Porn makes you gay

I could never make this stuff up.

Gene Expression: Straight porn makes you gay

Seriously. The original news item is here. In brief, Republican senator Tom Coburn had this to say last Saturday:

“Pornography is a blight,” Schwartz told an audience in a crowded room of the Omni Shoreham hotel. “It is a disaster. It is one of those silent diseases in our society that we haven’t been able to overcome very well. Now, I may be getting politically incorrect here. And it’s been a few years, but not that many, since I was closely associated with pre-adolescent boys, boys around 10 years of age. But it is my observation that boys of that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it.”


Schwartz told the crowd about Jim Johnson, a friend of his who turned an old hotel into a hospice for gay men dying of AIDS. “One of the things he said to me,” said Schwartz, “that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark… he said ‘All pornography is homosexual pornography, because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.”

There were murmurs and gasps from the crowd. “Now, think about that,” said Schwartz. “And if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants! You know, that’s a good comment, it’s a good point, and it’s a good thing to teach young people.”

As the blogger at Gene Expression points out:

Since the 1970s the Religious Right and Feminist Left have oddly paralleled each other, asserting strange ideas about the nature of heterosexual males and their susceptibility to sexual visual stimulus, without bothering much to consult a wide range of men who engage in the behavior in consideration.

As some shameless self-promotion, I'd like to refer anyone interested in this topic to my text on pornography, and on the very topic of the religious right and radical feminism making highly similar, equally ridiculous, judgements on porn that are based on absolutely nothing.

It's frightening that the religious right continues to make these ridiculous arguments that are based on pure nonsense. It's beyond sad that radical feminists fall into the same trap.

(thanks to Kaj Sotala for the link)