Posted on November 15, 2019

Rolling Stone: Men Who Abstain From Porn Are Dangerous Alt-Righters

Grayson Quay, The American Conservative, November 15, 2019

Adult (Pornography) Theater

There’s a scene in The Big Lebowski in which The Dude bitterly objects that the pornographer Jackie Treehorn, viewed by the local sheriff as an upstanding citizen who “draws a lot of water” in Malibu, “treats objects like women, man.”

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To read Rolling Stone, though, you’d think these people were providing a valuable public service. In a recent piece by EJ Dickson, the expert witness is Dr. David Ley, a “clinical psychologist and sex therapist” who “has partnered with the [pornographic] cam website Stripchat” to spread the word about “sexual health.”

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A segment on Trevor Noah’s Daily Show takes it a step further, trotting out the same psychologist from the Rolling Stone piece to explain that porn and masturbation make “a lot of really good things happen in your body and your brain” and that “people who watch more pornography…are more feminist” and have “more egalitarian values.”

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But if the producers and consumers of pornography are so clearly dedicated to spreading sweetness and light in the world, what kind of monsters would oppose them?

According to Dickson, the enemy is anyone currently participating in #NoNutNovember, a viral internet challenge that encourages men to go 30 days without watching porn or masturbating. In what’s become a tell-tale sign that the hip vanguard of the cultural left’s late-stage sexual revolution feels threatened, Dickson lets us know, in no uncertain terms, that those who dare abstain from porn have embraced “the ideology…of the far right”: “anti-Semitism,” “homophobia,” “racism,” and “misogyny.” He even includes Ley’s “You know who else hated porn? Hitler!” argument and goes out of his way (and I mean waaaaaaay out of his way) to name drop Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopoulos.

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Ley actually criticizes Jordan Peterson (whom he calls “a leader in the alt-right movement in Canada”) for telling young men that “there is nothing noble about masturbating to pornography.”

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Throughout the ages, Christians and pagans, Easterners and Westerners, philosophers and poets—and yes, even the hedonists, most of whom had some standards and would have sought out heartier fare than the low-hanging junk food of smartphone porn—have agreed that the uninhibited indulgence of sexual desire makes one not only weak but contemptible.

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Perhaps such enslavement is the goal. The time of the self-governing man, we’re told, is over. All the negative psychological and relational effects of porn are acceptable if only men can be reduced to such a state of surfeited acedia that they will roll over, accept the Pavlovian rewiring of their brains, and become good, docile consumers, fit only for the post-patriarchal age of PornHub and Amazon Prime.

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Self-control makes strong men. Self-indulgence makes weak men. Strong men make good citizens. Weak men make good slaves. Strong men are capable of doing harm. Weak men are incapable of doing anything else.