Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, author of the book Kosher Sex, has teamed up with Pamela Anderson, the actress and former Playboy model, to warn of “the dangers of pornography.”
In an article co-written by them in the Wall Street Journal, they described pornography as “a public hazard of unprecedented seriousness”.
Rabbi Boteach and Ms Anderson cited statistics from the American Psychological Association, stating that porn consumption rates are between 50 per cent and 99 per cent among men and 30 per cent to 86 per cent among women.
They warned that: “The incidence of porn addiction will only spiral as the children now being raised in an environment of wall-to-wall, digitised sexual images become adults inured to intimacy and in need of even greater graphic stimulation.”
They cited the scandals surrounding the Jewish former Congressman Anthony Weiner as an example of the “addictive dangers of pornography”.
Mr Weiner has been caught “sexting”, sending naked or semi-naked pictures of himself to others, on at least three occasions. Earlier this week his wife announced she intended to separate from her husband, after he sent a topless photo of himself which included his four-year-old son in the background.
Rabbi Boteach and Ms Anderson called for “a sensual revolution” to “replace pornography with eroticism, the alloying of sex with love, of physicality with personality, of the body’s mechanics with imagination, of orgasmic release with binding relationships.”
“We must educate ourselves and our children to understand that porn is for losers — a boring, wasteful and dead-end outlet for people too lazy to reap the ample rewards of healthy sexuality,” they wrote.
