A book Ben Shapiro wrote nearly 20 years ago about the danger of normalizing pornography proved prescient as the Daily Wire co-founder chatted Wednesday with Candace Owens on his podcast and radio show.
The book, “Porn Generation,” explored the mainstream embrace of socially destructive pornography, which has only gotten much worse, agreed the author and Owens, a Daily Wire star who this week launched a daily podcast of her own. And while Shapiro, who wrote the book as a first-year law student at Harvard, is published on the issue, he said Owens can say things about it even he cannot.
“It’s the stuff that you can do better than pretty much anyone else because No. 1, if I talk about the normalization of pornography in the culture, I’m a sexist,” Shapiro said. “If you talk about the normalization of pornography of the culture, then you’re a feminist. So it’s good.”
Owens said pornography dominates social media, which has led to the normalization of an industry once relegated to magazines kept behind store counters and sold in brown-paper bags. Kim Kardashian, she noted, used the internet to build her billion-dollar brand off of selling her nude body, she said. Kardashian became famous after a sex tape of her and a rapper went viral online.
.@benshapiro: "[Porn] is pandering to the worst in men. It is pandering to male desires. It is causing women to have to exploit their bodies in order to get attention." pic.twitter.com/PqAb0b0RDn
— DailyWire+ (@dailywireplus) September 14, 2022
“Her mother sat there and watched the sex tapes, and it was a complete PR move, and they released the tape that they thought was the best two out of three that they had her shoe, according to the man in the film, Ray J,” said the outspoken Owens, who made waves on her show Tuesday when she called Kardashian a “prostitute,” and her manager/mother Kris Jenner a “pimp.”
“And of course, it gets completely ignored by the mainstream media for being disgusting,” Owens continued. “Instead, if it’s paid attention to at all, it’s sort of in the subculture of the internet because you’re not allowed to report that Kim Kardashian has obviously exploited her body for money.”
Shapiro noted that long before he wrote his book about the subject, feminism and pornography were at odds.
“Back in the seventies, the feminist movement said pornography is exploitative because it obviously is pandering to the worst male desires [by] causing women to have to exploit their bodies in order to get attention,” Shapiro said.
But then the feminist movement changed its view during the 1980s and 1990s, embracing pornography as “empowering,” Shapiro observed. Now it has come so far that Hillary Clinton, for her new Apple TV show “Gutsy,” interviewed singer Megan Thee Stallion about her hit song WAP, an acronym so filthy it can’t be printed here. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state nodded in agreement as the singer characterized the son’s vile lyrics as liberating for women.
One of the most destructive influences of pornography, according to Owens, is on the men who consume it. They have become weaker husbands and fathers, or worse still, loners unable to forge meaningful relationships with women.
“It’s actually harming women and it’s harming families,” Owens said, claiming that it plays into the hands of the Left, which she said seeks to destroy the nuclear family and replace it with an all-powerful socialist government.
“Pay attention to the various ways that they are attacking the family,” Owens said. “It’s through pornography.”
Owens also updated Shapiro on her upcoming Daily Wire documentary, “The Greatest Lie Ever Told,” about the exploitation of George Floyd’s 2020 death by Black Lives Matter and much of the legacy media. Owens said the documentary’s release has been delayed in part by recent, damning revelations about BLM’s finances.
“I came to the Daily Wire and said, ‘I really want to do this,’ because I was castigated for being really kind of the first black voice that spoke up against the narrative that George Floyd was some hero,” she said. “It just wasn’t allowed.
“I really made it my mission to not just say the truth, but to continue to say the truth and to really unlock the answer to the question, ‘What happened to the $90 million that Black Lives Matter, the Black Lives Matter organization raised on the back of the George Floyd riots?’” she said. “We decided to find out, and it is going to astonish people.”