Wednesday March 31, 2010

DEAR NATIONAL REVIEW: I NEVER THOUGHT IT COULD HAPPEN TO ME! It's nice to know that, even in this age of Tea Parties, conservatives will still clap for a Nanny State when it comes to porn. Anonymous, "a psychologist [!] who lives with her children in Virginia," says "Congress should fund a long-term, multidisciplinary analysis of the effects of porn addiction on marriage and family life. The National Institutes of Health are granted billions of taxpayer dollars for research on a wide variety of public-health problems, and yet pornography addiction is not among them."

If you're one of those rad libs who think swine flu has a better claim on the NIH's attention than porn studies, hear Anonymous' sad story:

By his own account, my husband of 13 years and high-school sweetheart, was first exposed to pornography around age ten. He viewed it regularly during high school and college — and, although he tried hard to stop, continued to do so throughout the course of our marriage. For the past few years he had taken to sleeping in the basement, distancing himself from me, emotionally and physically. Recently he began to reject my sexual advances outright, claiming he just didn’t “feel love” for me like he used to, and lamenting that he thought of me “more as the mother of our children” than as a sexual partner.

Then one morning around 2am he called, intoxicated, from his office to announce that he had “developed feelings” for someone new. The woman he became involved with was an unemployed alcoholic with all the physical qualities of a porn star — bleached blond hair, heavy makeup, provocative clothing, and large breasts. After the revelation, my husband tried to break off his relationship with this woman. But his remorse was short-lived. Within a few months he had moved permanently out of the home he shared with me and our five young children. In retrospect, I believe he succumbed to the allure of the secret fantasy life he had been indulging since his adolescence.

So, to recap: this rightwing scold's husband dumped her for a blonde with big tits who likes to drink. Yeah, what besides a psychological malady could explain that?

UPDATE. Forgot to hat-tip K.Lo, whose pimpage of this article at The Corner offers wet spots of its own:

When I recently went to a press conference for a Witherspoon Institute study on [porn's] social costs, a man walked in, stayed a few, and announced, "I expected to be much more titillated by this than I am." And there we are. It's dangerous stuff...