I hate porn because I hate child abuse and sex slavery

Just one point that I want to make. While I don't disagree with the overall sentiment and accusations Matt levels at the porn industry, nevertheless, it strikes me how he is not even capable of critiquing exploitation without simultaneously expressing negative attitudes toward women (shocking, I know!). He says women do porn because they want the attention (he can't conceive of economic reasons, or of their hopes that, given the large volume of porn on the internet, people they know won't ever see it). These women are not even bothered at all by bullying. Well then, why do they want to do it? They are defective human beings!  Specifically, they are "psychologically and spiritually tormented." Interestingly, when a guy kills a bunch of people on his college campus (see next post), Matt rejects psychological reasoning. He says mass murderers (men) are rational individuals making purposeful decisions, and we should not discuss their mental health. But when a woman stars in a porn video, there is no end to the psychological and mental defects that Matt is willing to diagnose her with.

Once again, I looked at the comments, and you can see Matt's attitudes toward women bearing its fruit in the fan base he is establishing:

"While on the face of it your comments are valid, it’s not so cut & dried. I spent the first decade or more of my marriage in sexual torment because my wife had zero interest & would just lay there & actually prevent herself from getting aroused (ie lubrication was mandatory).

 Obviously the sex was horrible most of the time & I was deeply hurt & became very bitter.
Furthermore, she tended to come unglued during that time of the month which didn’t help matters.
Masturbation was a way to get some satisfaction & I turned to porn to make it really satisfying.
Another decade later & I view porn in spurts as I have no desire for my wife. Sometimes I’ll go weeks without because my desire is is just generally getting less but I have essentially been conditioned that my wife isn’t the person to have good sex with.

If I had the choice to have it different, I would. I feel bad at times when I view it & would want to be hot for my wife but my point is that porn is sometimes the resultant of & not the cause of marital issues.

 A man has needs & those needs are strong so if his wife chooses to not care, he makes his choices right or wrong-some sleep around on their wife & others go the porn route, however wives aren’t blameless either."

Bravo, Matt. I see you are keeping yourself in good company.


Matt Walsh writes:

I bought a diamond ring for my wife.

I saw it at the store, I didn’t think I could afford it but the woman behind the counter told me it was on sale. She said they had to discount it because most customers are refusing to buy it.

“Why?” I asked.

“Well, because it’s a blood diamond. It was mined in a conflict zone and sold to fund the activities of a brutal warlord. It was probably extracted out of the ground by child slaves. There’s probably a lot of misery, death, rape, and suffering that brought this diamond from a mine in Africa to a jewelery store in Baltimore.”

I was disgusted. I passionately oppose child slavery and violent African warlords, I insisted to myself.

But… Then again… Man, that diamond sure is pretty. And it’s cheap! So affordable! See how it sparkles!

Anyway, it looks really nice on my wife’s hand. Don’t judge me. I don’t endorse or condone all of those bad things; I just chose to potentially help fund them because I enjoy the fruits harvested from those bad things.

Make sense?

Are you convinced?

Me neither.

Honestly, I’m trying to trick you. I wanted to get you on board with the basic premise that we should not knowingly contribute to or condone brutality, rape, and exploitation, even if we enjoy whatever sparkly, attractive pleasures these atrocities might produce.

I wanted you to shake your head in dismay over my callous disregard for these injustices, so that the momentum might keep you shaking your head when I change the subject to a different kind of blood diamond: pornography.

Let me say upfront that I am biased. I hate porn.

I’m a man in modern society, and I still hate pornography. I don’t hate it because I’m some sort of morally righteous saint (far from it); I hate it because I understand it. I hate it because I’m honest with myself about it.

Believe me, I’d prefer not to hate it. I’d rather live in the convenient reality that pornography apologists so unconvincingly attempt to construct — the one where porn is just an innocent bit of fun, and our porn habits exist in some kind of vacuum, completely separate from all of the dark, seedy, repulsive things that fuel the industry.

That’s a fun world. An easy world. A world that requires less energy and thought. I wish that world was more than a fantasy or a rationalization — but it isn’t.

Here on Earth, the situation is more complex and challenging. Here on Earth, we have to deal with stories like this.

Alyssa Funke was a 19-year-old college student. She recently appeared in a porn, and she even more recently hanged herself.



The media has concentrated their coverage on the fact that Funke was ‘cyber bullied’ after she was ‘outed’ as a porn star. Of course, saying someone has been outed as an internet porn star is like saying I’ve been outed as a blogger. My site gets millions of views. I have my picture at the top. I make money from this website. Obviously, I want people to see it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have the picture, I wouldn’t have the site, I wouldn’t have the ads. I’d just keep my opinions to myself, or between myself and those closest to me.

If you don’t want your sexual escapades to be widely known, you probably wouldn’t have them filmed and put on the World Wide Web. The Huffington Post article on this incident breathlessly insists that people who appear in porn often value their ‘privacy.’

Needless to say, a ridiculous claim.

Indeed, privacy is precisely what you don’t want when you star in a porn. The real question is: why? What drives a person to publicly display such intimate things? What compels them to seek attention in this manner?

Police say that none of the ‘bullying’ messages and Tweets even rose to the level of illegal harassment. Funke herself actually took to Twitter to brag of her newfound fame shortly before she committed suicide.

The ‘bullied to the point of suicide’ narrative doesn’t seem to hold up.

But the media runs with it because they’re too cowardly and too dense to get to the heart of the matter. Alyssa Funke tragically took her own life for the same reason anyone does: because she hated herself.

And she appeared in a porn for the same reason.

It’s not that porn stars kill themselves when other people notice that they’re porn stars. It’s that porn stars are psychologically and spiritually tormented, which is why they’re porn stars in the first place.

This is obvious. We all understand this, even if we pretend otherwise. When you watch porn, you are watching desperate people resort to desperate and unhealthy measures. You are literally taking pleasure in their pain. Alyssa Funke was a self-destructive, depressed college student. If you viewed her porn, you viewed a cry for help from a suicidal young woman. Not so fun and innocent anymore, is it?

We jump through many hoops to get around this unavoidable reality. That’s why John Millward, a blogger and amateur porn-researcher, was received with much fanfare last year when he published a study which determined that porn stars only choose that profession because they “like to have sex.” Spectacular deductions, professor, but could there be more to the story? I like to have sex, too, but I don’t do it on camera for millions of strangers to watch. How do you explain that disparity?

Millward also says that the “stereotype” about porn actors and actresses often having a background of abuse and family turmoil is a “myth.”

How did he prove this? By asking them. He debunked the myth by using self-reported data from people who clearly desire to dispel the notion that their industry is kept running by mopping up and exploiting the shattered remains of abused and disordered men and women.

His scientific process consisted of this:

John Millward: “Hey, porn industry, does your business deserve any of the troubling stigmas attached to it?”

Porn industry: “Nope.”

John Millward: “Eureka! Myth debunked!”

Interestingly enough, when you ask someone who has left the business and is no longer financially dependent upon its success, you’ll hear a drastically different story.

Admittedly, it’s hard to conduct an accurate and honest study of porn and porn stars, because any such study would require the accurate and honest participation of the people currently invested in protecting the reputation and fortune of a multi-billion dollar business.

We can, however, turn to psychological science and begin to come to a few basic conclusions.
It is a well established fact that people who engage in risky sexual behavior often had a childhood rife with sexual, physical and emotional abuse. If you want to see one study among the thousands that demonstrates this link, click here.

We also know that starring in porn videos constitutes risky sexual behavior. Just ask the porn star who contracted HIV by having sex with a bleeding, HIV-positive man.

It doesn’t take a detective to connect these dots. There is no ‘myth’ associating broken homes and abuse with porn and prostitution. This is a self-evident, scientifically supported fact.

Pornography, like prostitution (and they’re really the exact same thing), relies on child abuse. Period. Without abuse and neglect, these industries wouldn’t have hardly any workforce at all. And we’re not talking solely about an indirect reliance on child abuse, either.

Child pornography is a multi-billion dollar cash cow. Porn viewers will tell you that they would never seek out child porn, yet they can’t explain how, precisely, they ensure that the participants in the sex acts they searched for on Google are all: A) of age, and B) engaging in this activity in a fully consensual manner.

There’s no way to be sure that the woman is a woman and not a 14-year-old child, and that she’s there of her own accord, and not because of drugs, or because she’s a victim of the massively expansive global sex trade.

Even if you were sure, it still wouldn’t be right. But you’re not. You know that you are not. And this point ought to weigh heavy on your mind. Why is it that Americans are concerned that their sneakers might have been stitched together by a 12-year-old in China, yet so unconcerned that the ‘consensual sex act’ they’re viewing online might actually be a very nonconsensual act of child rape?

The impossibility of discerning between children, and adults and consensual and nonconsensual, should be enough to convince any man (or woman) to try to fight the urge to sift through all of that filth and muck in search of respectable masturbation material.

Or, if not that, then the fact that even consensual porn isn’t really consensual, as the whole industry thrives on abuse and desperation.

Or, if not that, then the fact that most children are first exposed to porn at the age of 11. Considering that porn rewires your brain and changes how you view sexuality and romantic relationships, exposure at such a young age has a devastating impact that we haven’t even begun to understand.

Or, if not that, then the fact that porn causes great damage to current and future relationships. It grooms men to be adulterers, as evidenced by “cheating wives” being one of the top porn search terms in the world.

Or, if not that, then whatever other reason, of the thousands of reasons, that speaks to you when that quiet voice in your head tells you that porn is immoral and shameful.

We’re told to reject that voice, but I think it deserves a fair hearing for once.

That voice — our conscience — tells us that we should hate porn.

We should hate it because we hate abuse, rape, and exploitation.

We should hate it because women like Alyssa Funke need help — not a million wide-eyed, gawking, drooling voyeurs, just out to have an ‘innocent’ and ‘fun’ time on the Internet.