NEW YORK – I’m a simple guy, so it should come as no surprise to find that I like simple solutions. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I like simple solutions so much, it doesn’t matter to me whether they have any impact whatsoever on the problems they purport to address, or maybe even create bigger problems than the ones they’re ostensibly designed to solve.
For example, when there was a lot of concern over the lack of parking downtown in my hometown some years back, I heartily endorsed the idea of a total prohibition on driving cars throughout the downtown area. Hey, there can’t be too many cars in a parking lot if cars aren’t permitted to get to the parking lot in the first place, right? Problem solved!
Ultimately, what matters more to me than addressing the problem at hand is addressing my emotional need to feel like the problem is easily solvable, if only someone in our no-good federal, state, or local government would get off their bureaucratic ass and ban something for God’s sake.
Accordingly, I’m ready to throw my wholehearted support behind Ross Douthat’s simple solution, published by the New York Times under the even-simpler title “Let’s Ban Porn.”
Douthat apparently got the idea while thinking about people who advocate for addressing porn in the context of sex education, wherein educators presumably would inform young people the kind of sex they see depicted in porn isn’t realistic, enjoyable, healthy, or physically possible without the aid of significant editing, constant shaving of pubic hair, deceptive use of fake semen and extensive transmission of diseases which only bad, unchaste people are supposed to get.
Those teaching such “porn literacy,” according to Douthat, “have accepted a sweeping pedagogical defeat.”
A “sweeping pedagogical defeat” sounds grim I’ll admit, but so far, not grim enough for me to write my Congressperson about it, much less get off the couch to go march in the streets holding a hand-painted sign demanding action of some kind.
Tell me more, Mr. Douthat; I can’t tell you how eager I am to be persuaded your simple solution is the right one for me.
“They take for granted that the most important sex education may take place on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work is essentially remedial, and that there is no escape from the world that porn has made,” he adds.
Whoa; there’s “no escape from the world that porn has made”? Not even if I’m Snake Plissken?
OK, now this sounds like a very big problem, indeed. Thankfully though, as the title of Douthat’s column suggests, there’s also a very simple solution: Ban porn.
“The belief that (porn) should not be restricted is a mistake; the belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition,” Douthat writes. “Law and jurisprudence changed once and can change again, and while you can find anything somewhere on the internet, making hard-core porn something to be quested after in dark corners would dramatically reduce its pedagogical role, its cultural normalcy, its power over libidos everywhere.”
So, all we have to do is change the law to ban the stuff, and – bam! – porn would be relegated to the “dark corners” of the internet? That sounds amazing!
For some reason, I thought the internet was an international thing, and as such there’s a chance some dastardly, libertine, dope-smoking place like the Netherlands might tell us where we can stick our new porn-banning law, were we to pass one. But hey, I suppose if those dirty Dutchmen did that, we could just declare their entire shithole country a “dark corner” and declare victory, right?
I’m also glad to hear we’re finally over that whole “First Amendment” hang-up here in the U.S., and all the pesky precedent which holds that obscenity is a question of fact for a jury to consider, not something we can blithely assign to any sexually-explicit depiction which makes a New York Times columnist squirm in his khakis.
Sure, there will be some law-teaching eggheads, “free speech” perverts, IT-obsessed naysayers and ACLU members out there who will argue trying to ban online porn is a wasteful, unnecessary, and likely doomed-to-fail folly, but what do those people know – other than trivial subjects like Constitutional law, the nature of the internet’s technical infrastructure and other related claptrap?
The only important thing to understand about the idea of banning porn is it would be a simple solution to a major, growing problem and, according to Douthat “an opportunity to reconsider the tendency to just drift along with technological immersion, a chance where the moral stakes are sharpened to prove we don’t have to accept enslavement to our screens.”
Enslavement to my screen? Holy shit, that does sound awful – not least because I’ve forgotten my Windows safe word, and God only knows what my screen might do to me without that layer of opt-out protection in place.
