Porn Can’t Catch a Break

Righteous people hate porn because they know it’s bad, they just can’t prove it. In the face of study results showing porn doesn’t really do much harm, excluding how fucked up the actors get, religious and conservative groups tirelessly work to build a case against porn based on heartstring tales of the people fucking on camera armageddon. The latest round is a video of famous kidnapped Mormon teen Elizabeth Smart explaining how porn drove the base passions of the crazy homeless guy who took her for his sex toy in the woods.

“Looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him. Having sex with his wife after looking at pornography wasn’t enough for him. He just always wanted more.”

If you remember what the wife looked like, you’d have a better understanding of porn’s ability to drive sex without reason. Smart concedes she likely would’ve been raped regardless, but the porn made it worse. Smart speaking for a group called Fight the New Drug, an anti-porn advocacy group.

Of course, Smart’s anti-porn lamentation is some massive strawman. If her parents hadn’t hired male vagrants to work odd jobs around their children the actual kidnapping likely never happens. Every study on the subject finds that men who indulge in porn and strip clubs and hookers and the like smell like old cigarettes, but are less likely to commit sexual assaults than the truly repressed sociopaths unable to find an outlet for their particular form of madness.

Who knows what drives crazy dudes with voices in their heads living in the woods to go completely rogue. Tens of millions of people consume porn in this country regularly. How many of them are raping middle school girls and what would the outlier crazy fucks be doing with their free time if the porn went away? Helping old ladies across the street?

It’s convenient for moral arguments on the subject of modern sexuality and promiscuity to assume that rape and porn and pedophilia and homosexuality and the like all started at some point in the 1970’s. Also to ignore the fact that self-described religious fundamentalists are statistically some of the highest consumers of porn in the nation. 

Keep an eye on your children. Stop inviting creepy homeless men into your home to save money on roofing and pray you’re not the one in a million who becomes the next Smart family. Ignorance of the facts is never a good way to start a get-well campaign.