Snobbery, Pornography, and the Speaker of the House

Monday’s Vanity Fair headline: Mike Johnson Said He and His Son Monitor Each Other’s Porn Usage, and Yeah, It’s Exactly as Weird as It Sounds.

The new Speaker of the House, we learn, has the Covenant Eyes app on his phone. So does his teen son. Covenant Eyes doesn’t block any websites, but it does issue weekly reports to a designated accountability partner. The app flags content that may be inappropriate -- generally, pornography or “porn-adjacent” material -- with the idea that the accountability partners will then discuss the reports.

Father and son.

It is nearly impossible to block content – it is much easier to track website visits. The theory behind Covenant Eyes is that if self-control fails, the certainty that someone whose respect you value will see a list of every site you’ve visited will act as an additional inhibitor. (Covenant Eyes is a Christian app. About a decade ago, a group of Orthodox Jews – who shared the same worry about porn but not the same theology, approached the Covenant Eyes team.  Could they license the software and put it on a different platform, replete with different verses and exhortations? And thus Guard Your Eyes was born. I know some guys who use it.)

I don’t know when it became standard practice for magazine articles to have twenty-one-word headlines, but I don’t find it a happy innovation. I do still glance at Vanity Fair from time to time, because in my WASPy childhood, it was one of the three sacred magazines that appeared on family coffee tables. Architectural Digest and Town & Country were the others in the trinity, and they served as important arbiters of taste.  If we were curious about what others in the tribe of “Our Kind of People” were thinking, reading, or wearing, these three periodicals gave us much of what we needed to know.

In an era of microscopic attention spans, though, headlines like this one are necessary.  Those twenty-one words are economical, really, because having read them you don’t need to go any further. You’ve gotten the whole gist: Those crazy evangelicals! Obsessed with porn and purity and with no understanding of decent boundaries! What, my dears, is the world coming to when people like this are running our nation? What’s next, snake-handling? 

Vanity Fair knows exactly how to appeal to the anxiety, snobbery, and self-righteousness of their readers.  It’s a good headline in that respect.

When I was 13 or so, my mother caught me staring at two slightly older girls in the supermarket. They wore bandeau tops and short shorts.  Mama pulled me aside.

"Darling, you can't stare like that."

I was instantly embarrassed.

It wasn't just rude, my mother said. "The time is coming when girls will be afraid of you if you look at them like that."

That I hadn't expected. Who could be afraid of geeky, awkward me? And in the language of 1980, mama explained the male gaze and women's fear of being assaulted and how it was very normal for me to want to look at pretty girls, but I also had to make sure that my looking wasn’t noticed.

"A gentleman makes everyone feel comfortable," she reminded me. Lust, she, and my extended family believed,  was not a moral or spiritual problem. My mother was happy to have me want whatever I wanted. Lust was only a problem when its display made someone else feel awkward or afraid or embarrassed.

This goes back to a point I’ve made often: in the secular WASP culture in which I marinated, the great moral binary is public/private. Virtually everything is permitted in the latter sphere as long as your outer conduct is exemplary. The thoughts are free, as the German folk song goes; whatever you do behind closed doors is fine, but make sure it stays there.  (I have told the story before of my aunt finding a copy of Hustler magazine on my bedside table. The reproach was not that I had been looking at the vulgar thing, but that I had not better tucked it away.)

Here's the thing: “You can do whatever you like as long as you behave like a gentleman and don’t make people uncomfortable” is not, in fact, sufficient instruction for all of us. The reality is that the wall between private and public is rarely as sturdy as we would like. What we do in private sometimes seeps under the transom. Sometimes, we get enchanted by the idea of having our language match up to our life – or to put it another way, we feel a strange shame that our language and our life are so divorced.

It is impossible to convey how much class consciousness plays a role in this moral system. In particular, a very specific class-based claim about self-discipline.  My family was never outwardly snobbish because snobbery itself is a sign of poor manners. But I was raised to roll my eyes quietly at the “petit bourgeois puritans” who were so terrified of sexual disorder.  A gentleman controls himself; a man who is not a gentleman urges women to cover up, outsourcing his self-restraint to the women in his life.  A young gentleman may look at Hustler whilst lying on his bed, but nothing in his outer manner conveys that he is the sort of person who might do such a thing.

A good friend of mine was raised an evangelical and he has remained in the sturdy faith of his forebears. He learned the scripture early that inspired the name of Speaker Johnson’s favorite app: “I have made a covenant with my eyes; Why then should I look upon a young woman?” (Job 31:1).  He and I have laughed to discover that we were both reproached by our mothers for ogling girls in the grocery store and have marveled at the anthropological assumptions that undergirded our mamas’ rebukes. My mother was worried that I would make these girls uncomfortable; my friend’s mother was worried that he would be distracted by lust.  We are good enough friends, he and I, that we could also laugh about how incomprehensible our mothers would have found each other.  Each would have considered the other’s worldview to be both dangerous and foolish.

He and I both looked at porn magazines as teens and were caught out.  I was told to hide my stash more effectively.  My friend got his papa’s belt across his buttocks.  

When he told me that, I expressed sympathy. “That must have been so awful.” 

“It wasn’t fun,” my friend replied, “And I don’t hit my own kids.  But Hugo, what you got was awful too.”

I looked at him sharply. Don’t come at my mama, sir.  My friend explained: “You weren’t given any code to live by other than, ‘Work hard, make everyone comfortable, and be charming.’  Those are nice things, but it’s a meager diet.”

Mama gave me much more than that, but I take his point.

I have not come to my friend’s position on faith, or lust, but I certainly understand them better than I once did.  My friend and his nearly grown son have their own accountability talks, similar to Mike Johnson’s practice. I have seen the richness of their relationship, and the trust the boy has in his dad.  Whatever the particulars of their theology, they are trying very hard to match their language and their lives.

I will not use Covenant Eyes (or its Orthodox Jewish brother) with my son. It does not reflect who I am or what I believe.  But I know better than to mock those who do strive so hard to integrate their impulses with their commitments. I know better than to let the sneering of Vanity Fair determine who is to be admired, and who to be dismissed.

If a gentleman really wants to make others feel comfortable, he will not only tame his anger and his lust, but he will also temper his judgments with humility and curiosity.  And this aspiring and most imperfect gentleman will continue to work to figure out how best to guide his own children.