32. How To Be A Person -- Everything is Porn
The Newsletter for Friday August 23, 2024
Porn is no longer relegated to sex acts. If the definition of a porn compulsion is an inability to stop using it (and let’s face it, we’re not just passively watching porn) then porn is also the way we interact with social media, dating apps and the biggest streamer in the world, YouTube. If you’re swiping and you’ve thought to yourself, “I’m 30 minutes closer to the grave and I have nothing but shame and self-loathing to show for it,” it’s porn. Swiping up and down, left or right = pornography.
Comparison porn
Trauma porn
Food porn
Car porn
Cute animal porn
Shame porn
Nothing is worse than porn porn.
I subscribe to a newsletter called Culture Reframed which advocates for greater measures in the U.S. to protect children from pornography. The newsletter is a pipeline of bad news, statistics that will leave you hopeless and reports from the front lines of advocacy that are all too familiar. Like “For young people today, pornography is the de facto sex education. It’s a scary realization, but when porn is more prevalent in society than comprehensive sex ed curriculums, there’s really no way around it.”
This describes growing up in Ford Nation. Dougie repealed Kathlyn Wynn’s progressive sexual and health education curriculum and turned back the hands of time to the last millennium as a political move. This government’s regressive policies are transferring a previous generation’s hang-ups, prejudices and lack of experience as legislation to their children. Thanks mum and dad and the wealthy bully in charge and organized religion. Clearly, you know better.
So instead of learning about sex, kids learn about how sex workers perform sex in front of the camera. That’s like banning math class and instead the teacher just plays Good Will Hunting over and over again and calls the section “Algebra with Matt Damon”.
Performance can teach us many things but it is no replacement for things like sexual health education. Just like watching Tim Toks on yoga, cooking or My Little Pony is no replacement for living a life. The pornification of everything has happened. People think blowjobs must include choking. They also think going to a movie and looking at their phone at the same time is being a good audience member.
What do we do about this? Well, using my two children as the world’s smallest and least representative sample size, I can tell you I’ve had some luck with making their smart phones dumb (no internet), and placing major restrictions on screen time (6 hours a week). I treat them and myself like addicts. Practicing healthy habits and regulation is key.
Hi and welcome to another edition of Let Me Tell You How to Live your Life.
We read together, we read to each other, we watch movies and sports. But we do not go off to our separate rooms and stare at our devices. We don’t bring devices out to dinner. The price of admission for someone else cooking, serving and cleaning means you have to learn to sit there and make conversation with boring adults. You better get used to it. The world is lousy with them.
We do this because we know ourselves to be, at times, compulsive, helpless animals, governed by impulse and habit. And it’s no big deal. My kids are used to it. They aren’t jonesing for their devices purely because they’ve been acclimatized. Seriously, if I can parent like this, anyone can.
The upside to being so flawed is if you can try-on a touch of self-awareness there’s a lot you can learn. I’m talking to you Dougie.
I wonder what his search history looks like.
Doug Ford’s Search History
