Actress Ali Wentworth says she'd watch porn with daughters: 'You can't stop them'
Actress and comedian Ali Wentworth recently suggested that she was open to viewing pornography with her teenage daughters.
While on “The Dissenters” podcast, Wentworth, the wife of ABC News personality George Stephanopoulos, was asked by co-hosts Debra Messing and Mandana Dayani “how do you stop kids from looking at porn 24/7?”
She responded, “You certainly can’t stop them.”
Get Our Latest News for FREE
“They shouldn’t be looking at it 24/7,” she said. “If they look at porn, I would look at the porn with them, that one time, and go ‘they are performing.’”
“I’d sit there with them and go … like you’re in school and just go… ‘this is what’s going on, you know, and this guy’s probably married and has kids at home … He’s doing this because he makes money.’”
Wentworth also claimed that she would point to pornography as something that people use to “pleasure themselves” in “the privacy of their own home.” She said that she would describe porn as a “performance” and “not real” to her children as she watched it with them.
The actress dismissed the idea of taking a “block and say no” approach to pornography with children because it “piques their curiosity.” Instead, she spoke in favor of “them knowing what that is” and implied that she hoped exposure to pornography would “take its powers away,” making her children less likely to consume it in the future.
According to Wentworth, at least one of her children already opposes pornography. She told an anecdote about her daughter yelling at her husband when he admitted to watching porn in the past.
“She said ‘Just remember the next time you look at porn, that that young woman in that movie is somebody’s daughter! How would you like it if was your daughter? And she was probably trafficked into this, she doesn’t want to do this. She’s trying to make enough money to feed her baby.’”
The discussion about pornography began on the podcast when Wentworth was reminded of a panel she participated in where she said “every kid watches porn.”
“Our boys have such an easy access to porn and then they start thinking … ‘this is sex,’” she said. She noted that pornography gives teenage boys unrealistic expectations about what the female anatomy looks like.
She stressed the importance of making sure that teenagers know “what sex really is” and “how it’s about two people coming together.” “You emphasize the union of the man and woman and …having feelings,” she said.
Her comments come after actor Terry Crews called for the defunding of Pornhub. Crews was previously addicted to porn and lamented that “it changes the way you think about people. People become objects.” An online petition that calls for Pornhub to be shut down now has more than 1.6 million signatures.
