Criticizing porn is not popular, but it’s important. It’s important because pornography does a lot of damage to men, women, to relationships, and to families. Often it’s religious individuals and groups who lead the charge on this topic, so I thought this TEDx talk was particularly interesting because it comes from a man who is not religious (as far as I can tell) and who doesn’t embrace the religious ideals of chastity, monogamy, and waiting for marriage to have sex. His reasons for removing porn from his life, therefore, are kind of the lowest-common denominator, most generic, most widely relatable. The short version: porn kills love.
It’s an insightful and humorous talk, however, and definitely worth the listen. Be forewarned, however, that it does veer into some frank description of sex and pornography. It’s never salacious or disrespectful, but some of his argument for what is wrong with porn involves describing what specifically takes place in porn that is very different from the kind of sex real people have with the ones they love in real life. As a side note, I think being able to talk frankly and directly about sex is an important skill for a social conservative to have. We can’t articulate our views on healthy sexuality in the public sphere if we’re afraid to raise the topic at all. And we can’t articulate these views to our own children if we’re silent, either. Sex is sacred, as the saying goes, but it needn’t be secret.
Email subscribers will have to go to the site to watch the video because videos don’t embed in the email versions of the post for some reason. I’ll try to figure that out.