NEW PORT RICHEY, Fla. – When I’m considering the merits of someone’s argument, nothing inspires skepticism faster than rhetoric that makes careless use of superlatives or offers binary choices when other alternatives are obvious and manifest.
In what could have been an interesting piece about the challenges of modern “co-ed” military culture and the problematic popularity of pornography within it, War Virgin author Laura Westley for some reason decided to undermine her own points with claims so fantastic and unbelievable, they call into serious question the rest of her pitch.
For example, it’s one thing to say the popularity and ubiquity of porn consumption among male service members makes life far more difficult than it ought to be for enlisted women, but quite another to suggest porn’s popularity makes it nigh impossible to advance the cause of women in general.
“I believe the fault is not just with the military and its macho culture,” Westley wrote of the ongoing revenge-porn scandal rocking the Marine Corps. “I blame pornography and America’s addiction to porn. It’s at an epidemic level that has negatively impacted my own life in many ways and threatens to destroy any attempts at women’s equality and safety.”
Really? Porn “threatens to destroy any attempts at women’s equality and safety”? Even porn made entirely by and for women? Even gay porn, which often features women in no way whatsoever?
This assertion not only overstates the case against porn, but it does so in a way that implies all the producers, directors and performers currently engaged in making feminist porn are wasting their time — or worse, are mere pawns of the overarching pornographic patriarchy against which they purport to strive.
Lest you think Westley might cut some slack to auteurs of feminist porn, she’ll have you know not only is there no such thing as “good porn,” but there’s not even such a thing as a good porn viewer.
“Given that porn is a billion-dollar industry that has spawned revolutionary technological innovations, I don’t think it’s feasible to fight America’s porn epidemic,” Westley wrote. “The only effective method that worked for me was simply boycotting people who consume porn. I encourage others to do the same.”
Sure, that’s feasible.
Let’s say you think your doctor is good at his job, but you discover he watches porn. Clearly, you need to get a new doctor. It doesn’t matter whether he’s competent as long as he doesn’t read Hustler.
Got a good lawyer who surfs porn? Shit-can his perverse ass immediately and retain some dimwit who barely passed the bar but hasn’t been tarnished by harboring sexual fantasies of which you don’t approve — or who at least has the good sense to effectively conceal the fact he harbors such fantasies.
The single most absurd aspect of Westley’s argument isn’t about the impact of porn on the American military, or on Americans in general, but a mind-boggling nugget she offers about some unidentified, entirely porn-free country from which she has been fortunate to have met several wonderful people, evidently.
“Fortunately, I then had opportunities to romantically engage with people from other countries, which allowed me to ask about their respective sexual cultures, specifically with pornography,” Westley wrote. “Interestingly, there was an absence of porn and also a lack of gun violence, war, rape, and the men were more respectful of me.”
Which utopian countries is Westley describing here, exactly? Where are these paradises in which there’s no rape or gun violence and the men are more respectful of women because of an “absence of porn”? I assume they don’t have internet connections in these places? Or are the men there are so naturally chaste and respectful, they’d never even consider googling “blowjob” just to see what all the fuss is about?
If I start listing, off the top of my head, the countries in which I know porn is strictly forbidden by law, the places that immediately come to mind are Saudi Arabia, Iran and China.
Presumably these are not among the porn-free feminist utopias to which Westley is referring, correct? Or has Saudi Arabia recently undergone some sort of sudden feminist renaissance entirely undetected by the world press, not to mention unnoticed by Saudi women?
I’m not unsympathetic to the plight of women in the military, nor do I think it’s a good thing for open, unrelenting porn consumption to be tolerated within its ranks. By overstating her case so severely, by presenting the solution as an all-or-nothing, “you’re with me or against me” proposition, all Westley accomplishes is singing to the choir while alienating a good portion of the choir’s crucial audience: The (largely male) military brass responsible for setting and enforcing the kind of policies for which she advocates.
The ironic thing is, when it comes to what Westley would like to see the military do about the “porn problem” in its ranks, I have far fewer quibbles with her proposals than I do her justification for offering them.
“While banning pornography makes it the forbidden fruit, and people should be allowed to have their own personal expression, this must be in private only,” Westley wrote. “A zero-tolerance policy of publicly sharing pornography must be enforced and punished accordingly. And if any images or videos are even viewed without consent of the owner, then it should be punished to the fullest extent of the law.”
Depending on the definition of “pornography,” I don’t have much problem with this suggestion. Granted, I don’t think it makes sense to punish to the fullest extent of the law (whatever the phrase might mean in this context) a soldier for having a centerfold stashed in his cot, I can certainly understand why other soldiers, male or female, would prefer the bullethead in the adjacent cot not be allowed to surf Pornhub to his cock’s content.
“For those men who don’t consume pornography or objectify women, they need to stand up for women and fight alongside them, instead of remaining complicity ignorant in the longstanding battle for gender equality,” Wesley continued. “The more Marines (and other servicemen) police their own ranks with respect to discrimination, the less it will be tolerated, with the goal of eradication by peer pressure.”
Makes sense to me.
My only question is, why didn’t Westley lead with this sort of reasoning, instead of trying to convince me there’s this country out there, somewhere, presumably the happiest place on earth, where there’s no gun violence, no rape, and all the men respect women as equals, simply because they’ve never been exposed to the evils of porn?
I wouldn’t be able to suspend disbelief long enough to accept this kind of happy-day, egalitarian-promised-land bullshit in the context of a Harry Potter book. There’s no way I’m swallowing it in the context of an anti-porn argument.
Far more importantly, of course, this guy isn’t likely to buy it either.
