Gen-Z's Pornography Cult

"Gooning," men and autonomy, Christian scholarship, and more in this week's digest.

You may have already read this graphic and disturbing article in Harper’s about what they call a Gen-Z “pornography cult.” Be judicious in deciding whether to read this, as again it is very graphic. (I only skimmed much of it myself).

No one, besides maybe Neil Postman, could have predicted the formation of an international pornography cult. But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality. In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established. Widespread broadband internet had enabled the rise of the so-called tube sites: platforms like Pornhub, which streamed untold numbers of clips free of charge. Then came the smartphones, transforming every toilet stall into a potential porn theater. The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography.

In this earlier stage, if you wanted to watch porn, you still had to actively seek it out. That has since changed. Right as gooners began to solidify as a social force, I could no longer open Instagram without encountering dozens of large-breasted women skipping rope, romping in tank tops, brushing their teeth while drooling erotically. It was the same story on TikTok, the little of it I watched. Twitter was the exception: there I simply encountered uncut, hardcore pornography. We make our own algorithms, I know, but I don’t think I was uniquely deviant. The situation was the same for nearly every straight man I knew. Invariably this content was intended to funnel the viewer to platforms like OnlyFans, where a paid subscription would allow them to spend even more money on special extras like personalized d—k evaluations or nude kitchen-cleaning videos. It seemed increasingly plausible that, faced with this onslaught, some percentage of psychically defenseless men would simply crumple, follow the platforms’ logic, and start watching porn full-time.

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On a near-daily basis over the past decade, opinion columnists have fretted over this state of affairs, primarily over how all of this porn—a fair share of it violent and explicitly misogynist—was affecting the sexual behavior of young men in real life. What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself. This was certainly true for some before the pandemic, but the lockdowns appear to have disastrously accelerated this particular outcome in younger members of Gen Z. I’d been surprised at first to find that out of 107 respondents, 47 claimed to be sexually active in some capacity—roughly 47 more than I’d expected. But a quick crunch of the numbers set things straight. Median age of the sexually active gooner: twenty-seven. Median age of the non–sexually active gooner: twenty-three—i.e., someone in high school or college when the lockdowns began. It was this latter group that, in the Questionnaire, was likeliest to identify not merely as a gooner but also as a “pornosexual.”

When I first heard about this article, my assumption was that the author must have been duped by 4-channers or something. I actually do think some of these people are BS-ing about their habits. At the same time, the author appears to have personally validated enough to know that there’s something real going on.

While I’m personally bullish on Gen-Z, this is yet another example of how a segment of this generation is seriously messed up.

Men and Autonomy

This week I participated in a symposium responding to the chapter on men in Leah Libresco Sargeant’s new book The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. I’ll be posting a podcast with Leah on her book Monday.

In the meantime, my piece is online in Fairer Disputations.

Men are supposed to make their mark in the world, not just have the world make its mark on them. This requires some degree of legitimate autonomy and agency in order to be able to decisively act. It’s important for men’s autonomy not to be denigrated.

At the same time, such autonomy is not without limits. Odysseus was not free to abandon his wife to her suitors (protection). The Greeks had to honor their pledges to fight for the return of Helen. In gathering resources for himself, this comes with the obligation for the man to share them with his family and community (provision). As Gilmore notes of the New Guinea “Big Man,” “The mark of the authentic Big Man is that he is a large-scale net producer, always giving away more than he receives.”

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Provision is also more ambiguous today. Men aren’t typically hunting game except for sport, don’t grow food, etc. Instead, their material provision is also mediated by the marketplace. A man works a job to earn money, which in turn purchases provisioning. She notes how this can encourage society to think of a man’s value in terms of “a recurring direct deposit in his family’s bank account.” The non-material aspects of provision, or the value of relationship with the man himself, are undervalued. This leads to our tolerance for easy or even frivolous divorce. Liberals are loath to acknowledge that the vital role of the father cannot simply be replaced with cash payments from child support or welfare.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Richard Reeves of the American Institute of Boys and Men also contributed a response.

But I think she understates the remaining opportunities for men to demonstrate physical courage in the service of others. “When men choose to step into danger, today it is more often as a shared competition with other men, in sports or foolish stunts,” she writes. “There is no beneficiary of their appetite for risk.” I disagree. I’ve just visited the site of the World Trade Center, where it is very hard not to notice that all 343 of the firefighters who died attempting to save others were men. The reason that men account for more than 90 percent of occupational deaths is that they account for the overwhelming majority of workers in the most dangerous jobs, including among first responders.

We should all be grateful that our culture no longer asks men to put their lives in danger on a regular basis. But we should also not assume that this requirement has inevitably evaporated for all time. After all, in present-day Ukraine, adult men under the age of 60 are not permitted to leave the country. They are expected—obliged, in fact—to stay and fight, while women and children are free to leave.

Christian Study Centers

John Ahern is working to set up a Christian study center at Princeton provisionally called Coverdale House. He wrote an interesting piece on the challenges of Christians scholarship.

The Church is built up by scholarship like this. This is precisely what Christians in the scholarly world ought to be doing: granite-like argumentation, unwavering commitment to truth—even more than that, an assumption that the truth of scholarship will vindicate and harmonize with God’s truth.

But here is the brutal truth: T. C. Schmidt is not as common a phenomenon as one would hope. That is not because Christians are not trying to be good scholars, or are incapable of it (or are not writing enough books about it). I suggest there are two rather practical reasons: first, Christian scholars are not receiving the training necessary. Second, when they do receive the training, they can expect none of the funding necessary. There is, perhaps, a third point as well: even if they receive the training and the funding, they suffer from an overloaded ecclesial information economy, such that the good they offer the Church cannot be absorbed into the bloodstream of her pastors and laity.

Christian ministries have focused on higher education with the primary goal of getting Christian undergrads to stay Christian through their programs. This is not nearly enough. We must also form future scholars. In other words, we must form graduate students. After all, they will be the ones who, in 10 years’ time, will be forming the undergraduates. In 20 years’ time, they will be publishing the monographs that define whole scholarly conversations.

Click over to read the whole thing.

Best of the Web

Institute for Family Studies: Couples Around the World Who Met In Real Life Are Happier Than Those Who Met Online

Institute for Family Studies: It’s Time to Push Back Against the Glamorization of Polyamory

Institute for Family Studies: A Family-Friendly Community Offers Affordable Family Fun

WSJ: The Economy That’s Great for Parents, Lousy for Their Grown-Up Kids

Vulture: ‘I Became the Jubilee Girl’ - A piece about online debate shows.

Charlie Kirk’s death seems to be having a galvanizing rather than chilling effect on online debate. These shows and the slop they spawn may be completely futile as intellectual exercises, but as entertainment they’re the perfect dumping ground for the culture’s collective Schadenfreude and our desire to hear someone, even if they are an anonymous college student, or conversely a man who despises the very idea of college, voice our preferred version of the truth. A recent eight-hour stream of the Whatever podcast included 15 minutes where the guests were asked about the supposed “celebration” of Kirk’s murder before pivoting to the usual topics: whether you can be racist against white people or sexist toward men, the definition of rape, and one of Kirk’s favorite leading questions, “What is a woman?” For the entirety of the stream, a framed photo of Kirk presided over the head of the table.

NYT: Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street? (gift link). Warning: This is a very disturbing story with graphic photos. This is a reality of what blue governance is allowing in America. The federal government should put a stop to this ASAP.

New Content and Media Mentions

New this week:

• The Catholic Model for a Post-Protestant America - Early 20th-century Catholics built a thriving parallel world of parishes, schools, and charities to survive a hostile culture

• In Elevating Dependence, Don’t Denigrate Men’s Autonomy

• This week’s podcast is with Mark David Hall on state laws and religious liberty.

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