Inaugural Katie Couric Podcast Disses Porn—Big Time

CYBERSPACE—Everybody knows who Katie Couric is, right? This journalist/commentator has been on TV almost steadily since 1989, working for all three major networks, and earning the sobriquet "America's Sweetheart" for her 15 years co-anchoring The Today Show. But what many may not remember is, she's been an anti-porn crusader for a good portion of that time, as AVN noted back in 2014.

And sad to say, she's still at it, as evidenced by the inaugural edition of her new podcast, conservative media iHeartRadio's "Next Question with Katie Couric," where the inaugural question was, "Is violent porn changing us?"

Regular porn viewers might be forgiven for asking, "What 'violent porn'?" since most adult companies go out of their way to make sure their customers know that everything that happens on the screen is consensual—even companies that specialize in BDSM material—and that what happens on-screen is fantasy, not to be mistaken for actual relationships. In fact, pre-scene title cards on DVDs often warn viewers against trying some of the depicted sex acts at home with their partners.

So those porn viewers might be surprised to learn from Katie's main guest, the redoubtable Dr. Gail Dines, that "The three major sex acts in porn is, number one, ejaculating on a woman's face and increasingly in the eyes; the second major sex act is choking—first it's choking with the penis, and the penis is so far down the throat that she begins to gag. The third major act is one which is called ATM, which actually translates as 'ass to mouth,' where the penis goes into the anus and into the mouth without washing. This sounds extreme; it sounds like, you know, you have to go spend 15 minutes looking for these. These are the things an 11-year-old boy, when he puts 'porn' into Google, this is the only thing he's gonna see."

Dines was perhaps the perfect anti-porn choice, since she'd appeared opposite this author on an episode of AOL Build dealing with the Netflix documentary Hot Girls Wanted, and said at that time, "The average porn consumer does not understand that porn in its production is violence against women, that the women last for about three months and are often then thrown out because their bodies simply cannot tolerate the violence."

Dines was also the Justice Department's first "expert" witness in 2013 in the trial of Free Speech Coalition's and others' civil suit to overturn the federal record-keeping and labeling law, 18 U.S.C. §2257, during which testimony she claimed that since Playboy magazine first hit the market, pornography has become "much more cruel," and that 90 percent of the sex scenes in the then-top-selling DVDs featured violence and non-consensual acts.

That's nuts, but of course, it was exactly what Couric wanted! See, the podcast began with Couric interviewing a 30-year-old college student named Trish, who's studying to be a psychiatrist, but who had a boyfriend who was into choking her and reaming her anally, from which she developed a prolapsed rectum—and both she and Couric claimed he'd gotten those ideas from watching porn.

"I think he was replicating what he was seeing on those videos," Trish stated, with Couric adding, "Clearly, porn played a big part in Trish's relationship, which she did eventually end."

What Trish did let slip, however, was that she'd actually once told the boyfriend to put his hands around her neck, which she said excited him, and since she wanted to please him, she let him keep doing it, though that type of play got rougher—and she was apparently too afraid for some reason to tell him to cut it out until she finally broke things off with him.

The point of Trish's interview could have been the message that sex acts between consenting adults should be consensual or something's wrong with the relationship, but no, porn's to blame and that's all there is to it.

Gail Dines' first statement on the podcast almost made that point: "When I was growing up, if a guy would have said to me, 'Would you mind if I ejaculate on your face and choke you while we're having sex,' I would have thought he was a psychopath and ran." Right, Gail: sexual partners should agree on what sex acts they're comfortable with.

But one of "journalist" Couric's other main points is that the government should figure out some way to censor porn. When Dines stated that, "No other industry is as unregulated as the porn industry. ... How have we managed to have this multibillion-dollar-a-year industry which is virtually unregulated completely. It's an outrage that this has happened," Couric immediately came back with, "Let that sink in: instant anonymous access to hardcore porn 24/7; millions of hardcore videos and no age verification whatsoever from your phone, laptop, tablet, and here are the scary statistics: a third of young people have seen porn by the time they're 12 years old; 88 percent of top rented or downloaded porn contains scenes depicting violence against women. How have they been able to stay under the radar?"

Um ... because that 88 percent figure is complete horseshit? Because for Dines, such common, consensual acts as one partner slapping the other's ass during intercourse, or taking hold of her (or his!) hair while having sex are, to her, violent acts—and one can't help but suspect that the man cumming anywhere except inside the woman's pussy would be considered a form of violence by Dines as well!

And Dines wasn't done—not by a long shot.

"The porn industry is actually targeting young boys," she claimed. "It's not like the politicians don't know; there is no desire in this country to go after the porn industry. ... Giving out free porn to kids is the equivalent of me standing out in the middle school giving out free cigarettes. ... Porn is about a third of the internet. But you could say this is one of the largest above-ground industries in the world that is trading on misogyny and violence against women. So a lot of the boys and young men who are being brought up on pornography are playing porn sex out on these girls. The women and girls are the collateral damage of the porn industry."

And Couric was right there with her: "It sounds to me like it's this tragic alchemy of violent pornography, toxic masculinity, low self-esteem for women, and a hook-up culture."

Couric's second guest was Al Vernacchio, a sex educator at a private Quaker-run school in Wynnewood, Pa., just outside of Philadelphia. Vernacchio began by saying, "What happens today is that young people, because of the great vacuum of information or conversation, they encounter this material, and they are curious and they are turned on and they are hungry for information and they think, 'Well, nobody's talking to me; this must be it.' We need to not only counteract that message but start at a much younger age, saying, 'When you see stuff like that, that's actually not what sex is about. That's not what relationships are about. That's not what intimacy is about. That's performance. That's fantasy—and not even fantasy in terms of the good, helpful fantasy that can teach you something useful; the fantasy that is sort of corrupting and that gives messages that are the opposite of what we're supposed to be trying to do as human beings.'"

Not bad points, actually, if one can get over the "corrupting" horseshit: Porn is fantasy, and while adults, by watching porn, can often learn new positions and techniques they might want to try, it's definitely not sex ed material, and kids should be taught that at an early age. Sadly, however, many parents are themselves so afraid of sex and sexual issues that they can't bring themselves to discuss the subject with their own children.

But for Vernacchio, educating kids about the differences between porn and real life wasn't the point. As far as he was concerned, it was more important to teach them about "gender equity," and after talking about the goodness of sounding kids out as to why their favorite superhero group had more men than women in it, he segued right into, "[W]e help them begin to ask questions so that when they do encounter material like hardcore pornography, they're primed to ask that question, 'Wait a minute; that woman is being used completely as an object, and I've already been told that whenever we treat a human being as an object, that's disrespectful, that's devaluing.'"

Gee, wonder if Vernacchio would have them asking the same questions about the plot elements seen in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or Brokeback Mountain or The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo or Magic Mike—or Wolf Warrior 2?

But, see, as far as Vernacchio is concerned, the sex acts seen in porn videos isn't really sex.

"In my ninth-grade class, one of the questions that I want to ask and conversations I want to have with kids is, What does it mean when we say have sex with somebody? How is that defined? Because what our culture says, what the porn culture certainly says, is that sex is about conquest and power and penetration—"

"And abuse, really," Couric helpfully added.

"So then I get to say, what if we made a definition of sex that wasn't about what we did but about the way we did it?" Vernacchio continued. "What if we said sex was a consensual, mutually pleasurable sexual activity that helped people connect? If that's a definition you grew up with, around what sex is supposed to be, then when you come to look at porn, you're going to say, 'That's not sex,' or 'That's not the definition of sex that I learned.'"

Nobody (almost) is going to argue that sex with personal connection isn't preferable—but sex without the connection is pretty good as well, as long as it's consensual, so perhaps Vernacchio isn't doing his students any favors by insisting that sex for fun isn't sex.

Vernacchio went on in this vein for a while, and Couric brought Dines back into the discussion for more of her horseshit, and the podcast ended with Couric asking, "Are you as freaked out as much as I am?"

No, Katie, we're not—and if your future podcasts are going to be as ill-informed as this one, people would probably do well to avoid them.

(Psst: Some decent steps parents can take to keep kids safe online can be found here.)

Pictured: Dr. Gail Dines.