The leading conservative journal Policy Review recently published an article comparing pornography to tobacco. It got so many things wrong I'm tempted to simply ignore the article, but since the publication is relatively prestigious I can't quite dismiss it as random crap.
Pornography is the single most searched-for item on the internet and also the most profitable.
Today’s prevailing social consensus about pornography is practically identical to the social consensus about tobacco in 1963: i.e., it is characterized by widespread tolerance, tinged with resignation about the notion that things could ever be otherwise.
The example of tobacco shows that one can indeed take a substance to which many people are powerfully drawn and sharply reduce its consumption via a successful revival of social stigma.
What might this transformation imply for today’s unprecedented rates of pornography consumption? Perhaps a great deal. For in one realm after another — as a habit, as an industry, as a battleground for competing ideas of the public good — internet pornography today resembles nothing so much as tobacco circa a half-century ago.
