Letters to the Editor
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100 years ago, people wrote about masturbation the same way
Not everyone has someone to have sex with, you smug fuck. For those of us who currently don't, porn provides a convenient way to alleviate excess tension in a way that, while it may be undignified, is considerably better than the alternative of keeping the sex drive bottled up like a young yeshiva student or a monk. As long as it's tasteful, sensitive, and non-exploitative (check out or for ethically considerate erotica--needless to say, NSFW), there's absolutely nothing wrong with a single person using porn. While I realize that this letter is based around how porn affects relationships, I was really annoyed by the smug, satisfied tone you took to describe porn, as if it were only the purview of bitter married men too emotionally distant to direct their attention where it's supposed to be, their spouse. For many of us, porn is not a drug, it is not a substance, it is not a numbing behavior that serves to isolate us further from our community--it is simply a way of channelling energy that would otherwise be released in a harful manner.
You write "Like crack, it tends to take over, to push out other hungers that tend to nurture the human community by making us dependent on one another. Since we are dependent on each other we must be civil and loving. If we are not dependent on each other then we needn't be civil and loving. We needn't have community and family. That is the way in which any drug breaks down family and community by isolating its user. Porn isolates its users also, meeting their needs outside the social compact."
Substitue "self-abuse" for "porn," and that could have been taken straight out of a Victorian anti-masturbation pamphlet. Obviously you have never experienced firsthand a REAL drug and what it can do to human relationships. Try becoming addicted to heroin and see how that "breaks down family and community by isolating the user." Then you'll learn what compulsive behavior is really like. Right now, you are simply feeding into our culture's compulsive need to pathologicize everything pleasurable, a post-Victorian need to condemn human joy that takes the form of Overeaters Anonymous, NA, Gamblers Anonymous, support groups for "emotion addicts" and all the other various self-help groups that refuse to admit that anyone is healthy. News flash: we are all dependent on something to get through life, whether it's work, love, sex, achievement, money, faith, heroin, or any of the myriad other incentives society offers us in order to keep on playing the game. That's the way it's been through thousands of years, and that's the way it's going to be until we manage to blow each other up. Turning our basic physiological drives into pathological conditions that need treatment is not only foolish, but contributes dangerously to a society of perpetual hypochondria (witness the recent "rise" in such "diseases" as fibromyalgia, ADD, Morgellons Syndrome, and my personal favorite, "chronic fatigue syndrome").