I was six years old when I watched porn for the first time. It 1984, and I was watching a scene in Conan the Barbarian where Arnold Schwarzenegger was groping a statuesque and nude Sandahl Bergman. You could see everything but Schwarzenegger’s schlong, which was pretty explicit for an R-rated action flick made in 1982. Where were my parents? They were right there in the living room with me. They rented the damn movie. They knew I was into swords-and-sorcery flicks. They figured this was no different from Clash of the Titans.
I was twelve years old when I watched porn for the second time. Some girls I had mistaken for friends lured me to one of their houses, held me down, and made me watch some movie where a woman in a satin cape mounted some stuntman who had been handcuffed to the bed while they dry-humped me and mocked me for “popping a boner”.
But former liberal turned fashsymp propagandist Bari Weiss isn’t doing anything to boost my profile. And she certainly didn’t give me a thousand bucks and a lifetime subscription to one of her Schlubstack newsletters.
Mainly because unlike Isabel Hogben, I’m not a young and easily manipulated adolescent who had somehow made it to the age of ten without learning how to distinguish fantasy from reality. I’m not the sort of person Weiss can groom into a propagandist for her right-wing authoritarian agenda. Really, though, Ms. Hogben’s prize-winning essay, “I Had a Helicopter Mom. I Found Pornhub Anyway.” is a fucking riot.
She has no idea what porn is, or what it can be. She thinks it’s just PornHub? She should try reading one of her mom’s romance novels, because as a married man who filches his wife’s books I can tell you that many of them get pretty damn explicit. They’re also pretty educational, with lots of cautionary examples of how complicated a relationship can get when the participants don’t actually talk to each other.
Hell, crack open the Old Testament and get a load of the Song of Songs. Like most of the Bible it’s allegorical as fuck, but taken at face value it’s pretty spicy for a text reputedly written thousands of years ago by King Solomon. Then again, old Solomon was also reputed to have bound seventy-two mighty demons from Hell to his service. The man got around.
First, let’s get on the same page about what porn really is today. When I talk to adults, I get the strong sense they picture a hot bombshell in lingerie or a half-naked model on a beach. This is not what I stumbled upon back in fourth grade. I saw simulated incest, bestiality, extreme bondage, sex with unconscious women, gangbangs, sadomasochism, and unthinkable physical violence. The porn children view today makes Playboy look like an American Girl doll catalog.
What the absolute fuck has this girl been searching for on PornHub? I don’t regularly use it myself, but when I opened a “private” tab and punched up the site, I didn’t see half of this shit. I see the simulated incest by default, but I know the actors aren’t really step-whatevers. But bestiality, “extreme bondage”, rape (what Ms. Hogben calls “sex with unconscious women”), gangbangs, sadomasochism, and “unthinkable” physical violence? I think I’d have to explicitly search for a lot of that.
Granted, “gangbang” is listed on Pornhub’s categories page, as are “bondage”, “fetish”, “fisting”, “bisexual male”, “pissing”, “rough sex”, and “step fantasy”. Notice how the step-whatever stuff is explicitly labeled as fantasy? But “bestiality”? That’s not listed. Did Ms. Hogben find herself some furry porn or somebody playing with a Bad Dragon toy made to resemble a dog’s cock? She doesn’t tell. It wouldn’t suit the agenda she’s trying to push, which is that porn is bad, especially for people under the age of 18. It’s a pro-censorship agenda dressed up in pseudoscientific language:
There is no porn that’s okay for children and teens. Not even “feminist” porn. Here’s why:
A recent Cambridge University study shows that porn’s effects on the brain are neurochemically identical to drug addiction. It’s as much a dangerous substance as illicit drugs.
When someone consumes an addictive drug, a hit of dopamine, the pleasure hormone, releases into the bloodstream. The brain loves dopamine and wants to repeat the feeling, leading to cravings and eventually addiction. This “gratification hypothesis,” according to a University of Duisburg–Essen study, is why cybersex addiction occurs.
I’ve got a few questions here that Ms. Hogben has evidently neglected to ask.
- Has the Cambridge study been replicated?
- Has the Duisberg-Essen study been replicated?
- Has Ms. Hogben actually read and understood either of these studies, or is she only going by journalists’ often-mistaken interpretations of scientific studies they don’t necessarily know how to read, either?
Maybe Ms. Hogben doesn’t understand this, but science isn’t just doing an experiment once. The experiment has to be not only reported, but independently repeated with the same results. Ms. Hogben evidently doesn’t know what hypothesis means, either. A hypothesis is a supposition or proposed evidence made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation. This tends to not happen very often in sciences is like psychology and sociology, but evidently Ms. Hogben hasn’t heard of the replication crisis in psychology, in which attempts to replicate published experiments failed to reproduce the published results.
And, frankly, dopamine-chasing seems to be something we blame for every pleasurable thing we find objectionable, whether it’s watching porn, playing video games, or arguing with randos on social media and getting righteously butthurt. It’s good old all-American Puritanism – the unreasoning terror that somebody, somewhere, is having fun – dressed up in the same sort of pseudoscientific language that the likes of Charles Murray, Stephen Pinker, and Richard Hanania use to justify white supremacy.
But some, including Nadine Strossen, the former national president of the ACLU, argue that minors’ access to porn content is a “free speech” issue, noting young people have a constitutional right to information about sexual health.
Ms. Strossen is right. Children do have a right to information about sexual health, and the first thing they should learn is that nothing they see in pornographic pictures or video or read about in erotica is real. It is all fantasy, mostly fantasy that is unsafe or impractical to enact in real life. Young men and women deserve to be taught that they are not obligated to do something just because they or their partners saw it in a porno and want to act it out in real life.
Also, boys, nobody’s dick is that big or stays hard that long. You are enough. If she says or implies otherwise, propose anal sex. Suddenly you’ll be too big. And remember: a man is no man if with his tongue he cannot win a woman. Shakespeare might have been writing about rhetoric, but it applies to cunnilingus, too.
They are wrong. Porn is not about sexual health. Nor is it “content.” It’s a substance.
This is arrant bullshit. Ms. Hogben has presented no evidence for this claim and it should therefore be summarily dismissed.
With that same Google search, children consume dangerous lies about sexual pleasure. A recent BBC study of 2,000 UK men ages 18–39 found that 71 percent have gagged, slapped, choked, or spat on their partner during sex. A third said they don’t think to ask for permission before committing these acts.
Again, this is a failure in how we teach young men and women about sex, including pornography.
An Indiana University study shows that the earlier a girl is exposed to porn, the more she will accept behaviors like choking, facial ejaculation, and “aggressive fellatio” from a sexual partner.
At risk of belaboring a point, this looks like Ms. Hogben continuing to demonstrate credulity and scientific illiteracy. Has this study been replicated? Also, reading the study suggests that people “exposed” to porn are also more likely to engage in butt-fucking without prior discussion, which further illustrates my point that we’ve gone too long without proper sexual education because if you try to stick your cock or even a finger up somebody’s anus without prior discussion, consent, cleaning, and lubrication then both parties are going to find that the experience is nothing but a pain in the ass.
If I play with a woman’s asshole, it’s with her consent and on her terms. Because I’m not a fucking rapist. If studies like the ones Ms. Hogben are citing are true, then our culture has bigger problems than pornography, like rape culture, and the partriarchal view of sexuality and the emphasis on female chastity that right-wing authoritarians present as the ideal is right at the top of the fucking list because it encourages rape culture.
Meanwhile, models and female entrepreneurs—women who little girls look up to—are flocking to OnlyFans to sell naked photos of themselves.
The only new thing about this is OnlyFans. If OnlyFans had been a thing in the 1920s, you’d have found the likes of Mae West and Gypsy Rose Lee posting cheesecake there. Not to mention Betty Page in the 1950s. Furthermore, Ms. Hogben is conflating the sale of nude photos on OnlyFans with the kinky shit she’s been seeing on PornHub before she had reached puberty. Nor is pornography itself new. As long as there have been cameras, people have been using them to capture nudity and sex. Just check out The Whores of Yore if you don’t believe me.
Even before the invention of the camera, people have been making lewd art and writing lewd stories. Renaissance art was replete with depictions of the nude human form, and don’t you even think of telling me that nobody at that time got hard or wet from viewing such art. John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, aka Fanny Hill was published in 1748. Nor is sadomasochism new; the “sado” part exists thanks to a French libertine philosopher by the name of Donatien Alphonse François, better known as the Marquis de Sade, who wrote Justine and the 120 Days of Sodom and died in 1814.
In short, most of my friends think this stuff is normal.
Well, most of my friends at that age in the mid-1990s thought it was normal to get together in the woods and spend Saturday night draining multiple kegs of cheap beer and smoking weed they stole from their parents’ stash. Teenagers being stupid is hardly new.
The solution is not “good porn,” as Stoya claims. America needs a sexual renaissance—a massive, full-scale social change of heart and mind when it comes to porn, sex, and addiction. Fight the New Drug is one nonreligious nonprofit providing meaningful truth about this problem.
She’s right. We do need a sexual renaissance, starting with an end to the Christian purity culture that demands that people wait until they’re married, which might not happen until they’re in their late 20s, before having sex. We should not be stopping teenagers from experimenting with sex by themselves or with willing partners, but teaching them about consent, teaching them how to enjoy sex without causing unwanted pregnancies or spreading sexually transmitted infections, and encouraging them to be open about their sexuality instead of sneaking around and hiding.
When I was thirteen my parents put a lock on my bedroom door and gave me The Talk™. They gave me condoms, taught me how to use them (with a banana, you perverts) and were honest about how even a condom wasn’t foolproof because my father wore a condom and my mother was on the pill when they conceived me. They told me it was OK to jerk off as long as I did in private, wasn’t too loud, and cleaned up after myself. They also told me that if I wanted to bring somebody home, I was welcome to do so as long as I was discreet. And every year for my birthday I’d get a fresh pack of Trojans.
Of course, I never brought anybody home. One could argue that the best thing a parent can do to ensure their adolescent children don’t have sex as teenagers is to encourage them to do so. It certainly worked with my parents saying I could smoke cannabis with them once I was 18. I only touched the stuff once, at a concert in my early 20s, and haven’t bothered with it since.
But let’s talk about “Fight the New Drug”. They claim to be non-partisan and non-religious. Well, it’s mainly Republicans inveighing against porn; they don’t want people having recreational sex. They want all sex to result in pregnancy and all pregnancy to result in a birth, because there aren’t enough wage slaves and Moloch has a hungry. As for non-religious: “Fight the New Drug” is a Mormon front. The mere fact that the organization is based in Salt Lake City, Utah, ought to raise suspicion about its agenda and where most of its money and personnel come from.
Furthermore, “porn addiction” is a concept with no basis in current science. It is a culture-bound syndrome mainly experienced by Christians or adherents of religions based on Christianity, like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. And their “porn kills love” campaign is complete horseshit. Lots of couples use pornography together, to explore fantasies without involving other partners and risking their marriages. A good portion of the four-year long-distance courtship between my wife and me consisted of us writing lewd emails about what we wanted to do to each other once we finally got together. And if one of us expressed a fantasy that the other wasn’t into, the other person could say it didn’t appeal to them. We communicated. We still do. We’ll have been married 19 years this Halloween.
But here we have the real agenda, in which Isabel Hogben proves herself a useful idiot for anti-porn legislation:
Even better, legislators are finally starting to step up. Louisiana state representative Laurie Schlegel was one of the first lawmakers to break ground on this issue. Her bill imposed age verification requirements on sites like Pornhub, and as a result, traffic to that site is down by 80 percent in her state. Other states have now followed suit, with similar protective bills gaining bipartisan support in Arkansas, Montana, Mississippi, Utah, Virginia, and Texas. These age verification bills are progress, and they must be replicated across America.
First off, the reason traffic to PornHub is down by 80% in Louisiana is that PornHub has blocked access to visitors coming from IP addresses based in that state instead of complying. However, geography-based IP blocking isn’t perfect, and there’s nothing to stop tech-savvy people in Louisiana from using a VPN to hide their location.
Second, if they’re not using PornHub, they’re probably getting their pornography elsewhere. It’s very easy to get pornography via BitTorrent, and not that much harder to get it via USENET. If anything, pornography and other bootleg media is pretty much the main reason USENET still exists.
Finally, age verification is arrant bullshit, even if backed with a credit card. If Isobel Hogben wanted to see some guy get his ass gangbanged by his “stepmother” and “aunts” in werewolf costumes with twelve-inch strap-ons, and ran into an age-verification page, there’s nothing stopping her from lying about her age and using her mom’s credit card.
But try telling that to ideologues who are absofuckinglutely terrified that somebody, somewhere, is having orgasms without procreating. They just won’t listen. Never mind that they’re probably even kinkier than honest sodomites like me. Me, I like good porn. I’m just more likely to use Literotica than PornHub because I take the concept of “reading for pleasure” seriously.
PS to Bari Weiss: If you’re reading this you should be ashamed of yourself. If you’re going to take advantage of naive young women at least wait until they’re 18 instead of being a fucking groomer who encourages home-schooled 16-year-olds to push your bullshit agendas.