In Is Pornography Adultery?, in The Atlantic Monthly for October 2008, Ross Douthat asks whether married men looking at porn on the Internet are committing the moral equivalent of adultery.I'll file my response here in my "Music Etcetera" blog, since looking at porn on the 'Net qualifies as a kind of "home entertainment" (maybe).
Douthat's contention is that Internet porn viewing is much closer to an act of adultery than we might initially think. The fact that the process is mediated by a stream of digital pixels across a network connection does not separate it all that much from paying a prostitute to watch her perform a sex act in a hotel room, says Douthat. If that's cheating on your wife, then watching the same sort of performance across an Internet connection is too, right?
Or, if not, why not?
Douthat says that "in moral issues, every distinction matters." And there is a distinction, it seems to me, in the fact that a hotel room encounter is face-to-face. On the Internet, there is no encounter, period.
Adultery has to be face-to-face, I'd say, or at least skin-to-skin. Watching porn doesn't necessarily rise to the level of adultery.
Even so, the real question remains: If a husband looks at porn, is it a breach of marital faith and trust?
And the answer to that is: if the wife says it's a breach, then, yes, it is a breach.
Breaches of faith are non-negotiable. That is, there is no basis for him, the porn-avid husband, to say, in effect, "Honey, if I agree to do this, that, and the other, will you agree to let me look at porn?" No matter how big a sacrifice doing-this-that-and-the-other may represent to him, it can never offset a fundamental breach of marital trust in her eyes.
Accordingly, looking at porn is never a "right" that he can claim he has, as a man or as a husband. He has no "right to look at porn," unless she agrees that it's not a fundamental breach of marital faith and trust.
If she does say that it's a fundamental breach, then, for that marriage, looking at porn becomes the moral equivalent of adultery.
This attitude differs from Douthat's in that he would have porn viewing be absolutely the equivalent of adultery, or not, depending on how you argue morally. If the moral argument he presents to the effect that porn viewing is adultery is accepted as correct, then all porn viewing by married men is adulterous.
From that perspective, the wife's views, should they happen to be broad-minded, don't matter.
Douthat cites studies showing that a hefty percentage of women are broad-minded about porn use:
About a third of the women [surveyed] described the porn habit as a form of betrayal and infidelity. But the majority were neutral or even positively disposed to their lover’s taste for smut, responding slightly more favorably than not to prompts like “I do not mind my partner’s pornography use” or “My partner’s pornography use is perfectly normal.”
I object to a moral stance such as Douthat's which finds porn use occupies an invariably too-close-to-adultery position on a continuum with adultery at its end point. One reason is the it's-not-skin-to-skin argument I made earlier. Another is that, as I say, the stance ignores the attitude of the woman most involved: the wife. Like many moral absolutes, it's stealthily patriarchal: it "protects" the wife, even if she doesn't feel she needs this particular kind of protection.
A third reason is that Douthat's absolutist stance is, perhaps unwittingly, closet relativism. It skirts an important question: is porn use immoral in and of itself? That is, shouldn't the view of the (in my case Roman Catholic) church that porn use is absolutely sinful be the controlling one here?
Your religious affiliation may differ, but the question is equally valid. Is porn use a breach of religious faith? Does God forbid it?
My church says God forbids porn use, masturbation, premarital and extramarital sex, as well as artificial birth control, abortion, and homosexual acts.
Douthat notes that Jesus of Nazareth said, “I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Jesus lived in a different age. I'd say that the attitude each of us men, married or not, takes toward that adjuration or the various pronouncements of religion regarding sex is, in this day and age, a personal matter. If a man is unmarried, such that the question of his wife's trust doesn't arise, he can choose. He can commit "lust in his heart," or not, and suffer the consequences, if any.
As long as what he does does not exploit unwitting or unwilling adults, is not coercive in any way, does not involve children, does not violate marital trust, is not physically harmful or abusive, does not become an addiction, etc., etc., etc., it's entirely a matter of private conscience.
And, yes, my position does imply that sexual morality changes, era by era, by the way. But that's a topic for a whole other discussion.
At any rate, I don't think a moral argument such as Douthat's to the effect that porn use occupies an absolutely "wrong" position on a continuum of imaginable marital offenses can possibly work. Continua are intrinsically relativistic. You can't be both a relativist and an absolutist.
On the other hand ... if a man holds himself out as a paragon of traditional religious virtue, sexual and otherwise, but looks at porn, then whether he is married or not, he's a hypocrite.
I don't mean anybody has to place ads in the paper saying, "I masturbated today" or "I had premarital sex" or "I'm gay." Such things are no one else's business. But if a main rails against such behavior on Sunday and does it on Monday through Saturday, he's a liar.
'Nuff said about that.
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