WASHINGTON — Conservative commentators Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro delivered a scathing anti-porn tirade last week on “The Ben Shapiro Show,” which streams on right-wing news site The Daily Wire.
Both media personalities host Daily Wire shows. Their anti-porn screed, featured in a YouTube excerpt titled “How Porn Is Destroying Society,” was delivered during a segment with Owens appearing as Shapiro's guest.
Shapiro mentioned that Owens, his colleague, had done an episode of her new DailyWire+ show the day before, about “the normalization of pornography in the culture.”
“It’s the stuff that you can do better than pretty much anyone else,” Shapiro told Owens, “because No. 1, if I talk about the normalization of pornography in the culture, I’m a sexist, but if you talk about the normalization of pornography in the culture, then you're a feminist, so it's good — you can say these things.”
Owens explained that she had been prompted by a conversation she had with her husband.
“My husband,” she told the audience, “completely abstains from social media, and if you ask him, he just casually says, ‘Because it's all pornography.’
“He's talking about Instagram, he's talking about Facebook,” Owens continued, incongruously naming two platforms noted for not allowing any form of nudity. “He’s talking about opening up a page and looking at the Daily Mail.”
Owens: Instagram is 'Nothing but Butts and People's Tits'
“We’ve become so desensitized to it,” Owens opined. “So when I’m on Instagram, I don't even pay attention to the fact that actually there's just nothing but butts and people's tits on the Internet at all times.”
Owens also said she was “listening to a Catholic podcast and they were talking about how even the seeds that are being planted on porn websites — which I did visit yesterday — are all incestuous,” a phenomenon she tenuously linked to a current news item claiming that Kim Kardashian “orchestrated” the release of her famous sex tape with help from her mother, Kris Kardashian.
Shapiro then chimed in, alleging that the story is being “completely ignored by the mainstream media” but “paid attention to in the subculture of the internet because you're not allowed to report that Kim Kardashian has obviously exploited her body for money.
“And it's not as though Kim Kardashian has cooled it recently,” Shapiro continued, seemingly trying to shame the popular reality TV personality and businesswoman. “I mean, she recently appeared on the cover of Interview magazine wearing nothing on her bottom…”
The Mainstreaming of Porn: 'This Is All Bad.'
Shapiro took advantage of the exchange to plug his 2004 book, “Porn Generation,” decrying “how pornography was being absolutely mainstreamed, how people who had been porn stars were now being made into mainstream cultural figures.”
Owens then condemned pornography's effect on modern culture, asserting that it has led people to believe that “pedophilia is okay” and that “children can pick their gender, children can be sexual beings.”
Shapiro continued blaming what he called “really sickening stuff” on “the mainstreaming of pornography.”
“It really is an amazing story,” he continued, “because the fact is that back in the 1970s, the feminist movement said pornography is exploitative, because it obviously is. It's pandering to the worst in men, it’s pandering to male desires, it is causing women to have to exploit their bodies in order to get attention. This is all bad.”
However, Shapiro claimed, “then the feminist movement shifted in the 1980s and 1990s and suddenly pornography became ‘empowering.’ In fact, you'll have, you know, Hillary Clinton going around the country and doing a TV series on ‘gutsy women’ and the people that she's interviewing very often are people who are exploiting their bodies, obviously for fame and fortune.”
Shapiro then claimed that there is “an entire subpopulation — I would imagine now it's probably approaching a majority of the male population of the United States — that, if not addicted to pornography ... uses pornography regularly.”
Owens: Porn is a Massive Government Conspiracy
Owens then pivoted to a conspiracy theory: that the growing acceptance of pornography is attributable to a nefarious plot by some people in “the government,” which seeks to “be omnipotent in our lives” and therefore “needs to make sure that it is routinely denigrating the idea of the nuclear family unit, which stands in the way of a government and omnipotence and so that's what we're seeing and that's what we're talking about on the show.”
Owens urged Shapiro’s viewers to “pay attention to the various ways that they are attacking the family: it's through pornography.”
Owens lamented that when she was in school, she was taught in health class that “partaking in pornography as an observer of pornography, watching porn, was a healthy thing” and that “it's a good thing for your relationship for you to sit in a room, do something shameful and observe other people having sex on the internet.”
Owens concluded by saying she wanted young people to know that “what you're learning in the public school system is not correct. What they're trying to do is — create you — turn you into basically a government slave.”