Several weeks ago, long-time conservative Jewish radio host Dennis Prager got into a verbal scuffle with Catholic author and podcaster Matt Fradd on the subject of pornography. In the interview, Prager devotes a considerable amount of time to defending his late father’s decision to subscribe to Playboy Magazine throughout the course of a 72-year marriage to Prager’s mother. The terse exchange hits its peak during a discussion of the morality of watching pornography.
“If I’m masturbating to animated pictures of pornography, I’m not doing something evil?” Fradd asked, posing a rhetorical question.
“That’s correct,” Prager responded.
“Yeah, I think that’s despicable,” Fradd shot back.
The clip has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube and sparked a bevy of responses, almost all of them heavily critical of Prager. Yet, that’s not the only way to respond to this video. We shouldn’t be primarily focused on condemning Prager’s somewhat revolting stance on porn and Playboy—that’s not the main issue here.
What we need to be talking about, boldly and unapologetically, is that pornography in the 21st century is not a Playboy problem. Regardless of your political persuasion or religious conviction, porn in the 21st century is a danger to creator and consumer alike, one that not only rewires the brain of its viewers but creates countless victims in front of its cameras.
The porn industry of Prager’s day got its views and made its money in the pages of Playboy, this is true. But that is not the porn industry of the 21st century. We live in a world where PornHub received 33.5 billion site visits in 2018. That’s simply not a Playboy-level problem.
Sites like PornHub are targeting my generation—Generation Z (18-24 years old) made up a quarter of the site’s traffic in 2021. One 2018 study, found that 73 percent of females and 98 percent of males, all of which were young adults in relationships, watched porn at least monthly. Moreover, recent research indicates that the average American child encounters Internet porn at 12 years old.
Internet porn is the subject of growing research in the field of neuroscience. Various studies have linked increased Internet porn use to decreased sexual satisfaction, compulsive computer usage, increases in use of illegal forms of porn, decreased mental health and erectile dysfunction/impotence in partnered sex in extreme cases. “Porn scenes, like addictive substances, are hyper-stimulating triggers that lead to unnaturally high levels of dopamine secretion,” reads one 2019 analysis, further noting porn’s “correlat[ion] with erosion of the prefrontal cortex — the region of the brain that houses executive functions like morality, willpower and impulse control.”
Pornography rewires our brains by desensitizing our reward systems to high amounts of dopamine and creating an incentive functioning similarly to substance addiction. Heavy usage carries with it a plethora of risks, from decreased mental health and quality of life to actual sexual dysfunction. And that’s just the viewers.
Between 14,500 and 17,500 people are trafficked into the United States each year (not counting victims in the country), and it’s no secret that many of them end up exploited for purposes of producing porn. In harrowing incidents like GirlsDoPorn, women were coerced into filming pornographic videos before their captors released the videos onto the Internet without the victims’ consent. Although the victims in the GirlsDoPorn case won in court, many of them became suicidal as a result of the shame and stigma attached to the barbarity they’d been subjected to.
No one knows whether the Internet porn they watch is the next GirlsDoPorn. In the absence of such knowledge, the probability remains that Americans watching internet porn are not watching consensually produced films but an innocent person being raped on camera. That person is the victim of an industry that makes too much money off of their suffering to care about their rights, and one shouldn’t need a religious or political argument to understand the consequences. No amount of sexual frustration or loneliness is worth supporting that.
In Frederick Douglass’ landmark book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the former slave captivated audiences with his arguments about how the institution of slavery not merely destroyed the dignity of the slave but rotted the conscience of the slaveholder, dubbing it the “enemy” of both. If there’s one modern issue that conservatives, and all Americans for that matter, desperately need to grasp the scope of, it is the degrading way in which the porn industry destroys the dignity of the (often unwilling) actors who create it and rots the brain of the consumer—it, too, is the enemy of both.
Porn isn’t a Playboy problem anymore—it’s an issue that’s affecting countless Americans. What we do about it at the legal level is a question for policymakers. What we do at an individual level is up to us, and it’s on us to make the right decisions about an issue that’s wreaking havoc on the minds of millions. It behooves us to understand the effects and make the morally and factually informed choice to walk away. Failing to cast it aside is moral cowardice on our part, and a prioritization of convenience over conscience. Or, in Fradd’s words, “despicable.”
Isaac Willour
Isaac Willour is a journalist currently reporting on American politics and higher education. His work has been published in a plethora of outlets, including the Christian Post, The Dispatch, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, as well as interviews for New York Times Opinion and the American Enterprise Institute. He studies political science at Grove City College. He can be found on Twitter @IsaacWillour.
The views expressed in this article are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Lone Conservative staff.
