Naomi Wolf in Al Jazeera: Blame the Internet!

I had already written off Naomi Wolf’s most recent wave of anti-porn nausea, but every time I turn around, someone new is uncritically reposting it.

In light of Erica Jong blaming the internet for motherhood today in the New York Times, I have to say something about Wolf’s transparently pseudoscientific anti-porn, anti-sex-work stance, especially since Wolf has been working that side of the street since at least 2007, with the same spurious concepts.

If you haven’t caught up on today’s Erica Jong opinion piece in the New York Times, here’s my take on it. Jong thinks younger women are withdrawing from sex and running for motherhood, because the internet is sterile. It’s just one more data point in the anti-internet spasm that’s ripping through our fine nation at the moment. And I’d be tempted to say that Jong’s hostility toward the internet is an artifact of her generation, but I think I’d be wrong.

Naomi Wolf, twenty-one years younger than Jong and six years older than me, showed the same sort of prejudice, and an even more blatant tendency to draw grand conclusions from sketchy information, in her July 2 editorial for Al Jazeera, “Is Pornography Driving Men Crazy?” It keeps getting reposted, and reposted, and reposted, but from the notice on Wolf’s site it appears that Al Jazeera is the original source. Here’s Wolf:

It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways. Some powerful men have long been sexually voracious; unlike today, though, they were far more discreet and generally used much better judgment in order to cover their tracks.

Of course, the heightened technological ability nowadays to expose private behavior is part of the reason for this change. But that is precisely the point: so many of the men caught up in sex-tinged scandals of late have exposed themselves – sometimes literally – through their own willing embrace of text messages, Twitter, and other indiscreet media.

What is driving this weirdly disinhibited decision-making? Could the widespread availability and consumption of pornography in recent years actually be rewiring the male brain, affecting men’s judgment about sex and causing them to have more difficulty controlling their impulses?

…We now know that porn delivers rewards to the male brain in the form of a short-term dopamine boost, which, for an hour or two afterwards, lifts men’s mood and makes them feel good in general. The neural circuitry is identical to that for other addictive triggers, such as gambling or cocaine.

The addictive potential is also identical: just as gamblers and cocaine users can become compulsive, needing to gamble or snort more and more to get the same dopamine boost, so can men consuming pornography become hooked. As with these other reward triggers, after the dopamine burst wears off, the consumer feels a letdown – irritable, anxious, and longing for the next fix. (There is some new evidence, uncovered by Jim Pfaus at Concordia University in Canada, that desensitization may be affecting women consumers of pornography as well.)

[Link.]

A trained social scientist engaging in the kind of generalizations that Wolf and Jong do would look pretty foolish — to me, at least. Not that social scientsts don’t do it all the time; in fact, they practically patented it. But the good ones know that anything like a meaningful model for Clinical Psychology is made up of a combination of subjective information and supportable facts.

In this case, it’s just the same old anti-porn panic.

Wolf’s gig is slightly different than Jong’s; Jong is delivering a cultural commentary based on spurious trend assertions with no social science to back it up, while Wolf is cherry-picking neuroscience research to make a social sciences argument. For this reason, Wolf’s pornography essay is far more insightful, and far more potentially insidious, than Jong’s Times piece.

What Wolf is doing is also mixing up unreferenced science and anecdotal, unlinked information that smacks of moral panic:

“…hardcore pornography’s effectiveness in achieving rapid desensitization in subjects has led to its frequent use in training doctors and military teams to deal with very shocking or sensitive situations.”

[Link.]

Huh? “Frequent” use? Define “frequent,” Ms. Wolf. Define “doctors and military teams.” You mean, like, in medical school? That’s where “most” “doctors” get their “training,” so I would presume if we’re talking about “frequent” use to train “doctors AND military teams” (emphasis mine) we’d be talking about something, you know, specific, rather than an insinuated batch of connections between porn and extreme violence or trauma that seems to have been lifted right out of Videodrome?

I’m not going to say Wolf’s claims are not true, but in this essay they sure do come out of left field. And they certainly seem to rely on the fact that, probably, most readers of Al Jazeera, and readers of this article in general, will not only know nothing about neuroscience and nothing in organized, academic terms about pornography, but will also not be huge military nerds.

And you know what I find when I search that shit about porn being used to desensitize soldiers? Wolf’s essay and commentary on it. And hardcore porn. And commentary on Osama Bin Laden’s porn stash. And “guys in uniforms” video. So I don’t know about its reality or unreality, but gee, it sure would have been helpful if Wolf had honored the fact that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

Or does no anecdotal claim about pornography require a link to back it up, because it’s “just porn”?

I’m not suggesting that “the military” (whose military?) doesn’t train “doctors and military teams” using hardcore pornography — I have no idea. Seriously. I haven’t got the foggiest. I have heard this claim frequently over the years, usually in the same or adjoining paragraphs to claims about the Bilderbergs. It’s standard mind-control conspiracy theory. Is it an urban legend? I don’t know, because it’s so wacky that even Snopes doesn’t have a page on it.

But you’re talking to a pretty big military nerd, and I also write about the porn industry, and I also follow theories of mind control, and to some extent the medical world. And I’ve got a chin-smacking hard-on for dopamine, while we’re at it.

And I also follow pseudoscience. And quite frankly, until I see a fairly credible source for this crew of Men in Black going around with laptops making ER docs and Seal Team Six watch 100 hours of Max Hardcore, Wolf’s assertion smacks of David Icke telling me the world is ruled by lizard people. Sure, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe.

You know what Wolf’s claims sound like? Anti-porn, anti-internet, sex-hating hysteria. It sounds like a moral panic. And it also sounds suspiciously like Wolf is trying to connect the dots between “desensitization” through pornography and the revolting abuses of Abu Ghraib. That, I take personally.

And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. You don’t just get to hurl accusations and, because “it’s just porn,” not get challenged. This “dopamine squirt” thing has risen to a din so loud it makes my own dopamine receptors pack up and board the train for Jersey.

But Jong’s and Wolf’s articles are hindered by the fact that both Jong (in her NYT essay) and Wolf have mixed up ideas about what “Internet sex” is — presumably at least partially because neither of them has it with any great regularity. Wolf uses unspecified cases, presumably of Anthony Weiner, Christopher Lee, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, to claim that this is a cultural trend. But none of those things really go together..

I can only assume she’s referring to Strauss-Kahn, Schwarzenegger, Lee, and Weiner, since she doesn’t bother to mention any specific cases in establishing that this is a trend…rather, incidentally, than catching a clue that Strauss-Kahn may be a fucking rapist, Schwarzenegger may have had sex with his housekeeper, and the anti-Weiner panic may have been an anti-sex hysteria whipped up to turn prissy baby-boomer Democrats on each other, remove one of the House’s most liberal members, and paralyze the party in preparation for yet another Republican assault on the middle class. What do these have to do with each other, unless all men are a predictable glop of humanity who can all be generalized about. When people do that about women, it is, or should be, called sexism. The same should be said when someone generalizes about men with such bizarre, thready connections.

Again, presuming those are the four cases Wolf is thinking of, she’s referencing four cases that have nothing to do with internet porn per se. These things are only not apples & oranges if you don’t know anything about any of them! Rape, domestic extramarital affair, and two cases of male online exhibitionism.

I wouldn’t suggest for a second that Wolf’s concerns about how porn affects men don’t have some basis in reality. Male-female relationships are hugely problematic and, for many, troubling and unsatisfying…they always have been. Add the easy stimulation of internet porn into the mix, and sure, you’re going to get some problems for some people, no question about it.

But Wolf should be ashamed for displaying such a transparently slut-shaming, sex-hating, anti-male stance, and backs it up with the most spurious and incomplete understanding of the same pseudoscience crap every anti-porn freak has been pushing since Judith Reisman made up erototoxins. It’s seeing what you want to see, based on sex shame and squickery…independent of what logical assertions can be supported.

Naomi Wolf should know better.

Image: Hegre Art.