My guest on the show today is returning guest and all-around friend of the pod David Sessions, a Boston-based freelance writer and the co-host, along with Blake Smith, of the relatively new Off Christopher Street Podcast and and Substack newsletter, about the history and present of gay male life and culture in America.
David, Blake and I have recorded a crossover episode of Eminent Americans that focuses on their new endeavor, which should be out in the next month or two or three, but on this episode David and I are talking pornography, its ubiquity, the effect it may or may not have on our culture and kids, and related issues around technology, moral panic, and modern life.
A few key differences between the two of us structure the discussion. One is our ages. David is 40. I’m now 50, and though it’s not a huge difference from one angle, it represents a fundamentally different generational growing up experience when it comes the internet, social media, and smart phones, none of which I basically had growing up, all of which David got relatively early on.
Another is kids. I have three of them. David doesn’t have any. And a third is our backgrounds. I’m from a liberal secular Jewish home in the northeast where sex was discussed pretty openly, and porn wasn’t permitted but wasn’t really stigmatized either. David grew up in what he describes as a deeply conservative, Christian-nationalist home. He went to a Christian college, married a good Christian woman, and then came out as gay in his mid-thirties.
One consequence of that background, for David, is that he’s unusually attuned to some of the ways that mainstream discourse around issues like porn, smart phones, the internet, and social media has been influenced by savvy right wing Christian groups, who recognized pretty early on that if they wanted to move the mainstream they would have to find rhetorical frames that weren’t aversive to establishment media. So instead of sin and god and traditional values they talk about public health harms, addiction, exploitation, objectification of women, etc.
So David comes to these debates with an awareness of how they’ve often been covertly shaped by religious groups and motives. He also has the experience, as a gay man, of living a pretty flourishing social life that is enabled in all sorts of positive ways by the technologies that a concerned parent like me can easily fall into perceiving as purely pernicious.
And one last thing I want to bring up, which I think is important as context for this conversation, is that so many of the discussions around the effects of tech on kids lack a real perspective on how it plays out differently depending on the socioeconomic class of the kids in question. Who is really speaking for, or from, the kids who aren’t living with the kind of social and cultural capital that David and I both, albeit in very different ways, had growing up. Two parent homes, relatively intact communities, financially secure, high parental investment, and so on. David and I, and my kids, and his kids if he has them, have been or will be raised with psychological protective factor layered on top of psychological protective factor. What about the kids who don’t have all that? Are we condescending to their parents in imagining that their kids are just at the mercy of the evil tech gods, that they’re not able to sufficiently protect and nurture them. Or, alternatively, are we just basically ignoring them when we have these discussions, as elites, as though their kids are just like our kids, having basically the same experiences. I don’t know, and David doesn’t either, and – and this is maybe the worst part – who would I even turn to to help me answer it? So that’s in the background of this conversation too.
Two quick housekeeping notes. The first is a thanks to Joshua Howard for manfully editing this episode, as he has the last few. The second is that this the last episode of what I will retrospectively refer to as the scrappy, underground, indie era of this podcast. Starting in a week or two, I’ll be launching a partnership with Arc Magazine, which is published out of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
I’ll say more about that when we officially launch, but one thing I’ll say now is that Arc’s touch on the content and vibe of the show will be very very light. Occasionally I’ll have on a guest who is doing something for the magazine, there will be brief promos for other Arc content, and I hope to do some fun experiments that I didn’t have the bandwidth to do when it was just me and producer Robert. For the most part, though, I’m going to go about my business as I’ve done for the last few years. I’ll have on whoever I want. We’ll talk about whatever I want. And I’ll swear whenever I fucking want.
Peace.
