Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) urged young men to stop watching pornography and to “ask a real woman on a date” while speaking at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest event 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 said. “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.
Left-wing Twitter user @Acyn tweeted out the clip with the caption, “Hawley tells young men to turn off the porn and ask a real woman out.” The senator retweeted the video, writing, “I did,” and “I’m right.”
Hawley’s press secretary, Abigail Marone, shared a screenshot apparently showing @Acyn had posted a now-deleted follow-up 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 critical of pornography in the past, notably during his remarks regarding in October of last year at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, where he called out the left’s assault on traditional 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,” said Hawley.
“And while the Left may celebrate this decline of men, I for one cannot join them. No one should,” the Missouri senator went on to add.
Hawley doubled down on his comments and also defended traditional masculinity during 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 said. His comments went viral, garnering attention from the left, including some who were outraged, as Breitbart News Congressional Reporter Sean Moran noted.
In an American Perspectives Survey conducted by the Survey Center on American Life this past March, 44 percent of men aged 18-29 reported having watched pornography in the previous month, while another 30 percent said they had either viewed it in the previous year or at some point before then. One in four said they had never viewed pornography.
Additionally, the survey found that men who had watched porn in the previous 24 hours reported the highest rates of loneliness, insecurity, and unhappiness with their appearance. Their counterparts who reported having never watched porn reported the lowest levels of loneliness, insecurity, and unhappiness with their own looks, while those who had watched porn but not in the previous 24 hours were the median scores in the three categories.
“The findings here are not conclusive evidence that pornography is causing these problems,” wrote — the authors of the report associated with the survey. “Rather, these results show a strong relationship between pornography use and a variety of negative social conditions and circumstances.”
The survey sampled 2,007 U.S. adults from March 11-20. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent.