Pennsylvania Porn

“The media has largely viewed the email scandal through this lens,” writes Brandon McGinley of the scandal of men who worked in the Pennsylvania state attorney general’s office sending pornography around by email. “The real outrage we are told, is the use of taxpayer resources for personal entertainment,” he writes.

. . . The idea seems to be that if a state department chief hosted a fantasy football draft on state computers and state time, the scandal would be in its substance the same. . . .

This isn’t about where or when emails depicting the degradation of women were shared among senior leaders of Pennsylvania’s government.  It is about the fact that these emails were shared at all.

He thinks, and probably rightly, that most people object to the men exchanging pornography but various social conventions prevent them from saying so. The real scandal, he continues, isn’t so much that men in power shared dirty pictures and made lecherous remarks about them.

This is a scandal about sex and power.  It is a sex scandal not just in that it involves sexually explicit material, but in that it involves the way some of the men who run our state view women.

It is a power scandal not just in that it involves the improper use of public resources, but in that it involves the perpetuation of male power through sexually degrading imagery.

Brandon works for the Pennsylvania Family Institute and one might think that he’s simply using a liberal argument to score a point. But he’s not. Things that are wrong have varied effects. One effect of pornography is the one usually invoked, that it is bad for the person using it and the people who produce it. Another is that as a perversion of the right relation of male and female, it gives the more powerful sex yet more power. It’s like adding to the rules of backgammon the right to deck the other player. The percentage of victories by women is going to drop.