Pamela Anderson Warns That 'The Crack Babies of Porn' Are Nigh
In the Wall Street Journal, the ex-Playboy model blames online-porn for Anthony Weiner's texting troubles & kids propelled "warp-speed into the dark side."
It's weird enough trying to shoehorn Anthony Weiner's sexting scandal into a parable about online pornography. But what makes this Wall Street Journal op-ed truly bizarre is its co-author: icon of '80s fantasy Pamela Anderson. "If anyone still had doubts about the addictive dangers of pornography, Anthony Weiner should have put paid to them with his repeated, self-sabotaging sexting," the ex-Baywatch actress and Playboy model writes.
"And if anyone still doubted the devastation that porn addiction wreaks on those closest to the addict, behold the now-shattered marriage of Mr. Weiner and Huma Abedin."
Now, "porn addiction" is usually a proxy for other problems, so I would be skeptical of Anderson and her co-writer Schmuley Boteach's conclusions even if they were broadly applicable in Weiner and Abedin's case. But the fact is that there's no evidence Weiner's problems were related to online pornography, or that he even consumed it regularly. The (now myriad) sexual improprieties Weiner is accused of are all of the sexting and dick-pic sending variety.
As The Washington Post notes, "sexting between consenting adults is considered by many to be a safe form of sexual expression." But like anything that brings pleasure or fills some psychological need, this form of " electronic foreplay" can also become compulsive.
Compulsive behavior is generally rooted in the same sorts of underlying psychological issues, whether it's gambling or checking social-media or food-restriction or sexting. But Americans have a soft-spot for holding media responsible—Photoshop begets anorexia, Grand Theft Auto causes anti-social behavior, etc. And this holds especially true when it comes to sexual activity. So while people have cheated on their spouses, sent ill-advised erotic communications, and gotten-off on exhibitionism for centuries, folks for some reason want to believe that online porn is the culprit for Weiner and his kinky contemporaries.
Sample one more overwrought paragraph from the Anderson/Boteach article:
Put another way, we are a guinea-pig generation for an experiment in mass debasement that few of us would have ever consented to, and whose full nefarious impact may not be known for years. How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill? How many children will propel, warp-speed, into the dark side of adult sexuality by forced exposure to their fathers' profanations?
The duo also warns that "the incidence of porn addiction will only spiral as the children now being raised in an environment of wall-to-wall, digitized sexual images become adults inured to intimacy and in need of even greater graphic stimulation. They are the crack babies of porn."
The crack babies of porn! (So… a media-hyped panic that turned out to be way overblown?)
Anyway, for a chaser, check out Judith Levine in the Fall issue of n+1. Levine's essay, which explores children of the 1960s and '70s (including her own) exposure to erotica and pornography and traces the roots of the anti-porn hysteria, is the perfect antidote to fact-lite, melodrama-heavy fearmongering over online porn today. She points out that while courts in the '70s and '80s wavered on the free-speech protections owed pornography, the basic premise that viewing porn caused harm to kids and teens was always just presented and taken as a given, despite there being little evidence to back it up.
Today, these untested "truths" about porn and young people have become conventional wisdom. And crusaders are using the same playbook now when it comes to adults. The science never seems to back up what they want to find, but if every infidelity, sexual compulsion, or kink can just be assumed to be attributable to porn? Who needs science and facts when we can hold these feels to be self-evident?