Feminine Opposition to Porn is Not Hysterical
Porn is industrialized human sexuality and compels opposition (...a response)
“Do women hate male sexuality?”
asked in her recent piece entitled “Male Sexuality, Porn Consumption, and the Hysteria of Modern Feminine Discourse”.My answer: no, but many women believe that male sexuality, or really all sexuality, should not be reduced down to porn use. To equate male sexuality with porn use, as if they are one and the same, which is certainly the way the essay reads, is indulging in the elimination of enchantment and dignity from the sexual experience, which is precisely what porn and its makers seek to do. I word it this way because pornography is in a way an entire entity, a dark cloud of venomous rot that is poised and ready to envelop both our children and as many adults as it can. Regular porn use is a symptom of a male sexuality that has been high jacked and oriented towards the digital, as opposed to a healthy sexuality that is oriented towards the human.
Porn is an industry that is built off of the most basic of human desires, desires that are in place to propel the species forward, and which does the opposite of what those desires exist for. Porn is a stagnation, an agent of caustic wreckage for the minds and hearts of the people it preys off of.
Porn is not neutral, it is decidedly bad, and our culture’s obsession with pretending it is neutral or even good is just addict-speak.
I read the above-referenced essay a few days ago and it was less the actual essay and more the comments underneath it that compelled me to write this response. The comments were almost entirely from men, and generally complimentary. But, of course they were. Aly asserts in her article that regular porn use is more of just a “bad habit” than an addiction, and no one loves being told their addiction isn’t a problem via validation more than addicts do. She states:
“An addiction is measurably life-ruining. A person sells their body, steals from others, struggles to pay their bills, or struggles to maintain employment to sustain an addiction. How many men “addicted” to porn meet any of these four criteria? Almost none. At worst, it’s a bad habit that can be remedied by sexual access to a woman and going screen-free.”
Selling one’s body, stealing, and struggling with money and employment are not the only measures by which we can determine addiction versus bad habit. I know this because once upon a time, about 15 years ago, I was addicted to heroin, and there was a period of time in my active addiction where I was experiencing none of those things. What I did experience, and what she conveniently leaves out here, was the suffering of my close relationships. Interpersonal problems, self isolation, social withdrawal and the like are very common indicators of addiction, and this is fairly obvious.
To not list negative interpersonal implications as a measure by which a man can tell if he has a porn addiction is simply neglectful. If a man is choosing porn over his girlfriend or wife, or is choosing porn over pursuing real-life women if not in a relationship, he is displaying an addictive pattern. To recognize this is to recognize the weight of issue, not just brush it aside as a basic feature of male sexuality.
When I was 14, I went to a house party where most of the attendees were older than I was. I was one of those girls who developed physically fairly early and as a result I tended to attract a decent amount of male attention. Most of that attention at that early stage in my life ended up being harmful to my self image and ego and this night is a prime example of this.
There were several older guys at this party who were clearly interested in me, I remember overhearing (or did he just say it loud enough for me to hear on purpose?…) a guy who I later learned was over 20 say to another “Man if she was legal I would be taking those jeans off tonight” after feigning shock at my age after learning that I was a freshman in high school. The same guy’s cousin ended up trying to make out with me in the backyard as I tried to walk away to leave later that night.
This was the sort of attention I both relished and was simultaneously disgusted by, ultimately I believe this is because we are wired to desire male attention as females yet at that age are not yet wired to understand the implications of that attention, which is why precocious and early puberty in girls is such an issue.
It is also an issue because in a culture where porn is taking an active role in the raising of children, that male attention isn’t merely of those males, it is informed by what they are consuming. In my case, on that particular night, it meant that the male attention I received wasn’t just informed by porn, it was literally porn being shoved in my face by them.
At some point, a friend and I, similarly naive and similarly drunk, were led into a back room where there was a desk with a computer. By who, I honestly don’t recall, but I do know we were the only girls in the room and we couldn’t see what was on the computer screen until the group of guys opened up and we were pushed to the desk, the opening in the group of people we had just been pushed through zippering itself closed just as quickly as it had opened up.
And what, then, were we made to watch while this group of older guys laughed at our reactions? The now infamous 2 Girls, 1 Cup, of course. If you know, you know, right? We laughed in the embarrassed way young girls do, covered our eyes, balked at what we did see, gagged, and teared up as a result. They laughed to the point of tears themselves, pleased with our reactions. I spent a good many of my evenings trying to go to sleep over the next several months reliving that party and those images in my mind. It was not good.
I have many other personal anecdotes as to how porn shaped me as a young person, mainly via the guys that I dated and which I shall keep to myself, but I share this story here to illustrate how porn is in many ways, the ultimate insult to not just human sexuality, but to our souls. The inappropriate male attention I received that night without the forced viewing of porn was impactful enough, but the thing which filled my mind for months after was not the awkward make out or the older guy’s comments, it was the images I had taken in. It was a soul-injury.
Dee states the following:
“The average age of exposure to porn is 11-13 years old for males. This means porn executives are grooming CHILDREN to become lifelong customers.
This specific point is why Millennial Women particularly irritate me in the porn debate because we have also had exposure to digital dangers. Yet, we are too solipsistic to think, ‘Huh, how did the experiments social media and porn companies ran on us as kids change men forever?’
This statement is woefully disingenuous, and stated with a particular vitriol for her fellow women, a pattern unfortunately seen in the entire essay. Many, many women of my age have spent a long while contemplating how unfettered access to digital porn has damaged both ourselves and our male counterparts for years. These were our classmates, the boys we lost our virginities to, the boys we went to Prom with, the guys we drank with at house parties, the guys we were in sincere friendships with and went to coffee with, the guys who we studied with and eventually the men we married and had children with. To suggest we haven’t considered how porn has shaped their brains and their tastes and therefore their expectations and ability to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship is an unsound, ridiculous claim to make.
Related, Dee goes on to say:
“Somehow, women do not care that boys are having their brains fried, and it is entirely out of their control.”…
“The way I see many women talk about men and porn leads me to believe they would be the last ones their sons could or would go to if they found themselves exposed to adult content and consequently struggled with it. It is exceptionally poor parenting to ignore the digital dangers children are exposed to, and the women running around pointing fingers and laughing at men saying “porn brain, porn brain, porn brain” are going to be terrible mothers.”
Another vastly assumptive and pessimistic perception of her fellow women and mothers, and a pretty bold statement indeed when it comes to her thoughts on the mothering potential of women who are in opposition of porn use. The jump from crying “porn brained” to men who clearly have no qualms with regularly consuming a product which objectively harms women and children to “bad mother” is a stretch, and quite a long one. Women by and large absolutely do care about what young children are being exposed to, our qualms with pornography are not solely in place due to jealously, the way the author suggests.
Women care about porn not just because it serves to “replace” us in the most basic and unintelligent of ways, but because we have a grip on the mass cultural shifts that are taking place as a result of access to pornography at younger and younger ages and with more regularity due to the ability to access it with no social shame attached, along with rising instances of sexual extremes and paraphilias being represented and marketed to the men we love and yes, to our own sons.
Women’s concerns are not a symptom of hysteria, the way the title of her essay suggests, they are a symptom of a collective understanding that we are teetering on the edge of societal collapse in a way unlike ever before due in part to technology and the pornography it has brought into every household.
When people defend porn, it is usually by way of invoking male sexual needs and proclivities, and the words “it’s normal” are thrown around quite a bit. Yes, it is normal for men to be quite invested in sexual stimulation, and yes, it is normal for men to be interested in attractive women. Also, yes, there have been many versions of porn before the internet ever existed. The place where the combination of sexual liberation, birth control, and mass access to the internet collided is the place where things became decidedly not normal, however. For men to be allowed access to naked women, of literally every and all combinations of physical attributes, performing all manner of sexual acts, at any time and any place with no actual investment or work—is not normal. Porn disrupts the natural order of things, which is why it is an uniquely poised flavor of mass addiction.
Dee suggests that some of the reason for female jealousy in reference to male pornography use is that it basically steals resources from us as women. I don’t necessarily disagree. She says:
“Suppose you take women from their initial argument expressing grievance about male sexual morality to the end. You can typically expect them to conclude, "Men should be eunuchs who pay women's bills, and women can be as promiscuous as they want." Women are seldom arguing in consideration of men's humanity when it comes to human sexuality. They don't care. There is no endpoint. He is to become a monk if lacking sexual access.”
“Pay bills” is the crude way of saying “provide for”, and in the context of marriage and parenting, men should provide for their families. Stating this does nothing harmful to men’s humanity, in fact, I think it honors their natural design. This is why men are problem solvers and solution seekers. This is why they are physically stronger and faster. This is why they are the sex that does not gestate and birth and lactate. The male imperative is to provide and protect, fulfilling this imperative is mentally healthy. Pairing the idea that women desiring for men to provide for them with the argument that are somehow transformed into eunuchs when not allowed to access porn is nonsensical and overly dramatic.
If a man is too preoccupied with porn to be interested in pursuing women, in a way, potential resources for both women and children are being stolen away. And where are they being funneled? To the porn industry. And the cycle spirals….(also, in reference to this statement, I very much disagree that most women think we should be as promiscuous as we wish—in fact, there are many that do not wish for this at all).
Aly warns her readers to not read her essay if they “are not in the appropriate head space to discuss male sexuality and pornography consumption outside of morality”. I say, for the above mentioned reasons and then some, that pornography is not a subject from which morality can be isolated from. Why? Porn is first and foremost an industry, which exists solely to produce income for its makers and distributors. I am of the opinion that industrialization has no place in matters of the fabric of life— this includes things like sex, pregnancy, birth, and raising children. Turning sacred acts of vitality in a money making scheme while simultaneously harming children who will inevitably be exposed to it and encouraging the trafficking of human life all the while negatively influencing the masses’' sexual appetites and preferences is dirty work.
The work of the porn industry is work which is the antithesis of the feminine imperative—which I believe is to be open of heart and tender of mind whilst being ferociously and violently protective of the lives we make for ourselves and the literal life we make of ourselves in equal measure. Porn threatens all aspects of this imperative.
In order for women to be soft, loving and tender we must also hold within us a feral sort of potential for violence. You cannot have one without the other, and if you do, there is an imbalance. Porn demands of its female performers to close off their open hearts and tenderness towards their fellow people, and instead takes it from them with force. I do not care if a woman consents to performing in porn, this is what is happening at the soul level. Women cannot be physically used in such a matter and have this not be the case. I do not “believe women” when it comes to the women who say they enjoy it, I instead believe that they are instinct injured to the point that they do not know up from down and are therefore even more of an asset to the industry.
In order for women to be protective of the lives we have made with the men that we love, we have to be tapped into reality. The reality of this industry is that it is not an innocent “bad habit”, it is not natural, and it is not something we should acquiesce to simply because we need to lose weight like Aly so boldly suggests to the women whose male partners are no longer interested in sleeping with them (“My suggestion to wives concerned about looking better than porn actresses is to lose weight…”).
In order to protect the lives we make, we must be knowledgeable about what is being served up to children on a silver platter on the internet, often when they aren’t even looking for it yet. In order for all of this to happen, our feminine “hysteria” towards porn needs to be recognized not as hysteria but as a purposeful, smart, and emotionally sound reaction toward something which seeks to harm and destroy it all.
Porn is what has happened as the result of the mining of the human spirit via technological advancement and it simply only serves the purpose of continuing that advancement to its end. What that end is, I’m not entirely sure, but with sex robots and VR headsets and AI being able to morph any solitary human images together realistically into some sort of hybrid sex Frankenstein for those interested—I can confidently say it isn’t good for our collective well being—for women and men. It is a well known and oft-discussed fact that young people are not dating in the same way they used to and are not having as much sex, which Dee makes references to in her essay. How then, can we simply frame porn as a pesky bad habit that women are too self-centered and bitchy to have compassion for?
Bad habits don’t shift the direction of humanity—mass addiction to the monetized, sterilized, and fictionalized depiction of human sexuality that porn is, does. Emotionally bonding with a screen is a symptom of injured instincts. Dee compares male porn addiction to female addiction to social media several times in her essay, and while I don’t know if I agree that these two things are equally harmful, I do agree that they are both symptoms of that same injury. I also would frame both of these things as addictions, not bad habits as she does.
When a part of the natural course of healthy human life is monetized and sterilized, that is the marker of the industrialization of that thing. Porn in a way reminds me of big agriculture in that both deal in the adulteration of basic human processes. They both are quite extractive when it comes to organic resources and both are quite unforgiving in that extraction. They also are both uniquely poised to forever change the course of human health and well being. In the way mass farming practices deplete the top soil of minerals and leech their chemicals into waterways, porn depletes people of their innate ability to gain physical satisfaction and happiness from one another and leeches its poison into our general culture. Just like a damaged watershed has far-reaching consequences, so too does a damaged culture.
Dee ends her essay with this statement:
“In conclusion, the discourse surrounding male sexuality in the digital age reveals more about our societal biases than it does about the behavior itself.
The obsession with male porn consumption among women seems less about genuine concern and more about control and perhaps jealousy over the attention it garners.
If women ask men why they do what they do, men will tell them, but only if they are willing to listen without schoolmarming them and have earned their trust. Fostering a dialogue that doesn't reduce men to caricatures of their sexual habits is the best way for women to achieve healthy relationships with men.
I don’t hate male sexuality. In fact I quite enjoy it, I am not pregnant for the 7th time in my life for no reason. Many women quite enjoy it. My concern in genuine, as is the concern of many of my female counterparts. Our societal biases which are still intact are actually there for a reason—this is why the ability to obtain access to porn without having to go out in public and show your face while obtaining it is one of the main reasons it has become endemic—because shame (via recognizing and being aware of those societal biases) has a purpose. Some degree of sexual self discipline is good, both because it can foster good habits and creativity and also because it steers men towards what is actually typically best for them, both emotionally and mentally.
Fostering a dialogue that doesn’t reduce women to caricatures of their emotions (via terms like “schoolmarming”) surrounding pornography would similarly be a good way for men, and apparently women, to achieve healthy relationships with women. In addition, this particular essay isn’t just a response to Dee, but to her male readers/fans in the comments who think she is right in her assumptions about other women—I want to make it clear that she isn’t.
Female opposition to porn is a natural reaction to an assault on humankind—a humankind composed of men, women, and children.
****Editing to add a link to
’s compilation of resources on this topic, as it is relevant and also very thorough and helpful. It includes articles, podcasts, books, a film and many organizations for men, parents, women and marriages….
Yes, yes, yes. My husband is 16 months sober from a porn addiction that was ruining all of us. He was sexually anorexic, so, even though he had access to a size 4, Ivy MBA girlfriend/wife, he didn't want that. He wanted the screens, all day every day. The "if you just put out more, he wouldn't need porn" is simply not how it works. Porn is *different* than being with a real person. That, in many ways, is the whole point. Always accessible, completely anonymous, with infinite variety - no real person can be that. He's in his 50s, so it started with magazines at 10 or 11. By the end, it was his iPad. And the whole "harmless indulgence" argument? A21 and the International Justice Mission would like a word. Porn is *intended* to be addictive. Normalizing it as "every guy does it" not only echos the rationale of every addict out there, it ignores the agony it causes to family members and to the addict himself. My 16 year old daughter hasn't spoken to her dad in over a year. "Those girls in the videos are around my age", she said to me not long ago. It's not harmless, it's not cute, it's not because we need to quit bitching and spread our legs. It's a scourge - by design - and it is destroying people.
I think the defending of using women’s bodies for lustful purposes is hysterical. It assumes there is a lower class of women as whore who deserve to be used in this way. It also assumes that men do not have the ability to practice self-discipline and to turn away from sexual passions or temptation.