The Federalist channels incel logic with its latest hot take suggesting that watching porn is adultery

By David Futrelle

The Federalist has once again delivered a hot take so blazingly bad that the entire internet, it seems, has risen up to point and laugh at it.

The conservative site, a veritable factory of extremely bad takes on subjects ranging from The Mueller investigation to feminism, posted a piece by writer John Sweeney yesterday informing us all that “You’re Not Allowed To Knock Trump For Stormy Daniels If You Watch Porn.” According to Sweeney, you see, watching porn is basically adultery, so watching Stormy Daniels have sex is basically the same as having an affair with her.

Now, there are any number of things wrong with this, er, argument — not the least the fact that the real issue with Trump and Stormy Daniels isn’t the sex; it’s the hush money payments, which pretty clearly violated campaign finance laws, making Trump himself the unindicted co-conspirator in a felony case that’s already sent his former top lawyer to jail.

But let’s focus on the even dumber argument at the heart of the piece, the idea that watching porn is the same as committing adultery — at least if you’re a married dude.  (In Sweeney’s world, everyone is straight and only men watch porn.)

“Culturally we may not believe it,” Sweeney asserts,

but each time a married man watches pornography, he commits an act of adultery. … We don’t wait for our wives to leave the house to watch baseball.

Sweeney restates his basic premise perhaps a half-dozen times, but never actually presents a straightforward argument that would justify his conclusion.

Instead, he focuses on a slightly different scenario — a situation in which a husband engages in virtual sex with a woman online:

[I]magine that a woman returns home from work only to find her husband on a video chat, engaging in virtual sex with a woman he met online. … Direct physical contact is sufficient, but not necessary to commit adultery. …

[H]iding behind a computer screen is nothing more than a technicality, providing neither excuse nor justification. It is easy to see, then, that watching pornography is not substantively different or uniquely innocent.

Perhaps realizing that he hasn’t quite managed to convincingly argue that last bit — his equation of virtual sex and porn — Sweeney presents a different hypothetical scenario: a husband watching a live cam show. “His behavior here is no different than the previous hypothetical,” Sweeney asserts.

If a man can commit adultery through a computer connection, does it really matter who is on the other end?

Well, yeah, it does. There’s a difference between an intimate, interactive sexual encounter between two people — even if it’s virtual — and watching a show put on for dozens or hundreds of viewers.

Notice, then, how similar this is to watching pornography.  The only real difference is that a typical pornographic video is pre-recorded. 

This is like saying that talking to someone — in person or on the phone — is the same as reading a book by them. In the first case you are interacting with a specific person; in the second you are part of an audience and have no personal connection with the author.

The only scenario out of the three that could be considered “cheating” is the virtual sex scenario, because it involves a personal connection of sorts with another human being. Private cam sessions might also be considered cheating — emphasis on the “might.”

Are any of these things exactly the same as having an affair or having sex with a sex worker? No. And it’s up to individual couples to define what does and does not count as infidelity in their relationships.

Some might consider virtual sex with an almost-stranger to be much less of a big deal than, say, a partner publicly flirting with a neighbor, even if there is virtually no chance that this flirtation will lead to any kind of sex. Moreover, nonmonogamy has rules as much as monogamy does. Someone in an open relationship might be fine with their partner having sex with multiple other people on a regular basis — but forbid their partner from seeing a sex worker or getting a lap dance.

Different people draw boundaries in radically different ways. And that’s their business. Wantonly expanding the definition of adultery to encompass everything even vaguely sexual — including porn watching — is neither honest nor helpful.

Sweeney’s porn=adultery argument is strikingly similar to one I’ve run across again and again from NoFappers and incels and assorted others in the manosphere — the notion that those who watch porn are cuckolds, in that they are watching women having sex instead of having sex with them.

“All the porn you watch is basically Cuckold Porn.,” a NoFap Redditor calling himself keysomea declared in a post a year ago.

Why? Here is the explanation: You are basically watching another guy fuck the women that you would want to fuck and taking pleasure in that by masturbating to that.

While it makes a certain sense for someone trying to avoid masturbating to porn — the primary goal of the NoFap movement — to cast aspersions on the act of masturbating to porn, this argument is set forth even more energetically by incels.

“Watching porn makes you a cuck,” someone called Heightframeface declared on the Incels.is forums earlier this year.

How can people, especially incels, watch a Chad fuck a girl who’s making tens of thousands of dollars by being a digital prostitute? This is the ultimate form of cuckoldry.  …

WATCHING PORN MAKES YOU LIKE ANY OTHER SOY-INFESTED LIBERAL CUCK OUT THERE 

“Porn Fappers are cucks,” agreed another commenter in yet another thread on the Incels.is forums.

You Who watch Tyrone or Chad plow Stacy on the regular are cucks stuck in jewish agenda.

You enjoy seeing a superior man have sex With The girl you wish to screw daily and enjoy that.

And this isn’t the only way in which incels have broadened the definition of “cuck.” As I noted in a recent post,

incels have expanded the definition of “cuckold” to include every man who has sex with a girl or a woman who isn’t a virgin. In other words, if a woman has ever had sex with a man other than the one she’s currently with, she’s basically cucking her current man as much as if she were to have sex with another man right in her boyfriend or husband’s bed while he watches, humiliated.

Many incels become fixated on this idea. When they see a woman they find attractive, all many incels can think about is all the other guys that (they imagine) she’s been with.

And somehow this always leads their brains to thoughts of semen. “Can you talk to a girl knowing that her mouth has been filled with semen?” asked one Incels.is commenter. It’s something that these guys think about on a daily basis — causing them to feel worse about themselves and to hate women even more.

Incels aren’t the only woman-hating woman-wanters to make this argument, which is also fairly common amongst MGTOWs — those similarly womanless men who, unlike the incels, claim that their womanlessness is the result of their own deliberate choices. “How cucked do you need to be,” one MGTOW recently declared in a Reddit rant, “to put a ring on someone who took it up the ass and swallowed when she was younger?”

It’s easy enough to see why NoFappers, incels, and MGTOWs have adopted such a ludicrously capacious notion of cuckoldry. NoFappers define porn use as cuckoldry because they’re trying to stop using porn. Incels adopt the same definition not because they’ve given up porn — most seemingly haven’t — but because, somewhat paradoxically, it enables them both to play the “cucked” victim of porn and to look down on “normies” who also use porn.

Similarly, incels and MGTOWs are happy to castigate men who have sex with non-virginal women as “cucks” because it makes them feel better about their own celibacy (whether they consider it “involuntary” or their own choice). And it gives them yet another excuse to slut-shame any woman who have any sort of sex life at all.

So are there similarly political motives behind Sweeney’s weird expansion of the notion of adultery to include watching porn?

At the outset, Sweeney insists he’s not making the argument in his article’s title — that people who use porn have no right to criticize Trump’s affair with Stormy Daniels — in an attempt to absolve Trump of his sins. “This [argument] by no means justifies President Trump’s behavior,” Sweeny declares.

He slept with another woman while his wife was home caring for their son, and he deserves every second of criticism from his affair with Daniels.

Well, perhaps, but it seems pretty clear that by equating literal adultery — something that most people consider a Very Bad Thing — with something that most people indulge in and that very few people now see as a big deal, you are by definition minimizing the significance of Trump’s adultery, no matter how you try to deny it.

Beyond that, Sweeney’s main goal seems to be to use porn to attack the sexual revolution that began in the 1960s.

“If anything can be attributed to the sexual revolution, it is the widespread popularization of pornography,” he asserts.

It is the crowning achievement of a culture that treats sex flippantly, stripping it of its beauty and purpose, leaving only the bodily function. We have reduced sex to transactional entertainment and created a generation of pornography-addicted consumers, hiding behind the anonymity of a computer screen. 

Whatever your feelings about porn, to portray its current popularity as the “crowning achievement” of the sexual revolution is, I think, profoundly dishonest. The sexual revolution was about many things, but at its essence it was about sexual freedom, enabling those who lived through it or who grew up in its wake to approach sex with less stigma and needless guilt.

It’s given women sexual autonomy they never had before, and helped to enable LGBTQ folks to fight for and win basic rights previously denied them. It’s revolutionized the way our society thinks about sexual consent, helping to  reduce rapes and to render unacceptable the sort of sexual harassment that used to be rampant in the workplace.

We still have a long way to go on all these issues, but there’s no question that the sexual revolution has helped us to make progress on all of them.

Sweeney tries to present himself as a sort of white night for married women victimized by their husband’s “virtual adultery” in the form of porn use. But his real agenda seems to be to push back against a sexual revolution that has benefitted women in countless ways.

His piece isn’t simply a bad take; it’s an insidious one. He’s doing no favors for the women he pretends to be defending.

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