Damon Linker thinks it’s basically self-evident that every parent would be horrified to learn that one of their children works in the pornography industry, and that seems intuitively true. It’s true in my case. It’s probably true for almost every parent I know. But Linker should try a slightly different thought experiment. How would you feel to learn that your child is gay or lesbian? Would you be angry? Disappointed? Fearful for their safety and happiness? Some combination of these and other emotions?
I think the truth is that most people don’t want the burden of homosexuality for their children, but an increasing number of people primarily want their children to be themselves and to be accepted for being themselves. For them, learning that their child is gay is perhaps like learning that they want to be a painter. It isn’t what they envisioned and it’s not going to be an easy or necessarily lucrative career. Why not do something safer and surer, like go to law school? Yet, ultimately, most of us want our children to be happy and if they have to follow their muse, we’ll be accepting of that.
Pornography still has a huge stigma attached to it and even accepting parents would probably be unhappy to tell their friends that their son or daughter is in porn. Moreover, unlike homosexuality, doing porn is still a choice. But there are an increasing number of people who don’t have a problem with their children doing pornography, perhaps because they did it themselves. In their world, the power of this stigma has been largely overcome. We don’t have to agree with them, but we shouldn’t deny that they exist.
Finally, from my own perspective, while it’s true that I don’t want my son to do pornography, I’d be equally devastated if he decided to have a career issuing pay day loans or swindling the elderly out of their money. There are countless disreputable ways to make money legally in this country and many more ways to criminally rip people off. What I care about most is that my son not pursue any of those careers.
I think it’s true that people still have an idea of what’s noble and what is base, but I don’t think this involves the same amount of self-denial as Linker asserts. People are growing more tolerant of other people’s behavior even to the point of not disagreeing with it as much as they used to. In a real sense, the way people perceive right and wrong is shifting, especially on the sexual plane.
Middle-class Americans are hilarious when they talk theoretical ethics in an age of intentional and policy-driven high unemployment.
You can get down to the “angels dancing on a head of a pin” scholasticism if you contemplate the choice of working as a cashier for one of Art Pope’s Maxway stores or in a paper mill for the Koch brother’s Georgia-Pacific or for an oil field job in the Bakken shale region.
Personal ethical reflection, like personal piety, has become an excuse for avoiding the social action required to fix an increasingly unethical and unjust society.
And it is as time-consuming and unproductive as the long “diversity of tactics” discussions in Occupy general assemblies.
But inaction seems to be the purpose of progressivism these days.
I find myself agreeing with this libertarian writer that Andrew Sullivan has:
link
When it comes to prostition, my position changes because the power dynamics are clearly different there than in porn.
Not that I want prostitution illegal, I think it should be decriminalized, but not legalized. In fact some research shows that legalization has all the same problems as making it illegal.
“We’re living through a libertarian moment”? Fuck that. Look at this nonsense:
Does he really think libertarians can claim credit for the accomplishments of liberals and progressives? Because if you support gay marriage, but don’t think dismantling the government is the solution to every conceivable problem, you are not a libertarian but a liberal.
While I support decriminalization of porn and do not support discrimination or shaming of people who work or have worked in it, there’s no question that I would not want my son or daughter to participate. I agree that there are many other things that I wouldn’t want my child to do, such as make money by stealing or hurting others. But the fact that sex, something that is not necessarily harmful in any way, shows up as base when the motives are money rather than love indicates that I (and Boo for that matter) continue to hold onto some sort of traditional sense of things.
First things first, Linker is an idiot and I waste precisely zero fucks a day on what he horks up as “thought.”
Given the question as posed, back in Denmark there is a thriving porn industry nestled in the bosom of a country with six million inhabitants. If one of your cousins is not in business then you are something of an oddity, a fact easily incorporated into the nation’s famous disdain for judgmental attitudes.
If you want to get freaky, go to Iceland where they now have an app to guard against getting drunk (very popular) and hooking up (very popular) with a relative (easy to do in a nation of 250K, 125K of whom live in the one “big” city).