For Rabbi Shmuley Boteach and former playmate Pamela Anderson, the latest Anthony Weiner scandal provided a news peg for an important discussion: the deleterious effects of pornography. Yet predictably, Jezebel was critical of their “puritanical” approach.
In an opinion piece published in the September 1 edition of the Wall Street Journal, Anderson and Boteach urged readers to consider the “devastation that porn addiction wreaks on those closest to the addict,” using Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin and their four-year-old son Jordan as example victims.
Comparing the addictive nature of porn to that of drugs, Boteach and Anderson argued that “the incidence of porn addiction will only spiral as the children now being raised in an environment of wall-to-wall, digitized sexual images become adults inured to intimacy and in need of even greater graphic stimulation.” Today’s kids, the pair wrote, are the “crack babies of porn.”
But children are not simply suffering from exposure; they are hugely affected by the toll pornography takes on their parents. Addressing this, Boteach and Anderson highlighted porn’s “corrosive effects” on a “man’s soul and on his ability to function as husband and, by extension, as father.”
Jezebel contributor Stassa Edwards scoffed at what she viewed to be sensationalist moralism. First, Edwards argued that the concept of porn addiction is still “controversial” in the psychological field, pointing to the fact it is not a recognized disorder in the DSM V. Then, the feminist writer’s true colors shone when she complained: “There’s a reliance here on a host of old stereotypes: that women aren’t sexual, that fathers are the moral linchpin of the family, and that the family relies on the appropriate expression of sex according to gender roles.” How old-fashioned!
Although Boteach and Anderson clearly expressed the view that the “Pandora’s box of pornography” could not be capped, they still advocated for solutions to quell the damage. One such idea was a “sensual revolution” — the idea of replacing porn with eroticism – that would “alloy … sex with love … physicality with personality … orgasmic release with binding relationships.”
To this, Edwards sighed: “Porn, in this framing, has no room apparently in long-term relationships or marriage.”
Although a commitment to instilling high moral standards might be a more effective call to action than the writers’ “sensual revolution,” the pair are certainly to be commended for addressing this incredibly important issue so eloquently. Hopefully, some readers will be convicted and change their ways. The stakes are too high to ignore.
