David QuinnPeople need strong emotional connections with others to flourish, writes David Quinn
When The Late Late Show aired its toy show in the run-up to Christmas last year, a major porn site reported a 16% drop in the number of hits it was receiving in Ireland. This amazing statistic was unveiled at a conference on pornography in Ireland earlier this year organised by the National Youth Council of Ireland.
Think about that statistic for a moment. The 16% drop is testament, first of all, to the sheer number of people in Ireland who watch the toy show. But it is obviously testament as well to the number of people who watch porn. What’s more alarming is to consider the age profile of those who stopped watching porn in order to watch the toy show. Were they middle aged and older, or were they teenagers and younger, or a bit of both?
Recently, Enda Kenny said we need to have a national conversation about pornography and the effect it is having on young people.
He said: “Our young people [are] growing up imagining that what they see on the screen might be normal sexual behaviour, there has to be a discussion about this in terms of families and children and the kind of society that is evolving in the start of the second century since the Rising of 1916.”
The kind of society that has evolved is one that is absolutely saturated in sexual imagery and not just hard core porn. It has also seen the ‘evolution’ of sexual attitudes in a direction that supports a hook-up culture at the expense of a courtship culture.
The growing ubiquity of a ‘hook-up culture’ (basically sexual encounters, often one night stands, that are meant to involve zero degree of emotional intimacy) was highlighted by a young woman interviewed recently on RTE radio by Ryan Tubridy.
Aoife O'Callaghan (27), who any normal male would say is attractive looking, told Tubridy that she finds it very hard to find a man who isn’t interested only in a ‘casual’ encounter, which is to say in sex without intimacy.
She said: "If you get talking to someone and you don't want to go home with them straight away, that's it you're gone.
"I'm pretty old-fashioned. I'd rather – if I do meet someone on a night out – swap numbers and go on a date before going on to the next stage, but nowadays, if you don't go home with someone, they immediately reject you.”
She said ‘dating’ websites or apps like Tinder are making things worse because they encourage the ‘hook-up’ at the expense of courtship and dating.
She also feels at a disadvantage because of the way she dresses when on a night out. "When I go out, for example, I would be pretty simple. I do my hair and I do my make-up but I wouldn't have the likes of fake tan, HD brows, fake eyelashes, fake nails… the works. When I go out nowadays and I see girls with next-to-nothing on, they're size six to eight and I don't know how because they musn't eat but guys just flock towards them immediately.”
O’Callaghan’s remarks bring to mind a very widely read and commented upon article that appeared in the American magazine, Vanity Fair, not so long ago called ‘Tinder and the Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse’.
The article was accused by some of exaggerating the extent to which apps like Tinder are replacing dating with casual sex, but there isn’t the slightest doubt that experiences such as those recounted by Aoife O’Callaghan are becoming more commonplace. That is really bad news because people need intimacy and strong emotional connections with others if they are to flourish. A sexual culture which discourages this is ultimately against human nature.
Divorcing sex from emotional commitment (never mind marriage) forces us to separate our bodies from our emotions. Some people might be well able to do that, for a time at least, but only by objectifying their sexual partners, that is, by not really regarding them as individual people with their own feelings and personalities.
When you think the time has come for you to connect sex to commitment, is it that easy to do? Are others willing to go along with your newfound goal? Some might be, but plenty won’t. Your chances of finding a strong sexual and emotional connection to someone diminishes. And if you can’t find love, where does that leave you? So the hook up culture is leaving emotional devastation in its wake.
And it is helped along by the sheer prevalence of porn. Enda Kenny drew attention to young people, and by young he also meant small children, because it is so easy to access, sometimes by accident. Look up your favourite celeb and you might also find links to porn sites. Parents who try to limit what their children look up online can be easily undermined by the fact that their children can find porn on their friends’ smart phones and other devices.
Doing something about this is the hard bit and it’s not helped by liberal ambivalence about both the hook-up culture and porn. Liberalism extols personal freedom and if that freedom leads to the hook-up culture, then so be it, they say. (Question; does Aoife O’Callaghan feel free because of it?)
Likewise, with pornography. If there is lots of it and if lots of people look it up, well, once again that is the price of freedom, liberals insist, even though its sheer prevalence means lots of people become addicted to it and then lose their freedom. (Ask the wife whose husband is addicted to porn what she thinks of all this ‘freedom’)
So Enda Kenny is right, we do need a national conversation, but at the end of the day it is hard to see where it will lead unless we begin to question where certain liberal norms have led us and until we begin to realise the number of hapless and often unwilling victims those norm are creating.