Chapter 5 - Consent Is Not Enough
FbF Book Club: The Case Against the Sexual Revolution (Perry, 2022)
Previous Entry - Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering
As a heterosexual male, I take the liberty of thinking that I can speak for all other heterosexual males in that we think about sex in a completely different way at age 28 then we did at age 16, and just as differently at 44 years of age vs. when we were still in our 20s. With age and experience comes wisdom (at least it should), but with that same distance comes loss of memory as to what we felt like when we were much, much younger. We do not think the same way as it we once did, even though we are in the same body with the same skull encasing the same brain.
I bring this up because Louise Perry dedicates the fifth chapter of this book to an attack on porn. Porn is very low-hanging fruit, but she is right to focus on it due to its sheer size and especially of its negative effects on people and society as a whole. She does a good job in describing these negative impacts from various angles (most of which will not be covered in this entry due to need for brevity) but I find her attempt at a solution rather weak and quite trite:
This is one of those rare problems that has such a blindingly simple solution: opt out. Regardless of whether the state regulates the porn industry – as I believe it ought to – the individual maintains absolute control over whether or not he or she directly contributes to it. There is no good reason to use porn. Giving it up costs the consumer nothing. It is easier by far than giving up factory-farmed meat or products made by sweatshop labour because, although we all need to eat and clothe ourselves, not a single one of us needs to watch porn ever again. The sexual liberation narrative tells you to keep going; I’m telling you that you have an obligation to stop.
Earlier in the chapter, Louise notes how some men can be addicted to porn (actor Terry Crews, for example), but in her conclusion claims that individuals have “absolute control” over their consumption of it. Well, which is it?
Porn is a vice, and like all vices, some people cannot control it. I wrote the following about gambling back in August of last year:
In the mid-1990s, the Canadian Province of Ontario decided to open government-controlled gambling casinos in order to extract more money from its own citizens, as well as the tourists who would make their way to these establishments. Prior to this, gambling was restricted to horse racing, charity events, and illegal venues run by various organized criminal groups. The result was a revenue windfall that encouraged the expansion of this scheme elsewhere in Ontario.
The legalization of gambling served to give the once-underground activity a fig leaf of legitimacy. What this served to do was to introduce gambling to huge swathes of people who would have never, ever considered placing a bet prior to this, as to do so would have meant that they would have to deal with unsavoury (and potentially violent) elements. Housewives flush with cash wouldn’t be caught dead at an all-night poker event in some dingy basement, where they would be eyed carefully by Calabrians making sure that they continued to bet until they went broke. These housewives sure did love sitting in front of a slot machine for hours on end though, the flashing lights and the mechanical noise manipulating their brains into pressing their luck just one more time.
It wasn’t too long after legalization that people began to talk about how so-and-so didn’t tell his wife that he was borrowing money to go down to Niagara Falls one more time to try his luck at the poker table, or how another so-and-so lost her house and her husband as she took the mortgage money and spent the whole of Saturday either pressing buttons or trying her luck at the roulette table. These stories were commonplace. I can list at least two dozen examples of homes that were wrecked by the legalization of gambling. These same homes would be intact today if the doors to those casinos were never opened in the first place.
Not everyone who went to the casino ended up losing everything. Despite the odds always being in favour of the house, most people managed to have self-control and went to gamble “just for fun”. They were casuals. Other people got hooked relatively quickly, making gambling their primary outlet for enjoyment and raising the stakes by becoming more adventurous in the process. Dollar machines gave way to five dollar machines, which led to the roulette table, and then to shooting craps. “Thrill seeking” demanded that this psychological type keep trying new and riskier games because they were bored of the ones that they were already playing.
People titter and laugh when you tell them that marijuana is a gateway drug. It sounds silly to Gen Xers, and I can only imagine how corny it sounds to Millennials and Zoomers. But it is 100% true. A line is crossed when you smoke that first joint, and thanks to the relative harmlessness of marijuana when compared to harder drugs, a person will think to themselves “it’s not that bad at all”. Like gambling, many people will make this their first and final stop. Others will seek newer and riskier highs. The same applies to pornography; many males (and I assume some females as well) have to keep searching for more hardcore or niche variants in order to continue to feel sexually stimulated and turned on, because the “vanilla” stuff simply “doesn’t do it anymore”. We all know people like this, and some of them end up with seized hard drives and prison time (I know of at least two guys who were friends of friends that this happened to).
Yes, with freedom comes responsibility. But freedom needs checks on behaviour as not all people are the same. Sometimes even those checks come too late, as the damage has already been done.
Gambling is not as central to the lives of humans as sex is. We can live as a species without gambling (even if it will always be there), but without sex we are doomed to extinction, and bodies and minds have evolved as best as they could to seek sex in order to reproduce.
When you’re a teenage boy, your hormones are raging so hard that you often will not understand what is happening to you, and even worse, you have not yet learned that being very, very horny negatively impacts your judgment. “Men think with their dicks” is absolutely true, but young men do not immediately understand this. As we hit puberty, our minds and bodies are wired up for maximal sexual arousal. Every guy in here will remember getting erections in class during high school for no reason whatsoever. Zero stimulus required. It just happens. His body is primed for sex. He is in proximity to attractive girls his age who are already in possession of the physical attributes of grown women that attract male sexual attention.
At the same time, our culture is sex-obsessed. The teenage boy’s body and mind are telling him to have sex. So is the music he listens to. So are the TV shows and movies that he watches. Having sex becomes not just a biological imperative, but also confers social status on him once it’s revealed to others (and all teenage boys immediately tell their friends about their encounters). The incentives are many.
What about the teenage boys who can’t find a female for sex? Their bodies and brains don’t try to mitigate at all. What results is frustration, and this can manifest itself in many ways, some of them ugly. Teenage boys in proximity to females of the same age group are yet to understand their own bodies and the feelings that these same hormones generate, and do not grasp just how dumb they become when aroused. Compounding matters further is how so many of them do not know how to interact with females, especially when it comes to reading the signals that are given to them. This often results in miscommunications which can be embarrassing at best, and criminal at worst.
We are told by pro-porn people that pornography gives an outlet to male sexual frustration, thus shielding many women from potential rapists. What will a young male do when his body is telling him to have sex all the time (yet is denied it), and when free pornography is available at the click of a mouse? It is impossible to expect young men, whether teenagers or young adults, to enact the kind of self-discipline that Louise suggests. It betrays a lack of understanding of just how horny young men are. After reading this chapter, I had to think back to the many times I embarrassed myself in order to revisit that same mindset that I, like all teen males/young adult men, were caught in through no fault of our own.