Questioning Porn: Whose Morality?
Your May 19 editorial “Questioning Porn” urges Americans to privately ask two simple, critical questions about porn: Is it right? Is it healthy?
The answer to the first question, you seem to suggest, can be found in the new common sense that emerged when these questions were raised about smoking. But while most people now agree that smoking is unhealthy, we did not decide that smoking was wrong. According to your own analogy, it was people having to put up with the obnoxious fumes adjacent to such legal but unhealthy activity that we decided was wrong. But who is having to put up with obnoxious porn? Who is being subjected to secondhand porn against his or her will?
As for the question of health, reliable evidence just doesn’t exist to support a conclusive answer--not even approaching what we know about smoking.
Thomas Robischon
Los Angeles
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Better you should ask such questions about so-called sports like boxing and hunting. I’d rather see people having sex any day than witness either of the aforementioned barbaric activities. Any society that considers the presentation of a pleasurable activity--one indulged in and enjoyed the world over--wrong or unhealthy, while elevating to the level of “good, clean fun” the spectacle of two human beings beating each other bloody and senseless or the killing of innocent creatures, not for survival but amusement, has some seriously twisted values. In this larger context, we should, indeed, ask ourselves: “Is it right? Is it healthy?”
Steven A. Wells
Glendale
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Implying that pornography is not right or healthy places the burden of proof on the wrong side. You should have asked: “Is it wrong? Is it unhealthy?”
No objective research has found pornography damaging to one’s physical or mental health, and “right” and “wrong” are moral terms. Whose definition of morality should we apply? Jerry Falwell’s? Larry Flynt’s?
Forrest G. Wood
Bakersfield
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To compare the porn industry to the Mafia or Big Tobacco is absurd. The Mafia engages in illegal enterprises, and tobacco causes cancer. Pornography is legal and causes nothing more harmful than masturbation. Your analogies are false.
Your hypocrisy, though, is quite genuine. You state that “the real question is not a legal one,” then follow that up with the erroneous comparison to smoking, pointing out, “A new common sense emerged, ultimately codified in laws.” You are, in effect, endorsing censorship to satisfy your own prudishness. Shame on you.
Stephen Lemons
Burbank