Why I Want to Ban Porn
When my argument for banning pornography over at The American Mind went viral last month, libertarians responded by doing exactly what I said they would: Freak out.
I was accused, predictably, of being sexually repressed and crippled by my own shame. Rather than dealing with the arguments, the libertarians chose to try and chop the messenger’s head off.
I suppose it is, then, at my own risk that I tempt the wisdom of Solomon by answering the fool according to his folly. It wasn’t all ad hominem though. One of the more substantive criticisms concerned the notion of an outright ban on porn.
People can go find whatever they want, especially on the internet. Even if we agree that porn ought to be banned, the fact is that you can’t actually do it.
This point is sensible on its face. But it is also flawed — so I’d like to address it, and in doing so, explain further just why it is that I want to ban porn.
Digital Porn and Social Cost
The reinvention of pornography for our digital age indeed makes porn easier to find — unbelievably easy by the standards of any other generation in human history. But that point doesn’t do for the libertarians what they think it does. Indeed, it makes the case for banning porn that much stronger.
Back when you had to physically walk in the door of a sex shop to buy porn, the latent social stigma of walking in and out of such a public establishment served to make pornography socially marginal. And there wasn’t any chance that a preteen would innocently stumble upon high-resolution hardcore porn, as there is now (in fact, it’s not a chance — it’s a near certainty).
Low-access porn of the pre-digital age did not require the same political restriction. In the digital age, easy-access porn requires it.
Psychosexual Trigger Algorithm
But the danger does not end there, because digital does not merely make porn more accessible. It also makes porn more dangerous. The algorithmic structure of internet pornography works according to the same logic as, for example, Netflix.
Both of these platforms, algorithmic digital porn and Netflix, cast a wide net to ensnare as many viewers as possible. With Netflix: romantic comedies, British period dramas, action/adventure, etc. As soon as you start choosing, the net encircles you and tightens, making personalized recommendations and even auto-playing the next relevant show or movie, so that your viewing experience is customized, designed algorithmically to find your particular psychological trigger to induce you to keep watching.
Algorithmic porn does the same — it casts a wide net of genres, and once it finds your fetish, it keeps refining your recommendations, to keep you watching, to keep you hooked. Like Netflix, porn searches for your psychosexual trigger, and then pushes it, over and over and over again.
As I wrote in The American Mind:
Porn in the digital age is unlike porn in any other. The untrammelled ease of access and the algorithmic recommendations that reward addiction put consumers on a highway to watch not only more violent and more degrading sex acts, but to descend ever deeper down whatever rabbit hole of porn enslaves them most. What was titillating yesterday is vanilla today; what was “just a preference” or “kink” today becomes a consuming perversion tomorrow. Like a user chasing a high, the porn viewer is always chasing the next feeling of transgressive shock or psychological surrender.
In the digital age, porn is more powerful, more accessible, and thus, more dangerous.
The first reason to ban porn, then, is simple: Even if you can’t make it totally inaccessible, you can make it much, much harder to find. I mean, at this point porn is so easy to find that pretty much anything you do will make it more difficult to find. That shouldn’t be hard to see.
Thus Spake the Law
Which brings me to the second reason to ban porn. It is illustrated by the outrage that followed my original article. The mere fact that I want fewer people (preferably none) put on camera while they have sex, the mere fact that I want fewer people (preferably none) wasting their lives watching other people have sex, the mere fact that I want fewer children (preferably none) stumbling upon scenes of sexual torture, somehow this all amounts to me having weird hang-ups from my sadistic Puritan upbringing.
Note to readers: I did not have a sadistic Puritan upbringing.
What’s my point? Am I just upset at being called names by libertarians?
No — I’m profoundly concerned by how widespread the sentiment has become that “Porn isn’t a big deal.” A few decades ago, this simply would not have been the case. The ’50s were not a golden age, by any means. People still looked at pornography — though they had a harder time getting their hands on it. Nevertheless, the denizens of the ’50s knew, whether they were hypocrites about it or not, that pornography was ultimately a perversion of the true nature of sexual union.
We ought merely to be arguing about how best to curtail pornography — instead, we’re arguing over whether porn even matters. As I said in an earlier Twitter thread: This is a profound regression in the health of public discourse and morality.
Does the Law Matter?
We can no longer see what sex is, and because we’re blind to sex, we’ve become blind to the perversion that is pornography. Call it obscenity blindness, call it psychosexual compromise, or call it a pornified culture.
But Bedivere, politics is downstream of culture. There’s no use passing a law trying to put the cultural genie back in the bottle. Change the culture first; the laws will follow.
Again: Sensible on its face, but wrong. This isn’t just a libertarian argument; in fact the phrase “politics is downstream of culture” has become a rallying cry for conservatives attempting cultural renewal. And I don’t have a huge problem with it, except insofar as it denies an essential aspect of law — law’s pedagogical function.
In other words, law is a teacher.
Plato knew this. In the ideal city, he says:
We [Legislators] would remain on the spot long enough to see people getting a taste of the laws while they’re still children; then when they’ve grown up and have become thoroughly accustomed to them, they can take part in the elections to all the offices of the state (Laws, Book VI).
The founding legislators of the city prefer to watch over and supervise the city until the first generation of children grow up under the laws, so that they are formed by the laws and can follow them by second nature.
But you don’t actually need Plato to tell you this. The libertarian freak-out is proof enough. Decades of legislative and judicial laxity on pornography and obscenity have taught Americans that porn isn’t a big deal.
While conservatives have debated in endless internecine think tank conflict about whether the law is a teacher, Americans learned from the law that porn is normal and fine. In a psychosexually compromised culture, the law is the only power strong enough to interrupt the porn algorithm and rewire us, so we can see perversion as perversion.
