Boring Anti-Porn Scolds Are Boring,

"Pornification" is a word I first heard from Laura Ingraham and am hearing again today in this column by Mona Charen. While I'm sympathetic to their concerns about the coarsening of the culture and the casually blatant sexualization that's everywhere, the scolding tone of these sorts of screeds isn't going to convince anyone to come to their side. Heck, I want to visit 20 porn sites in retaliation right now! A snip:

The statistics are mind-numbing. Pamela Paul, author of "Pornified," reported that "Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs per year. About one in five rented videos is porn. Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66 percent of 18-34 year old men visit a pornographic site every month."

They are not, Paul and others explained, looking at Playboy magazine-like images of naked women. Instead, they are descending into darker and darker realms where sadism, fetishes, and every imaginable oddity are proffered. Sex and violence are offered together. Women are presented in a degraded -- not to say disgusting -- fashion.

Surely only people with peculiar sexual tastes are drawn to this sort of thing, right? Not exactly. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, author of "The Brain That Changes Itself," noted that pornography use actually changes the brains of consumers. Like other addictions, pornography use breeds tolerance and the need for more intensity to get the desired result. He quoted Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons," in which a college kid asks casually, "Anybody got porn?" He is told that there are magazines on the third floor. He responds, "I've built up a tolerance to magazines I need videos." Tolerance is the medically correct term, Doidge notes, which is why pornography becomes more and more graphic.

The men (and they are overwhelmingly men) who become hooked on this bilge are often miserable about it. They know that it affects their capacity to love and be loved by real women. As Doidge explained, "Pornographers promise healthy pleasure and a release from sexual tension, but what they often deliver is an addiction, tolerance, and an eventual decrease in pleasure. Paradoxically, the male patients I worked with often craved pornography but didn't like it." Hugh Hefner, the godfather of mainstream porn, apparently does not have normal sex with his many girlfriends. Despite the presence of up to seven comely young women in his bed at a time, he uses porn for sexual satisfaction. Think about that.

Uh-huh. I'm thinking that Hef is 1000-years-old and probably wishing he could just read a book in bed instead of having to be King Stud for a herd of dippy bimbos, but he's trapped into having to live a lifestyle he's outgrown.

Notably missing from these scolding articles is any mention of the WOMEN involved. The drunk bimbos flashing the "Girls Gone Wild" cameras aren't staring down the barrels of guns and not every porn performer is a sad junkie who was molested by their stepfather. By removing the suppliers and bashing the consumers, it makes you wonder how repressed Laura and Mona are and how that's manifesting itself in these screeds? Why they aren't saying, "Put your clothes on, ladies! Show some pride!"? Why just yell at the menfolk that they're destroying their families by looking at porn?

Granted, there are sick losers whose lives are messed up by this stuff, just as there are pedophiles and liberals who prey upon the powerless, but to take a "Reefer Madness" stance on it only backfires IMNSHO. It's ironic that these two scold liberals for trying to use isolated incidents like splashy gun incidents as an excuse to disarm the citizens, but use a few perverts to make it sound like they want burquas for women.