Kids and porn, Portnoy v. WaPo, Moynihan and Rosenfield and "TIM"

Dispatch from the land of the lotus eaters

Greetings from a shaded patio in the Larchmont section of Los Angeles, where the bees are having their fill of a Melaleuca alternifolia and where we just huffed two almond croissants from the bakery in Los Feliz where I used to see Leonardo di Caprio’s mother and the father of Heidi “the Hollywood madam” Fleiss having coffee each morning. This, at the time their kids, respectively, were starring in The Titanic and serving time in federal prison for tax evasion. I lived in Los Angeles for 18 years, as careful readers of this newsletter will recall, and each time I return the information LA seeds beneath your skin activates, it’s as though you never left, the grunge and beauty and soft warm air lulling you into thinking, maybe I come back…

Before we continue the LA seduction tour, here’s what else happened this week. I wrote about kids and porn for The Free Press, specifically Louisiana representative Laurie Schlegel’s spearheading a 2022 law that requires users of hardcore porn sites to digitally enter ID showing they are 18 or older before accessing content. A clip from “The Woman Who Stood Up to the Porn Industry—and Won”:

Schlegel’s crusade started back in December 2021. She had listened to The Howard Stern Show and 21-year-old pop sensation Billie Eilish talking about online porn. Eilish told Stern that she began watching “abusive” images at the age of 11, and that this had warped her sense of how to behave during sex and what women’s bodies look like.

“No vagina looks like this,” Eilish told Stern. “I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

Schlegel was struck by Eilish’s openness, that she was “just a young girl being vulnerable enough to share those details with the world.” 

The singer’s story also chimed with Schlegel’s professional experience both as a sex addiction therapist and a court-appointed special advocate for abused and neglected children in the foster care system. She knew the issues facing young clients raised on unlimited free online porn—the decoupling of intimacy from sex; the inability to get aroused without porn playing in the background; a warped idea of what your partner actually wants. 

“If you’ve never had your first kiss but you’ve seen hardcore pornography, it’s going to mold the way you view sexuality,” Schlegel said. “You’re not dealing with a fully formed adult brain that's like, ‘Oh, so I shouldn’t strangle my partner?’ ” 

If Schlegel understood the damage pornography causes, she also knew how easy it is for children to access it. And she realized that now she was a state legislator, she was uniquely positioned to do something about it. 

She soon settled on the idea of legislation that, if passed, would require porn sites to confirm their customers were 18 or older before they could click through to their content. 

“You can’t be 10 years old and go into Mr. Binky’s—that’s an adult bookstore in my district,” she says. “This is public policy we’ve accepted across the board in brick-and-mortar stores, but we’ve just been giving a pass to the internet.” 

While Schlegel attends a nondenominational Christian church and describes her faith as “very important to me,” she had no desire to impose her morality on others over the age of eighteen. “Adults have rights, so I get it,” she says, explaining that all she wanted was to craft a bill making it harder for kids to access videos like “I Invite My Stepsister to Take a Bath to Fuck Her Hard and Cum in Her Ass.”

Schlegel’s success had other states enacting or trying to enact similar laws, which you’d think would all be newsworthy. You would be wrong, or wrong at least to folks who leave comments like, “Censoring internet porn is the main gateway to censoring the entire internet” and accusing me of “platforming” Schlegel. First, accept my apologies for shutting down the web as we know it, and also, here’s Matt Welch this week on why, in addition to curiosity, journalists would want to cover events and people, regardless of whether or not you agree with their policies:

“Are you a political journalist who does not like Donald Trump? Maybe do some convincing and truthful journalism capable of reaching people who don't share your political priors” - “Media Critics Agree: Stop Interviewing the Bad People!” (Reason)

Speaking of incurious journalists with political priors, maybe you caught the video of Barstool Sports’ Dave Portnoy cold-calling a Washington Post reporter:

Man, I squirmed listening to the reporter try to buy time, then deflect, then deflect again, then insist she was going to call him and how about the next day at 10? As I put on the Twitter machine:

It would never occur to me to lead a potential source or someone I wanted a quote from the way the WaPo reporter did, which was to try to get him to say what she needed him to say in order to fill in a story whose contents she’d pre-decided. This is what can be referred to as trimming the facts to fit the theory, and forgive me, it - as well as, you know, threatening people with the sort of “exposure” that hits them in the pocketbook - is garbage. Is the piece that eventually ran necessary and edifying? You tell me. Please also note that WaPo did not in the piece mention they’d cancelled the 10am interview, but did write that “Portnoy agreed to a full-fledged interview, but when The Post asked to reschedule, he declined an alternate time and declined the offer to answer questions in writing.” I have no opinion on whether this was a deliberate f-u from Portnoy, who strikes me as at least partially a douche-bro, but what does any of this have to do with pizza? Also, my dad as a teenager used to eat an entire pie by himself at John’s Pizzeria on Bleecker Street and anyone threatening this nearly 100 year-old family-run institution can rightly fuck off.

WaPo is sucking wind if they think these sorts of pieces are the way to win back any of the 500,000 subscribers they lost since Biden took office…