Dr. Laura on Pornography
Posted by Danielle Bean in News on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 9:30 AM
Let me begin by telling you that I love Dr. Laura Schlessinger.
I love her no-nonsense approach to relationships, her emphasis on family values, and her insistence upon personal responsibility. In fact, her book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands
But all of the admiration I have for this woman only exacerbates my disappointment with her today.
In a recent blog post, she takes on the topic of children viewing inappropriate sexual images in checkout lines at the grocery store and shopping mall window displays. I was right there with her until she threw in the topic of pornography use among adults.
A recent female caller complained that her boyfriend occasionally looked at some photos or videos of naked women on the Internet. It is unbelievable to me that, lately, there is such hysteria about men viewing naked women or male/female sexual encounters. Did somebody just discover that men are very interested in sex and are visually stimulated by viewing women’s bodies?
Of course, Internet porn can be a problem, particularly when it becomes compulsive and a substitute for real-life intimacy, or self-medication for emotional problems. However, much of the time, it is just a curious male having a stimulating moment ... There is a huge difference between “casual,” and “compulsive.”
The fact that she poo-poos her listener’s gut reaction to the evil of pornography and dismisses it as “a curious male having a stimulating moment” tells me that she is seriously lacking understanding of human sexual morality. I did not think this was true of Dr. Laura.
Of course I don’t expect Dr. Laura to espouse Catholic teaching, but as a Jewish woman who wrote a book titled The Ten Commandments: The Significance of God’s Laws in Everyday Life
The rest of her blog entry, however, makes me think that perhaps Dr. Laura does know these things, but fails to make the connection on an adult level. She goes on to say the following about children viewing sexual images:
These images tell your children that sexuality, nudity, their bodies, and intimacy are just “everyday stuff”—no big deal, certainly not private, and definitely not special. Is that the lesson you want them to learn?
What I want to know is this:
If sexuality is not “everyday stuff” and if sex is a “big deal,” “private,” and “definitely special,” shouldn’t we expect grown men and women to behave as if it is? And isn’t the casual use of pornography for a “stimulating moment” a blatant contradiction of those kinds of values?
Dr. Laura has never been afraid to take an unpopular stand. I’m hoping and praying that her take on the casual use of pornography just wasn’t well thought through—and that she’ll reconsider her words.
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