For whatever reason, Ross Douthat has spent a fair bit of time making the blogosphere scratch its head on the porn issue. He’s put up a blog post linking to various things he’s written on it, including an article for the /Atlantic/ proper. I takes a bit of work to figure out what his position is–he speaks of “betrayals” and “what counts as a breach of marital trust,” but what if your partner doesn’t mind? This post makes it sound like he’s only defending “no porn” as a reasonable request, but in the /Atlantic/ article he’s clearly horrified to learn a lot of women don’t mind men using pornography (like Kerry Howley). The question, he says, is “what sort of people we aspire to be,” and after setting up an account of a porn-friendly utopia, ends the article by declaring “All we have to give up to get there is our sense of decency.”

Let’s humor the “reasonable request” angle for a moment. The definition of “reasonable request” differs from person to person, so that I don’t think it makes sense to argue about the fine points of what one is. People should look for a partner with preferences reasonably in tune with their own, and be willing to negotiate a little. Some broad rules work, notably “don’t make a request you wouldn’t reciprocate,” but even that’s a rule of thumb: a violation might be worth tolerating if you like the general situation a lot, and there are inherently asymmetrical yet beneficial arrangements we need to accommodate (one person works longer hours, one spends more time taking care of the kids, to cite a banal example).

For myself, I’m confident of my ability not to look at porn; if a girlfriend said “I don’t feel comfortable with you looking at internet porn” I’d say “I won’t.” I’m not so confident of my ability not to masturbate; if a girlfriend said “I don’t feel comfortable with you masturbating” I’d say “what if we pretend I don’t?” Maybe all else being equal, I’d be better off aspiring to be the sort of person who doesn’t masturbate, but it’s not worth the effort.

The idea behind the “all men look at porn” argument must be that most men are with porn where I am with masturbation. I worry, though, that this argument is misleading, and partly benefits porn users by exaggerating how difficult it is for a woman’s no-porn preference to be fulfilled. (Don’t want to be too hard on the porn users, though, as I think women who don’t like porn etc. sometimes play similar games.)

But anyway, back to Douthat’s horror and women who don’t mind: his position has to be like Leon Kass’ position on licking ice cream: even when everyone is happy with the situation, it still does some intangible harm. That position isn’t as crazy as I just made it sound: many would feel the same way about the man who wanted to do nothing but play push pin, or have pleasure delivered by electrodes, or enter Robert Nozick’s experience machine. It’s unfortunate that he won’t come out and say it, though.