Don’t Polarize the Fight against Porn

I n 1958, Oscar Hammerstein told Mike Wallace that Oklahoma!, the hit musical he wrote with Richard Rodgers, “has no particular message except that it has a flavor which infects the people who see it. It’s gaiety. Oklahoma! is youth and irresponsible and not-very-intellectual heartiness in life.”

It’s no coincidence that a musical of youthful heartiness is anti-porn.

Oklahoma!, which opened on Broadway in 1943, is set in 1906, when Oklahoma was still a territory. The western territories in the late 1800s and early 1900s were prime markets for pornographers. The people most likely to uproot their lives and move west at the time were young, disaffected men. They moved to wide-open spaces on the frontier, where they spent most of their time either alone or with other men.

Nowadays, we associate porn with the Internet, which has, of course, made indulging the temptation much easier. The threat environment since 2005, when porn-tube sites started, is like nothing before (and, as I wrote in July, the church has been powerless to stop the flood of pornography). But the source of pornography’s appeal does not lie primarily in its ease of access.

In Oklahoma! we see testosterone-filled desperation play out on stage. (Descriptions in this piece are based on the 1998 West End revival starring Hugh Jackman, which was released as a movie and is available on streaming platforms.) A cowboy returns from a trip to Kansas City and describes the burlesque show he saw there. He also shows off his purchase of a “Little Wonder,” a metal tube with pornographic images in it that can be viewed by holding it up to the light — the Pornhub of 1906. Every man on stage is practically drooling.

The musical centers on the love story of Curly McLain and Laurey Williams. Though obviously attracted to Curly, Laurey is doggedly independent. To spite Curly, she accepts an invitation to a dance from Jud Fry, a farmhand and a loner who lives in an old smokehouse. The date is a disaster, leaving Laurey terrified of Jud.

Curly decides to pay a visit to the smokehouse, where he finds that Jud lives in the dark, plays with guns, and has a collection of pictures of naked women. After discussing the pictures, the conversation between Curly and Jud quickly turns as dark as Jud’s hovel. Curly notices a rope hanging from the ceiling and says it’s strong enough to hang someone. They start wondering, first in speech and then in song, what it would be like for Jud to hang himself, and what the funeral would be like. Curly says there would be lots of women there, which surprises the lonely Jud, but Curly reassures him that “they don’t never come right out and show you how they feel less’n you die first.”

Things turn confrontational when Curly asks Jud, “How’d you get to be the way you are?” That question sends Jud into a rage. After Curly leaves, Jud is visited by a traveling salesman who tries to sell him more nude pictures. Jud says, “Sick of them things. I’m going to get me a real woman.” In the number “Lonely Room,” Jud sings about a real woman’s soft arms and feeling her hair on his face. The song ends by resolving to action:

I ain’t gonna dream about her arms no more!
I ain’t gonna leave her alone!
Goin’ outside
Git myself a bride
Git me a woman to call my own.

The problem for Jud is that his strange living arrangements and sullenness have made him completely unattractive to any woman, especially the beautiful Laurey — though there is another layer under her repulsion. The first act ends with a nearly 15-minute “dream ballet” sequence. After dancing expressively with Curly, she then dreams of her wedding day. She puts on a veil and stands across from the groom. When the groom pulls back her veil, she is stunned to realize it’s Jud.

The music stops, then turns foreboding. Laurey begins to dance with Jud, with none of her previous energy. Jud kisses her neck forcefully, and she falls to the ground. He drags her, then picks her up, and then six burlesque dancers appear on stage. They dance with Jud while Laurey watches. Laurey scrambles around stage, unsure of what to do. She eventually joins with the burlesque dancers for a moment, only to become horrified and run away.

At that moment, Curly reenters. He confronts Jud, and it becomes clear that one of them must triumph. They fight and Curly appears to win, but Jud takes him by surprise and kills him. Laurey is crawling on the ground, completely dejected, as Curly’s body is taken offstage. Everyone exits except Laurey and Jud. They stare at each other, then come together, and Jud is lying on top of her when the dream sequence ends.

In the second act, Curly gets the girl. His and Laurey’s wedding celebration is interrupted by the return of Jud, who had left town after losing his job as a result of terrifying Laurey on their date. This time, the fight between the two men is not just in Laurey’s dream. Jud has a knife, and in the scuffle, he falls on it and dies. It’s not a suicide, but he dies by his own knife in a circumstance he created because he was unable to fulfill his romantic desires.

A musical in which the villain is a porn user who dies in a futile fight for a woman he behaves badly toward sounds like a Christian morality tale, right? But it isn’t. Morals aren’t what Rodgers and Hammerstein were interested in; the musical isn’t preachy and doesn’t promote a Christian sexual ethic in general. Curly is not a role model of Christian living, nor is anyone else on the stage.

As Hammerstein told Mike Wallace, the musical is about “heartiness in life” — and the joy onstage is infectious. Yet the musical undeniably has a strong element of darkness, and porn is a contributing factor to Jud’s downfall. That’s what makes the anti-porn theme work in a perhaps unexpected way. Oklahoma! doesn’t juxtapose porn use with righteousness. It juxtaposes it with fun.

As Yuval Levin has written, “pathologies of passivity” define many American men today. Those pathologies — pornography use chief among them — are not only socially unhealthy, they’re ultimately unfun. Humans are meant to be social, not to sit in the dark alone. As some on the right begin to talk about rejuvenating masculinity, it’s important to remember that the tough-love, grow-up approach is not the only way to get men to see what ails them. That approach is sometimes warranted, but an alternative approach would celebrate the joys to be found in relationships and community, as we see in Oklahoma!

Conservatives should be anti-porn, but they should also remember that, while there are pro-porn elements of the Left, the Left as a whole is not the enemy here. The rot runs much deeper than our political divide. The Democratic Party might advocate socially liberal policies, but it’s not Democrats’ fault that men watch porn. Men were using pornography way before the critical feminist movement began talking about “toxic masculinity.” They were using it before Oklahoma was a state.

In their conversation in the smokehouse, Curly tells Jud there are two options for men. “Live out of doors is one. Live in a hole is the other.” There are lots of men in the United States, on the left and on the right, living in holes. If we’re serious about wanting them to live out of doors — and we absolutely should be — it doesn’t do us any good to make this issue one more front in the culture wars.