Why the Meaning Behind Words Matters

As I’ve written many times before, I’m a big fan of Dr. Laura and agree with most of what she says.

One thing I appreciate is that she tends not to buy into the hysteria regarding “adult media” that so many other conservative, “marriage-and-family” advocates have. Primarily, that means when a wife calls, upset that her husband likes looking at pixels depicting nude women or even women in sexual situations, Dr. Laura usually tells the caller to get over it as long as it is depicting human adults, isn’t gay male material, isn’t something like BDSM or some other fetish, and the husband isn’t neglecting his obligations (such as rejecting his wife to go and masturbate to porn).

On yesterday’s (September 11, 2017) show, the first or one of the first calls was from a woman who found out that her husband was looking at “teen porn”. Unfortunately, despite the fact that 18 and 19-year-olds are teens, and many people older than that pretend to be teens in mainstream media as well as adult, Dr. Laura immediately condemned the husband, raised the subject of “kiddie” stuff and told the woman to leave her husband and take the husband’s computer to have it checked by police. When the caller pointed out that 18 and 19-year-olds are teens, Dr. Laura said that a year or two doesn’t make a difference.

When Dr. Laura tells wives to get over the fact that their husband views adult media, what exactly does she think most of that media depicting “women, women with men” features? In most cases, it isn’t women the same age as the husband or the wife. Most of those women in general adult media (as opposed to “granny” or “MILF” stuff) are under 30 years of age, many of them 18-25. Playboy has always featured women who were as young as 18 and 19 (and, the fact is, at least once they had a female under the age of 18).

Your average regulation heterosexual man is going to find women under the age of 25 to be most attractive. I’m talking about from a purely visual, casual perspective. Of course he’s going to find the woman he loves and who loves him to be highly attractive. And truth be told, if most women had to rate men solely on the performance of their penises, most would prefer guys under the age of 25. It’s simple biology.

In other words, Dr. Laura might have told a woman to leave her husband, the father of her child, and invite police to search his computer over the kind of stuff that can be found in Playboy.