408. Coming to meet (VII)

Why is pornography wrong, anyway? For the traditional religions the answer is straightforward: various prohibitions on fornication and adultery. For some people—probably a small number—there is a certain inherent disgust response; the whole business is beneath their dignity, tacky or dirty. Outside these reasons, we enter more convoluted territory, usually with a pseudo-psychological or conservative feminist inflection: so pornography is wrong because it is addictive, or because it encourages violence against women.

These reasons stay within the progressive belief system; for progressivism, probably as an outgrowth from Romanticism, the addict is a holy figure: a doomed Byronic figure, granted uncanny insights but destined to addiction—despite his best efforts, all his struggles with ‘is menal ‘ealth, he will probably succumb to his addiction; remember that addicts never die or expire, they succumb. The word suggests submission and surrender, a feminine condition—and so it is high status in our feminised society. You succumb to the succubus. Since addiction is high status we manufacture new addictions every year, from smartphones to vaping. “I’m,” pause to look down coyly, “struggling with me addiction issues at the moment, mate.” Whether these are true addictions is debatable; personally, I think pornography is a bad habit—like picking your nose—and nothing so glamorous as an addiction.

The idea that pornography is violence against women is also within the progressive belief system. Remember that when feminists make this point they do not do so to defend traditional marriage or the idea that men should own women and defend their property. The feminists who think pornography is violence against women are more misandristic than their mainstream peers; basically, they are the Valerie Solanas faction who want to cut up men—or the Andrea Dworkin faction who are too ugly to be on OnlyFans and so want the whole enterprise scrapped instead. Crew cuts abound in this contingent. In reality, women are natural hedonists and exhibitionists who love to be the centre of attention—they are perfectly at home in porno world.

The non-religious objection to pornography, an objection not based on shame or instinctual revulsion, is that it wastes resources. It wastes the eggs of the women involved—and if their fathers had a say as to what they did, as fathers did for most of history, what these girls do would never be allowed. This argument is never really made; at most, people say: “These girls have fathers” or “What would you feel if your daughter did that?” And yet these are shame-based arguments, still feminised—the goal is to shame someone into action, ineffective and unhealthy.

Pornography also wastes a lot of sperm, except sperm is cheap so it matters little—although, presumably, taken cumulatively the lost sperm expended on pornography adds up. No, from the male perspective pornography wastes resources because it encourages men in a hedonistic and non-productive activity. Manliness means to be creative—just like God. A man who does not produce or create is not a real man. Women create children and so are excused from any other creative pursuit; anything else they do is secondary to this act. A man’s sole justification is that he creates; all men are self-made men: a man’s purpose is never apparent to him and so he must discover it himself, whereas a woman knows what she was made for from day one—babies.

This is why it is an insult to call someone “a wanker”; it means to be unmanly, uncreative—and it is the primary activity pornography encourages. This is why pornography is wrong; every other objection is moralisation and based upon shame—fundamentally unhealthy. Whether or not baby Jesus cries every time some anon shoots his load over RedTube is neither here nor there: the question is whether or not you will become more Godlike, more procreative, in all respects—and pornography demonstrably discourages that outlook. To be virtuous is to take effective action in the world, whereas pornography is an ineffective private indulgence. Wanker.