Rod Dreher: A social conservative who just doesn’t get it

Via Robert Stacy McCain, I found this post by walking oxymoron and closeted cuckoldry fetishist Rod Dreher lamenting the pervasiveness of porn among teens:

Recently I had dinner with a friend who teaches in a private (secular) high school. He mentioned at one point how much he worried about his students, who were heavily into watching pornography. Notice the placement of the comma in that sentence. Porn is so ubiquitous and normalized among the (well-off) kids in his school that it’s considered the usual thing to partake of it. My friend went on to say that the situation was the same at the well-known (and relatively conservative) Christian university he’d attended. Among the male students, he said, “The question really wasn’t, ‘Do you use porn?’ but rather ‘Do you feel guilty about the porn you use?’”

Mr. Dreher has made a shocking, SHOCKING discovery – post-pubescent males have libidos! The horror!

He said he worked in a counselor’s role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

I suppose prostrating yourself before your woman like a frightened, impotent mortal in the face of a capricious god(dess) is your idea of “relat[ing] to women in a healthy way.”

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here. Porn helped make him who he was. After our conversation, I went into the Dallas Morning News online archives, and researched this guy, Greg Goben. He really was a Southern Baptist golden boy, from the time of his youth.

You probably heard about serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy’s jailhouse confession to Dr. James Dobson (who is a psychologist — many people don’t know that) about the role pornography had in shaping the monster he became.

Crunchy Con logic: two rapists used porn, ergo, porn makes men into rapists. Except that it doesn’t. Not that facts should ever get in the way of a good moral condemnation.

But it seems inarguable to me that no good can come of pornography, and whatever weaknesses we struggle with in relation to sexual and emotional health will be amplified by porn. Put another way, can anybody imagine that using pornography makes you a better or more emotionally healthy person?

And this is why nobody takes you seriously, Dreher; because you’re a bloody moron. The only reason pornography exists is to help men get off. Emotional health has nothing to do with it.

I never had any interest in porn, absent looking at a few dirty magazines as an adolescent. It creeps me out. When I was in college, neither I nor most of my close friends were religious, but none of us used porn — or if any of them did, they kept their habits a secret, because they understood it to be shameful.

For a guy named “Rod”, you’re curiously devoid of anything resembling that. Dirty pictures creep you out? I rue the day the reins of Christianity fell into the hands of sackless, sexually dysfunctional misfits like you.

Now, there’s no shame in it in our culture. This teacher’s stories made me think that I need to figure out how to plant seeds in the souls of my children now, to grow within them a sane sense of personal purity and respect for the human body — both their own and those of others — that cause them to turn away from porn when it is presented to them, and to stay away from people who use it. Because in this vile Late-Roman culture in which we live, there’s no way to avoid it. As long as personal computers and the Internet exist, the temptation will always be there.

You can take your kids all the way to Mars, make them memorize Bible verses for hours a day, beat your SWPL-cum-Jesus freak philosophy into their brain-boxes every chance you get – it won’t make a difference. No social conditioning, conservative or feminist, can overcome the power of the human sex drive.

I spent my high school years at a private Catholic academy, a supposed island of morality in a sea of depravity. Despite the fact that Catholic teaching were drilled into our heads every day, I, and every guy I knew used porn. Why? Men in general are horny bastards, and teenage males are the horniest of all. Combine this with the hypergamous mating of modern women, the collapse of marriage, and cheap broadband internet, and porn usage among men is inevitable. The overwhelming majority of men in this country and the West at large either view porn or have viewed porn, and anyone who claims otherwise is not only lying, but insulting the intelligence of anyone with a functioning cerebrum. And for a substantial percentage of men, porn is the only available means of sexual release. Dreher’s blanket condemnation of pornography exposes his lack of knowledge of and disregard for male sexuality.

For the record, I agree with Dreher in that I don’t believe extensive porn usage is symptomatic of a healthy society. Violating yourself to porn promotes mental laziness and perverse ways of thought. The average guy would be better off, physically and mentally, studying game and trying to score with flesh-and-blood women then manhandling his love-wrench to Bangbros three times a day. Thing is, we don’t live in a healthy society. The realities of the modern sexual marketplace mean that porn is not going away, no matter how loudly the religious right brays about “family values.”

I’ll be writing more later on why many conservatives are so ignorant when it comes to sexuality and women, but for now, I’ll offer some ideas to help these guys out. If Rod Dreher and his ilk were serious about this issue, they’d propose solutions that acknowledge the inborn sexual needs of humans. They’d educate their sons on interacting with women, instead of leaving them to navigate the wilderness of modern sexuality on their own. They’d work to repair the rotting, corrupt institution of marriage. They’d propose economic solutions that would allow men to get married and raise families at a younger age. Until this sector of the right can acknowledge the realities of human nature, their opinions on this topic are utterly useless.

And Stacy? Seriously, dude, you’re smarter than this.