Today’s idea: “The public moral status of tobacco half a century ago is strikingly similar to that of pornography today,” a scholar writes. Like tobacco once was, Internet pornography is “widely accepted as an inevitable social fact,” for better or worse. But as with tobacco, that could change.
Flickr Naughty stuff.Internet | Writing in Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution wonders if the “prevailing social consensus about pornography” will crumble in the long run much the way acceptance of tobacco eroded after the Surgeon General’s landmark 1964 “Report on Smoking and Health.”
The politics are different today — support for a laissez faire approach is strong on the left (including some feminists) instead of the right — yet that support seems “on a collision course with the empirical reality of pornography’s harms,” she writes.
So despite what she calls today’s “sophisticated consensus about the harmlessness of Internet pornography,” Eberstadt says, it’s not hard to imagine, in light of smoking’s comeuppance, “a future consensus that casts a far colder eye” on the business. [Policy Review]
More Recommended Reading:
- What Would Happen if Texas Seceded? — Ezra Klein, American Prospect, and Annie Lowrey, Foreign Policy
- Post-Consumer Prosperity — Robert H. Frank, American Prospect
- The World’s Biggest Diamond Heist — Joshua Davis, Wired
- Newspapers Are Dying. Are Universities Next? — Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Education
- Life Before Air-Conditioning — Mental Floss
- Down With Denim — Daniel Akst, Wall Street Journal (George Will agrees)
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