Movie stars promote it, it's seen as chic and debonair, and society accommodates it at every turn. It's
smoking back half a century ago,
which this writer sees as a parallel to our current opinion of pornography. Well, sorta: first scroll down to "distinctions with a difference" which erodes 90% of the argument, and then it boils down to this: in the 1950s, society as a whole moralized against pornography, but let people decide for themselves on smoking. Today, smoking is controlled by society, while people are allowed to decide for themselves about pornography. The mechanism for both changes in attitude is markedly different, and it's unfair to think that pornography will follow the same path of cigarettes, even in the writer's own arguments. It would be helpful to believe what the writer has to say if she'd cite her sources: she claims porn incites sexual assault, causes divorces (one
very biased source there), gets people fired, that the business has high margins and low cost just like tobacco - but when you write for a university think-tank, nobody expects you to actually
know anything: as long as you write convincingly, nobody will take your FranklinCovey planner away. Watch for next week's article, "Pornography is the new child-beating" and "Pornography is the new locking up of pregnant teenagers" as other comparisons to the wholesome 1950s as viewed through very limited cultural contexts but fleshed out with thousands of words of speculation.
