{"id":68391,"date":"2018-02-20T12:18:46","date_gmt":"2018-02-20T17:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=68391"},"modified":"2018-02-20T18:01:25","modified_gmt":"2018-02-20T23:01:25","slug":"nyt-op-ed-ross-douthat-could-we-please-ban-pornography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=68391","title":{"rendered":"(NYT Op-ed) Ross Douthat–Could we please Ban Pornography?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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For anyone who grew up with the ideals of post-sexual revolution liberalism, there is a striking pathos to these educators\u2019 efforts. The sex education programs in my mostly liberal schools featured a touching faith from the adults in charge that they were engaged in a great work of enlightenment, that with the right curricula they could roll back the forces of repression and make sexuality a place of egalitarian pleasure and safety for us all.<\/p>\n

Compared to those idealists, the people teaching \u201cporn literacy\u201d have accepted a sweeping pedagogical defeat. They take for granted that the most important sex education may take place on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work is essentially remedial, and that there is no escape from the world that porn has made.<\/p>\n

Which at the moment there is not. But we are supposed to be in the midst of a great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out of assumptions that serve misogyny and impose bad sex on semi-willing women. And such a reassessment will be incomplete if it never reconsiders our surrender to the idea that many teenagers, most young men especially, will get their sex education from online smut.<\/p>\n

This surrender was not inevitable. It was only a generation ago that the unlikely (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation of pornography a live political debate. But between the individualistic drift of society, the invention of the internet, and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell alliance\u2019s predictions that porn would lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn case was marginalized \u2014 with religious conservatism\u2019s surrender to\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s playboy candidacy<\/a>\u00a0a seeming coup de grace.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Except it doesn\u2019t have to be.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For anyone who grew up with the ideals of post-sexual revolution liberalism, there is a striking pathos to these educators\u2019 efforts. The sex education programs in my mostly liberal schools featured a touching faith from the adults in charge that…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more ›<\/a><\/div>\n

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