On December 12, 2024, The New York Times published a piece titled “It’s Time to Talk About Pornography, Scholars Say.” It cited a sobering 2023 survey showing that almost three-quarters of American adolescents under seventeen have viewed pornographic materials.
Much of the piece talked about the harmful, misleading and unrealistic nature of indecent literature, photographs and film. It held out little hope for the future. After all, attempts to control it have largely proven futile. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will only add to its dangers.
While the paper admits pornography might have some harmful effects, it is far from making a moral judgment or declaring it sinful. It remains a “concern,” not a crisis.
Arguing that Pornography is Harmless, 1964
This article is not unusual. Many journals talk about the dangers of pornography. The distinctive feature is that it appeared in the Times. For decades, the “gray lady” has prided itself on its permissive attitudes. Indeed, as the “sexual revolution” first broke out in the sixties, the NYT carried its banner.
In fact, one reason that anti-pornography efforts failed is that The New York Times often made light of them. It argued that any such problem only existed in closed minds. For example, consider a short quotation from “Pornography and the Censor,” which the NYT published on April 12, 1964.
“To be sure, there will always be some adolescents…with an over‐developed interest in sex. So long as their experimental bent does not injure others, especially other children, they can be left to find their own hard way to normal life and interests.”
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Thus, the ne plus ultra of American journalism blithely asserts that most youngsters would ignore pornography and that the remaining few would be unharmed by it. To the folks near Times Square, the real danger lay elsewhere.
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“It is the spirit of absolutism that is the greatest enemy of a liberal civilization.”
This single column from 1964 is not alone. The NYT has had a lot to say about pornography over the last sixty years. Searching the NYT’s online archives for “pornography” reveals hundreds—perhaps thousands—of such articles. Almost all conveyed an anti-religious, pro-sexuality bias. What follows is a sampling.
Arguing that Pornography is Beneficial, 1973
In July 1973, the paper carried a piece by Anthony Burgess, a novelist and “distinguished professor of literature” at the City College of New York. The article’s title summed up his attitude and that of the NYT, “Pornography: ‘The Moral Question is Nonsense.’”
In it, the author discourses on the nature and necessity of freedom.
“[W]riters and film makers must be free to do what they will…. Freedom is always a terrible responsibility, but no human being may shirk it. To leave it to others to decide what is good or bad for us is sinful abdication of a human right and a human duty.”
By such a standard, pornography might even be a positive good. To enforce the law’s artificial limits is to violate humanity itself. At worst, pornography is a necessary evil. Allowing its corrupting nature into society is preferable to stifling artistic capacity.
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Those who endured high school and college campuses during the seventies heard a lot of this pretentious verbiage. Rendered to its core, it merely restates the permissive code of the age. The NYT and Mr. Burgess chose to promote a ubiquitous national adolescence.
Arguing that the Fight Against Pornography is Futile, 1985-1986
By 1985, the harms of pornography had become apparent, even to many who had accepted the attitudes of the seventies. In May 1985, Ronald Reagan’s Attorney-General, Edwin Meese III, convened a new panel to examine the issue. Its leader was Arlington County, Virginia Chief Prosecutor Henry Hudson, who had made a name for himself rooting out pornography from that D.C. suburb.
Eleven months later, the NYT reported that the pornography commission was split as its deadline drew near. Barry Lynn of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the NYT’s “go-to” sources, pronounced his own vindication.
“This commission is starting to fall apart…. This just proves our point. Individual taste dictates how you feel about pornography and whether you should use it.”
When the report was finally released on May 27, 1986, Mr. Lynn was delighted. He based his reasoning on the fact that it contained examples of the material that it considered harmful. For the NYT, he adopted a puerile, sneering tone.
“The explicit nature of several sections should guarantee that this report will be one of the hottest-selling Government publications in history…. Although I personally find much of the material in this volume highly offensive, I would nevertheless defend absolutely the Federal Government’s right to publish it.”
The Internet and Pornography, 2000-2001
By the turn of the millennium, arguments over pornography focused less on books and magazines and more on the rapidly developing Internet. Major arguments centered around the new technology’s universal nature. A computer cannot assess the age of the eyes staring at its screen.
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On November 12, 2000, the NYT opposed “A Misguided Pornography Bill” that would require schools to place filtering software on school computers. Their argument centered around the idea that such software would filter out too much.
A year later, the issue was more theoretical. In 1957, the Supreme Court set three standards for determining if material was pornographic. One was whether or not that particular item violated “contemporary community standards.” That phrase was always problematic, but it acknowledged that the people of New York City could view such matters differently than, say, those of Dothan, Alabama. The Court refined the idea in the 1973 case of Miller v. California, but that did not end the controversy.
The Internet complicates any such evaluation to the breaking point. The computer cannot evaluate its user’s community or its prevailing attitudes. The argument goes that the Internet makes the entire world into a single “community.” The NYT’s November 30, 2001 article quoted a spectrum of “experts,” most of whom shared the opinion of Hofstra University Law School Professor Eric Friedman. “It would be great if the Net finally shoved Miller over the questionable doctrinal edge on which it is teetering. The longer and hard it falls, the better.”
Connecting both Internet situations is a common attitude. As in the sixties and seventies, the Times concludes that too much protection is worse than no protection at all.
A Deep Influence on American Culture
For decades, the NYT and its collaborators in the so-called mainstream media have repeatedly told Americans that pornography presents no real problem. Those opposing it are either stupid, insane or would-be theocrats. The Times ignored soaring rates of what used to be called illegitimacy, divorce, and sexually related criminal activity of all sorts. Evidence never dissuaded them. Their permissive ideology governed their coverage and, through their influence, the entire society.
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Is The New York Times signaling a change in philosophy? Do they finally recognize that a pornography-saturated society causes real problems? Maybe, but there is ample room for doubt. A single article does not necessarily imply a significant philosophical change. Pornography has fed the leftist agenda for far too long and far too well for them to abandon it willingly now.
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