Is Porn Adultery? Only If You Want It to Be

I'm generally a fan of the direction The Atlantic has taken under editor in chief James Bennet. Before he arrived, the magazine had a tendency to take its readers' interest for granted, presenting one daunting, magisterial survey after another on Big Important Topics. Bennet has upped the sexiness considerably without losing much of the smarts, leading with punchy, polarizing pieces like "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and "Why Obama Matters."

But every so often, the new Atlantic, in its haste to provoke, stumbles into incoherence. That's what happened with Lori Gottlieb's much-hated piece on why women should lower their romantic standards, and it happened again in the October issue with Ross Douthat's essay on why watching pornography ought to be considered a form of infidelity.

Douthat's argument is as follows: First, that porn in the digital age is different in kind from what came before -- more realistic, more personalized, more interactive. Innovations like user-generated porn move the genre from the realm of fantasy into the realm of the everyday, even as the social-networking phenomenon blurs the line between "real" and "virtual" existence. In other words, porn consumers are getting more and more immersed in the experience.

Meanwhile, more people are watching more porn than ever before as it becomes easier and cheaper to discreetly access a limitless archive of images and video. Pre-internet, looking at porn was an occasional activity of a minority of men; now it's something virtually all of them do on a regular basis. So to the extent it represents a moral danger, it's one that can no longer be safely ignored.

But it's in demonstrating that porn is a moral danger that Douthat's logically-confused arguments fail to persuade. Douthat quotes the sex-advice writer Dan Savage as typifying the culture's increasingly blasé attitude toward porn and lack of sympathy for those women (mostly) who are bothered by their partners' porn habits. But if he were a regular reader of Savage's widely-syndicated column, or a listener of his excellent podcast, he'd know a favorite Savage maxim: "Consent is the magic ingredient" -- ie., it's an element that, when present, can turn even the most seemingly violent or humiliating bit of bedroom kink into an act of love and devotion.

But consent seems to feature nowhere in Douthat's moral scheme, which is structured entirely around Douthat's own Victorian intuitions about what is or isn't "decent." He notes in passing that a majority of women are "neutral or even positively disposed" to their partners' porn habits. Where, then, does he get off (pardon the expression) telling these perfectly well-adjusted women they are, in fact, unknowing victims of spousal perfidy? Aren't women capable of deciding for themselves what should and shouldn't upset them?

Similarly, Douthat suggests that watching X-rated films in one's basement rather than in a theater is a more acute betrayal of one's spouse because home viewing is more "intimate." But wouldn't most women, given the choice, want their husbands to masturbate at home and not in a public venue? Whose feelings are we concerned for here, if not the wife's?

Douthat says widespread porn consumption risks "universalizing" a "sort of degradation." Who's being degraded, exactly? Plenty of adult film actors say they find their work fun and rewarding, not shameful. As for the do-it-yourself pornographers, surely feeling a little pleasant degradation is exactly what they're after. Who is Douthat to tell them they're wrong for desiring that?

Douthat's essay will no doubt accomplish its goal of prompting lots of reader mail and blog reactions like this one. (His blog posts > on the subject have already drawn scores of comments.) But there are many ways to provoke. Dressing up a poorly thought-through bit of moralizing in fancy language and printing it in a magazine known for clear reasoning is, unfortunately, one of them.