Royally anti-porn

Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore believes pornography can poison men’s minds.

In an era when powerful men are falling from grace due to sexual misconduct toward women, Moore hopes to use his position of power to teach ballplayers throughout the Royals organization to view and treat women properly. That starts with addressing men’s mindsets, in Moore’s view, and he sees porn as a feeder problem, if not a root cause—even if secular society won’t acknowledge it as such.

Moore thus had Fight the New Drug (FTND), a nonreligious anti-porn organization, host a seminar about the evils of adult entertainment during spring training at the Royals’ training complex in Surprise, Ariz. Attendance was mandatory for the Royals’ minor leaguers but optional for major leaguers.

“To me, educating our players about the harmful effects of pornography is similar to the importance of honoring women, respecting women and looking at them as human beings and not as sexual objects,” Moore told USA Today. “Most of these young men are going to be husbands and fathers. It’s our job to educate them.”

Many in the national media disagree: Lisa Ann, a former pornographic film star who hosts a fantasy sports show on satellite radio, says the Royals have no business telling players how to spend their free time. National sportswriter Charles P. Pierce wrote for Sports Illustrated that “part of me wonders where the management of a baseball team gets off promoting what may well be camouflaged quackery to its players.” (FTND’s research concerning the adverse effects of pornography on the brain has come under fire from some scientists—a 2016 op-ed in The Salt Lake Tribune accused FTND of “systematically misrepresenting science.”)

Still, Moore, a devout Christian, recalls the lasting effects of his own experiences viewing porn in his 20s as well as those that young men between the ages of 16 and 25 have recounted to him. That includes the story of a prison inmate who committed rape at age 15—after he started viewing porn at age 12.

Most professional baseball players, especially in the minors, fall into the 16-25 age range. Neuroscientists generally believe the brain is still developing in one’s teens and early 20s and doesn’t fully mature until roughly age 25.

This means the adolescent brain is still being hard-wired, and the damage from viewing pornography at that age can be lasting. According to a 2011 Psychology Today article, viewing porn during the brain’s developmental stages “has the potential to lead to great problems in sexual compulsivity and sex addiction throughout the adolescent boy’s life because his brain gets shaped to expect the ‘heroin-like’ porn dopamine rush from all his real-life sexual experiences.”

It doesn’t help that porn is readily accessible at no cost via electronic tablets and smartphones—or that ballplayers often have long hours to fill while traveling. Also, should a player suffer sleep deprivation while feeding his porn addiction, as porn addicts often do, it could adversely affect his performance: “In a game that requires concentration and focus over 162 games, I’ve yet to run into a player where their personal life doesn’t affect their play on the field,” Moore told the sports website The Athletic.

Moore won’t go so far as to ban porn from the Royals’ clubhouse, as the Colorado Rockies reportedly did under then-general manager Dan O’Dowd in the mid to late 2000s. Still, Moore seems to have his players’ support: “The porn thing is a big deal,” Royals outfielder Alex Gordon said. “And with the outlet to social media and everything, people don’t realize how much it affects people.”