones to conclude, “He assumed that girls like it, because the women in porn do.”

That teenage boys brag about things doesn’t occur to Jones. Teenagers “aren’t always sure what is fake and what is real in porn,” she writes, and “some adolescents use porn as a how-to guide.”

Jones’ story was widely read, and prompted a second Times piece, this time a column by Ross Douthat, which called for the outright banning of pornography.

A pornographic sexual education produces a very specific kind of man, writes Douthat, “a breed at once entitled and resentful, angry and undermotivated, ‘woke’ and caddish, shaped by unprecedented possibilities for sexual gratification and frustrated that real women are less available and more complicated than the version on their screen.”

The #MeToo movement against sexual abuse and harassment will have failed, writes Douthat, “if it never reconsiders our surrender to the idea that many teenagers, most young men especially, will get their sex education from online smut.” If we want a generation of better men, “there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle.”

This kind of pearl-clutching is not just puritanical. It’s bad for women.

For starters, there’s mounting evidence that pornography is correlated with a reduction in rape and sexual assault. With the advent of the internet in the 1990s and all the websites Jones depicts as corrupting the youth came also a staggering reduction in rates of sexual assault, sexually transmitted diseases, teen sex, and rape.

This correlation has been established internationally as well as here in the U.S. According to a paper by Anthony D’Amato, a law professor at Northwestern University, the states with the least Internet access, and thus the least access to pornography, saw a 53% increase in rape from 1980-2000, while the states with the most access saw a 27% drop.

And while correlation is of course not causation, shouldn’t something correlated with such a significant drop in rape be celebrated, rather than banned, no matter who it offends or how many cads it produces?

Sure, pornography is full of anti-feminist imagery, and women are often exploited in the making of it (though there’s a growing movement towards ethically produced pornography, as Jones notes).

But that this does not translate to the behavior of its users can be seen in another study from 2015, published in the Journal of Sex research. The study found that users of pornography held more egalitarian attitudes than non-users when it came to women in positions of power, women working outside the home, and even abortion.

The study also found that those who did and those who did not indulge in pornography “did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward the traditional family and in their self-identification as feminist.”

The idea that these images provide an educational tool for what real sex is like is as absurd as claiming that the teen show “Riverdale” is a dating manual. Pornography does not bleed into real life, even — and here’s the crux of it — if teenagers believe it does. Because it’s fiction.

Just as young girls grow up reading “The Fault in Our Stars” and hoping to date Gus Waters and then learning that they will not, young men watching porn may mistakenly believe that sex is like porn — until they learn that they were wrong as soon as they start to have sex.

In fact, in that same New York Times Magazine story, this very process happens to one of the teenagers when he ultimately has sex. He finds he isn’t drawn to having sex like they do in porn — though his girlfriend is! (Surprise! Women watch pornography too!)

The actors in pornography are, don’t you know it, acting. And everyone who watches it knows it is fiction, or comes to learn that very quickly — a fact lost on Douthat and Jones and countless other pearl-clutchers.

Men might be cads and sexually selfish, but they were long before pornography. Besides, we are all sexually selfish. It’s external power dynamics — the kind #MeToo is dispensing with — and not the effects of a fictional genre that makes women fall prey to male selfishness.

The proliferation of pornography should be seen as a sign of progress, rather than its opposite. In this #MeToo era in which we are finally learning how to protect women from sexual harm, it’s crucial that we learn to celebrate the realms of fantasy that produce pleasure.