It sounds a bit like the set-up to a joke, somehow: Pamela Anderson and a rabbi pen an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal urging people to give up porn.
This is not a joke, though, especially not for Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. The two made an impassioned plea in the Opinion pages of Thursday’s Journal, pegged to Anthony Weiner’s latest sexting scandal, that pornography has “corrosive effects on a man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband and, by extension, as father.”
Anderson and Boteach continued with: “How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill? How many children will propel, warp-speed, into the dark side of adult sexuality by forced exposure to their fathers’ profanations?”
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These arguments are as old as the concept of pornography. The specter of what might happen after porn was accepted (though not widely discussed) in mainstream society was raised most pointedly in a Premiere magazine story on the Adult Video News Awards in 1998: “The more acceptable in modern culture it becomes, the farther porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of unacceptability that’s so essential to its appeal,” David Foster Wallace wrote.
Anderson and Boteach focus on the effects on the men of society, an interesting choice given the American Psychological Association statistics they cite that up to 86 percent of women watch porn. These women, the two wrote, tend to go in for “less explicit” fare, and report more satisfactory sexual relationships. Not so the men.
The pair aren’t trying to get back to some prurient past; rather, they see porn as a tool whose usefulness has run its course.
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“We must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers,” they conclude. “A boring, wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality.”
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