After the spot of adolescent fun taken with Armed Liberal’s benevolent prescription for Kenneth Branagh, he (that would be Armed Liberal, not Kenneth Branagh — someday we are going to hire a writer!) pointed out an old post of his about porn.
Turns out he’s agin it. In part because it makes us passive consumers of our lives instead of active participants. It’s better, he tells his sons, to “hold hands and smooch with a real girl than to jerk off to pictures of someone you’ll never meet, much less get to go to bed with.” Or, as he explains:
“So instead of buying p0rn[sic], go meet someone and ask them out. Instead of watching the NBA finals and tying your identity to a team of mercenaries, go down to the park and play some hoops.”
This is great advice, for normal folks. But it’s very exclusionary of the fringes of society — the folks who aren’t athletic enough to play hoops down at the park, or the guy who isn’t attractive enough to get a woman to go out with him. Do we say that professional basketball is bad because playing basketball at the park is more fun and better for you than watching hoops on television? If so, that’s pretty hard on Crutches Boy. “Basketball on television is bad, because it keeps you from getting so desperate for sports fix that you’ll go down to the park and try to play basket ball with the kids who can walk, even though they won’t pick you for their teams and you’ll go home humiliated and frustrated every damn time you try.” Great advice. Thanks. Crutches Boy will be back for more good advice later, bank on it.
On the sex side this problem is worse for younger people, who often don’t have the perspective or maturity to figure out exactly why they can’t get find anyone willing to touch them, much less have sex with them. Most people figure out how to get laid eventually, but it can take a while and a fair percent don’t manage it until fairly deep into adulthood. (There’s also the unfortunate percentage who have genuinely unfixable strikes against them, like general ugliness or unresponsive obesity, that make the project even longer and more painful than it is for the kids who are merely callow and clueless.)
Worse yet, we tell our young people, for lots of strong reasons, that for the first five to seven years after their bodies are sexually mature, there is absolutely no socially acceptable way for them to have an orgasm with another person. Is it really better, for that long span of time, to “kiss and cuddle” without orgasm, than to masturbate and fantasize, which is what porn is mostly about? Perhaps a balanced life has room for both.
In short, Bacchus thinks that there are a hell of a lot of people for whom porn makes the world a better, brighter, or at least more tolerable place than it otherwise would be. This is arguably quite sad — Bacchus finds women a lot more fun than porn, when he finds them — but it’s still true.
