For a long time, the only thing that “fundamentalists” like us and feminazis could agree on was the destructiveness of pornography, but we’ve been approaching it from different angles. For Christians, it’s been an issue of unfaithfulness to God. For feminists, it’s been an issue of objectifying women. Now, we can both agree that it’s simply destructive for relationships too.
Feminist writer Naomi Wolf has written a cover story in New York Magazine about the way porn has robbed sex of all mystery and allure: “People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.” She’s even discovered the value of good old-fashioned modesty:
I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”
When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.
She must feel, I thought, so hot.