Pride and Prejudice and Porn

by Mark T. Mitchell

posted April 27, 2011

Excerpt:
Indeed, my wife and I once visited friends who took us to the campus of the respectable private university where the husband teaches. Our friends thought the kids might enjoy the billiards and foosball in the student union building. Our plans quickly changed when we realized a young man was watching porn on the big screen television in the public area. Where once consumers of porn parked in alleys and scurried through dark doorways in seedy parts of town, today pornography is merely another consumer choice in the litany of available choices. I’m not sure if I was more surprised by the fact that pornography was so publicly visible or that this young man apparently felt no shame....

...In a pornographically saturated culture, the sexual imaginations of boys and girls will be shaped in ways that lead to a variety of unhealthy attitudes toward sex including, not surprisingly, a coarsening of the relations between men and women and the temptation to look upon members of the opposite sex as merely objects of sexual gratification. That these habits of mind would lead to a culture of hook-ups and rape is quite unsurprising.the rest -Excellent! image

Admittedly, Austen’s world is idealized, yet consider this: who would you prefer your daughter to bring home? 1) a young man whose sexual imagination has been formed by Jane Austen along with Homer, Virgil, The Song of Solomon, Dante, and Shakespeare or 2) a young man who has spent the last ten years of his life fantasizing about women whose images he has objectified and consumed through pornography? Who will make a better husband? A better lover? A better father? That so many of our young men are being shaped by pornography does not bode well for our young ladies or for our society as a whole. If we are witnessing the passing of the gentlemen, there is much to lament. Although the path is difficult and the outcome uncertain, perhaps it’s time for the gentleman to stage a comeback.