Tuesday, January 30, 2007

The pornography debate

Ezra Klein has entered into a little dust-up with Ross Douthat, who works at the Atlantic and writes a right-of-center blog called The American Scene. The debate concerns pornography, not a normal topic for either of them, but they range pretty widely on their blogs. At issue, mostly, is Klein's contention that the Girls Gone Wild franchise -- and it is a Hefneresque franchise, complete with merchandising, private planes and champagne to-dos -- is sexually and economically exploitative.

Douthat doesn't disagree, but replies with sarcasm:

Yes indeed -- thank God that regular, all-American porn doesn't have anything to do with rape or drugs or pressured consent or economic exploitation. It's a shame that bad apples like [Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur] Joe Francis have to go and ruin a perfectly unproblematic industry.

I'm not exactly sure where Douthat is going with that line of argument, since saying porn at large is an ugly enterprise hardly contradicts the claim that Girls Gone Wild is part of the problem. But they both have a point (the same one), since porn is so obviously a case of, at best, coerced consent, in which money is the most coercive factor, followed by drugs and/or alcohol. Acknowledging that it won't be stopped isn't reason to point out that it should be. [UPDATE: Last sentence is sic, given Jan's post above.]

Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:26 PM

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