Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) advised young men not to watch porn but instead “ask a real woman on a date” during a speech at Turning Point USA's AmericaFest (AmFest) held in Phoenix, Arizona, on Sunday.
“Young men, let me make a suggestion to you: why don't you turn off the computer and log off the porn and go ask a real woman on a date?” Hawley stated. “Just a thought. Ask her out.”
“Don’t make her cater to your whims. Treat her right. Treat her like what she is, a woman, a person of incredible significance created in the image of God,” he added.
A left-wing Twitter user named @Acyn tweeted the video with the caption: “Hawley tells young men to turn off the porn and ask a real woman out.” The senator retweeted the clip, writing, “I did” and “I'm right.”
Hawley's press secretary, Abigail Marone, shared an image that appears to show that @Acyn deleted a follow-up tweet to his original tweet.
“Or just hear me out…go ask a real woman to make porn with you,” it read.
“Liberal ‘feminist’ boys scoff at the idea of asking a woman on a date and suggest making porn instead. Demented,” wrote Marone.
Hawley has been vocal about his dislike of pornography before, especially in his comments on the issue in October at last year's National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, where he criticized the left's assault on masculinity.
“Still…can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness, and pornography, and video games,” Hawley said.
“And while the Left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should,” the Missouri senator added.
Hawley repeated his remarks and also defended traditional masculinity in an interview with Axios's Mike Allen days after the speech.
“We've got to say that spending your time not working…spending your time on video games, spending your time watching porn online…is not good for you, your family or this country,” he stated. His remarks went viral, drawing attention from leftists and even enraging some.
In an American Perspectives Survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life in March, 44 percent of the men surveyed between the ages of 18 and 29 reported watching pornography during the previous month, and another 30 percent said they'd viewed it during the past year or prior to it. One in four reported that they'd never watched pornography.
In addition, the study discovered that those who watched porn in the past 24 hours experienced the highest levels of anxiety, loneliness, and discontent with their appearances. Their counterparts who had not watched porn had the lowest levels of anxiety, loneliness, and discontent about their appearances. And those who had watched porn but not within the last 24 hours had the median scores across the three categories.
“The findings here are not conclusive evidence that pornography is causing these problems,” stated Daniel A. Cox, Beatrice Lee, and Dana Popky, the survey report's authors. “Rather, these results show a strong relationship between pornography use and a variety of negative social conditions and circumstances.”
The survey involved 2,007 U.S. adult males from March 11-20. The range of error is plus or minus 2.4 percent.
