Porn is a great way to shoot your marriage in the head

By Jonathon Van Maren

With the recent implosion of Anthony Weiner’s marriage to Hillary Clinton confidante Huma Abedin after his serial cheating managed to finally wreck more than his career, an unlikely figure came out to condemn pornography’s impact on marriages: former Playboy model Pamela Anderson. In a column in the Wall Street Journal titled “Take the Pledge: No More Indulging Porn,” Anderson and Rabbi Shmuley Boteach warn that pornography is poison:

We are a guinea-pig generation for an experiment in mass debasement that few of us would have ever consented to, and whose full nefarious impact may not be known for years. How many families will suffer? How many marriages will implode? How many talented men will scrap their most important relationships and careers for a brief onanistic thrill? How many children will propel, warp-speed, into the dark side of adult sexuality by forced exposure to their fathers’ profanations?

Anderson and Boteach have discovered what anti-porn activists have been saying for quite some time: The best way to shoot your marriage right in the head is to look at pornography. Canada’s National Post published an article titled “Till porn do us part? New study finds that married couples who watch porn double their risk of divorce:”

In case you were already worried about your spouse discovering your late night taste for porn when he or she isn’t around, here’s another reason to panic: according a to a new study called “Till Porn Do Us Part?” by the American Sociological Association, married couples who watch porn are twice as likely to get divorced then those who don’t.

Not to mention, women who start watching porn are three times as likely to split. However, quitting porn altogether only lowers the risk of divorce for women, not men.

Shocking, isn’t it, that welcoming thousands of naked strangers into a marriage does not make a marriage stronger. The mainstream media is starting to get the picture: pornography wrecks everything. Even the New York Times published a column last month called, “It’s O.K., liberal parents, you can freak out about porn:”

In addition to making pornography hard to contain, the internet is making it weirder and weirder. Intellectual property theft and the flooding of the market by amateur sex tapes has cut into producers’ profits; they can compete with bootleggers and Aunt Fannie and Uncle Bob’s home videos only by coming up with more extreme scenarios.

In an essay last week in the online journal Aeon, the journalist Mark Hay lays out how the industry uses data collection to discover and satisfy the most outré desires. “You can boot up Pornhub, xHamster or any other popular porn tube site that collects videos from around the web, and there’s a decent chance that you’ll see a moving thumbnail of a topless girl in a diaper,” writes Mr. Hay, or “some other fetish you used to have to scour to the dark edges of the net to find.” The fetish that’s trending right now, Mr. Hay told me when I called him, is necrophilia — “artificial snuff films.”

Healthy stuff, right? The fact is that porn is warping sexuality, spurring sexual violence, and destroying families. I had one teenage girl come to me after a high school presentation on pornography and tell me that her dad would sometimes use the computer in her room to watch pornography, and when she found out no one would believe her. This was her father—the man she wanted to respect the most. Those kinds of discoveries can never be unseen.

When the sheer poisonousness of pornography can be agreed upon by a pro-life activist, a rabbi, a former Playboy model, the National Post, the New York Times, the Republican Party, and feminist academics, perhaps its time to start realizing that we need to purge porn from our lives, our families, our communities, and our countries.