Okay, so I’m finally getting to this, after a few days off the radar.

Amy Payne, a student at Brigham Young University (which is owned by the Mormon church and attended primarily by its members from around the nation), felt compelled to reply to my assertion in the LA Times that viewing porn is “normal”. She did so in a piece the Times titled (appropriately) ‘Porn isn’t normal‘, and I’d like to offer a response to that now.

She starts by saying that pornography is “neither normal nor right.” I should point out that my piece in the Times was not intended to argue for the legitimacy of porn; it was a defense of Judge Alex Kozinsky’s right to own it and his right to privacy. During the course of that argument I mentioned that even if Kozinski owned a collection of pornography, it wouldn’t make him anything but ‘normal’. As I reported in the full-length version of that article, one recent study finds that 98 percent of men and 80 percent of women have viewed pornographic material, a high percentage of those doing so on a regular basis: that’s what I mean by normal. Even Payne’s likely political allies agree with me on this: Senator Sam Brownback, for example - a conservative Christian who believes that porn is “disturbing” - thinks it is now “ubiquitous”.

Payne misses that definition of ‘normal’ completely, preferring instead to use it as a misnomer by which she means ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’:

“Pornography can become just as addictive as any hard drug and can have just as negative an impact on family and marital relationships. How can something that degrades women and portrays sexual acts as public and unsacred be normal?”

Well whether or not it degrades women or anything else has no bearing whatever on its normalcy. It either is ‘normal’ (ie. viewing thereof either is a normal practice) or it isn’t. Even if I agree with her about the negative aspects of pornography, admitting that it is normal isn’t the same as asserting that it is good or right or acceptable.

And she claims that pornography is degrading to women. Really? Does she mean it is degrading to women by definition? Or is she arguing that some pornography can be degrading to women (and in that case is she concerned that it can also be degrading to men)? I’ve always found the word ‘degrading’ interesting in discussions like this. In my dictionary, the word in this sense means “to treat or regard someone with contempt or disrespect.” I find it difficult to understand its applicability to a case involving women who have entered of their own free will into the adult film profession. Are they degrading themselves even by being in those scenes? And is it degrading because the scenes are sexual in nature? And if so, where is that line and why? (I presume a kissing scene would not be degrading? Or maybe Payne thinks so.) So many questions, so few answers - ever - from those in Payne’s camp.

“Is the emotional damage of the wife who finds her husband viewing pornography really worth the kick he gets out of it? No wife wants to feel second-best to an image on a computer or a raunchy video.”

Well she’s assuming that the wives must “find” their husbands viewing pornography, and also that they’ll be emotionally damaged by it. I find it fascinating to see Payne’s stereotypes and prejudices revealed here: she thinks porn is the exclusive domain of sleazy men watching while their wives aren’t looking. It’s certainly true that more men than women view pornography, but the existence of a huge porn market for women and for couples who wish to watch porn together testifies that she’s wrong to stereotype. None of the thousands of women who say they view porn on a regular basis have had to “find” their husbands watching porn; they’re watching it with them!

As for the second part of this paragraph, where Payne suggests that wives are feeling second-best as a result of seeing their husbands watch pornography, she appears to be simply speculating without basis. If a husband is allowing his wife to feel inferior in any way, they have problems unrelated to his seeing pornography.

On to the next sentence:

“Sex is an expression of deepest love and devotion. Any wife would be horrified to find her husband cheating on her with another woman. Finding out that he is addicted to porn, or even looking at it casually, is just as traumatic and leaves her feeling just as betrayed.”

In the case that a husband is watching porn without his wife’s knowledge and that it is happening at the expense of their sex life, Payne may have a point. It’s a definite possibility that a wife may feel betrayed in that case (or that a husband may feel betrayed if the wife was the one expressing all her sexuality with pornography, a possibility that never seems to have entered Payne’s blinkered mind). But their problems are not a consequence of the use of pornography, then. Their problems are a lack of communication, trust, honesty, openness and their vapid sex life is a result.

“Our society is fast becoming numb to the sexual imagery in movies and television.”

Well this is just meaningless bullshit. It’s like saying, “Our society is fast becoming numb to Spongebob Squarepants”; it means nothing, the standard is arbitrarily set by whatever happens to be the conservative custom at the time and - most importantly - it doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with the question of whether or not pornography is right, let alone whether it is “normal”.

“Do parents, even those who are OK with viewing pornography, want their children to grow up in a world in which watching sex is just as common as watching the Disney Channel? There are only selfish reasons to view pornography, and only unselfish reasons to fight against it and prevent it from seeping further into society.

“No happily married man wants to destroy his marriage. However, viewing pornography is a sure-fire way to help it go downhill. There’s nothing normal about that.”

What a crock. As many factors would suggest that sexually explicit material could actually help a marriage if used by the partners in the right way, particularly if the sex life of a married couple has been somewhat lackluster and in need of some spice.

And there are only selfish reasons to view pornography? There are only selfish reasons to eat, too. As far as I can see, Payne hasn’t provided a shred of an argument against pornography; only confirmed her own prejudices and reiterated her own tired stereotypes about the things she has been taught to believe first by her family, then by her church and now by her church’s university (if I may be permitted to do some reasonable speculating of my own).

The point of my original piece in the Times was to defend Kozinski’s right to possess pornography in private (and thus by extension the right of porn producers to create it). I strongly suspect that Amy Payne would disagree on the basis of her ‘arguments’ in this piece. So not only is Payne and her ilk not interested in distinguishing between normalcy and morality, but she isn’t interested in distinguishing between morality and legality.

Typical.