Can we cut to the part when everyone admits porn is bad?

Plus: the health of the state, the American village, and more

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A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Can we cut to the part when everyone admits porn is bad?

(via)

Late last week, The New York Times published an essay (that’s an unlocked link) in its “Modern Love” column that is less about love than its absence.

Plaintively titled, “Men, where have you gone? Please come back,” it observes that many men in our society seem to have “quietly withdrawn from intimacy and vulnerability. Not with violence or resistance, but with indifference.” They are not out and about, wooing women and making an effort. They are at home, “scrolling. Dabbling. Disappearing behind firewalls, filters and curated personas.”

The writer, Rachel Drucker, speaks of men unwilling to commit to a serious conversation, let alone marriage. One man ghosted her, she recalls, when she asked to define the relationship. But he lingered around her online, following her “Instagram stories—one of those small gestures of passive engagement that so many of us now mistake for closeness. It looks like interest. It feels like silence.”

This is a thoughtful article, but an article that skates ever so lightly past a kinda crucial detail: Drucker worked for Playboy. She was on a marketing and IP team and so knows “in exact terms, what cues tempt the average 18-to-36-year-old” man: not love or anything like it, but “access to simulation—clean, fast and frictionless.”

Wow, I wonder why if we know one key reason so many men are home scrolling? I wonder if Drucker herself, along with her fellow porn-mongers, had some small role in creating the situation she now rightly bemoans? And I wonder why no Times editor insisted Drucker consider these extremely relevant questions in her piece?

Actually, that’s not true: I don’t wonder. I know that there remains substantial resistance in American society to admitting what is long since evident: that porn is bad. That it is indecent, embarrassing, dehumanizing, indefensible. That there is no such thing as “ethical porn,”¹ only porn that does not compound its evil with rape. That, as

O. Alan Noble

compellingly argued last month, porn is poisonous for relations between the sexes if women grasp its depravity and spread. That you don’t have to be a “cool girl” who doesn’t nag about porn, doesn’t say exactly how disgusting and disheartening it is that this is such a common pastime among men— including a rising number of Christian men—and how unsurprising it is, in this context, that so many men are unmarriageable.

And this Times essay is not alone in refusing to get to this point.