Posted on 06/17/2002 8:25:38 PM PDT by JMJ333
There is a body of water in Eastern Canada that has the improbable name of "Lake Despair". This sinister appellation is an accident of language. The French originally called it Lac d'espoir (Lake of Hope). English-speaking settlers in the region, accustomed to hearing only their own language, misperceived its name. And so it became known, culturally and cartographically, as Lake Despair. This type of metamorphosis occurs just as easily on a moral plane.
Pornography takes human sexuality, with its hope of love, fidelity, family, and fulfillment, and turns it into an empty and lifeless husk. It does this as a predator destroys its prey, by eviscerating sexuality of all its inherent grace. This transmogrification, which some mistake as emancipation, takes place through processes that are neither liberating or enriching, but Depersonalizing, Enslaving, Self-destructive, Preposterous, Alienating, Isolating, Reductionistic. The process can be subtle enough that, for some, it goes unnoticed. But ultimately, the difference between the reality of human sexuality and its residue in pornography is all the difference in the world. It is the difference between what "gift" means in English and what "Gift" (poison) means in German. Indeed, it is the difference between hope and despair, heaven and hell.
DEPERSONALIZING
Pornography displaces love with lust. The fundamental reason that lust is listed as one of the Seven Deadly Sins is precisely that it gives pleasure primacy over the person. Lust prefers the experience of pleasure to the good of the person. Rather than loving the other, lust prefers to appropriate the other for the self. Such an inversion of proper values is at once unjust to the other who is regarded primarily as an instrument of pleasure, and destructive of the self inasmuch as it undermines his own nature as a loving being.
In his "Theology of the Body," John Paul II states that lust "'depersonalizes' man making him an object 'for the other'. Instead of being 'together with the other' - a subject in unity, in fact, in the sacramental unity 'of the body' - man becomes an object for man: the female for the male and vice versa." With lust, the subjectivity of the person gives way to the objectivity of the body.
In his book, The Case Against Pornography, David Holbrook argues that pornography is connected with the same processes of objectivization that is essential to the Galilean-Newtonian-Cartesian tradition that lowers nature and man "to the status of dead objects". Psychiatrist Leslie Farber and others have described the depersonalizing effects of pornography most vividly by stating that it transfers the fig leaf to the face. Pornography is not interested in the face, through which personality shines, but the objectivized and devitalized body. Pornography represses personality and exalts the depersonalized, despiritualized body.
ENSLAVING
The process by which one objectivizes the other, results in an objectivization of the self. This is the basis of slavery. "The enslaving of the other," writes Christian existentialist Nikolai Berdyaev, "is also the enslaving of the self." Viewing the other as a depersonalized, despiritualized object is incompatible with communion.
But only through inter-personal communion is one liberated form the world that is enclosed in the material. "By objectivization," Berdyaev goes on to say, "the subject enslaves itself and creates the realm of determinism."
Pornography enslaves by imprisoning people in the material. It also enslaves because it erodes personal freedom. "There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us," wrote C. S. Lewis. "Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance."
A third way in which pornography enslaves is through chemical addiction. When the pornography addict indulges in his habit, the adrenal gland secretes the chemical epinephrine into the blood stream. According to David Caton, author of Pornogrpahy: The Addiction, epinephrine goes to the brain and assists in locking in the pornographic images. These locked-in images can result in severely changed behavior, including an obsession with pornography that has much in common with chemical addiction.
SELF-DESTRUCTIVE
The depersonalizing and enslaving effects of pornography are inevitably self-destructive. The high rate of suicides among pornography actresses is a graphic indication of this.
The notion of "stripping," especially when applied to the pornographic film, goes far beyond the act of disrobing. It represents the stripping away of inner qualities as well: character, moral values, shame, fundamental decency, restraint. The logical end-point of such pornographic stripping is the complete dissolution of the self. In this regard, pornography leads to sado-masochism and death, as illustrated in the infamous "snuff" films.
Canadian Business magazine reports that "Hard-core Capitalists" stand to make so much money in peddling illegal porn that they are undeterred by the criminal sanctions against it. One producer, that fittingly calls itself Dead Parrot Productions, caters to the appetite for sado-masochism and self-destruction.
PREPOSTEROUS
Preposterous, as its etymology indicates (prae + posterius) means putting before, that which should come after. Trying to remove your socks before you have taken your shoes off, rather than after, is clearly preposterous. Pornography is preposterous because it puts sex before personhood, lust before love, pleasure before conscience.
When Adam awakened from a deep sleep and looked upon a woman for the first time, he joyously exclaimed: "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh" (Gn. 2:23). "He rightly understood that his partner was first and foremost a human being, like himself, and secondarily sexual. He did not exclaim: "This at last is the opposite sex, a convenient instrument for my sexual gratification." The human relationship comes first; the sexual relationship must be grounded in personal love.
As a result of the Fall, Adam and Eve began to get things backwards. They experienced shame because they suddenly regarded each other first as sex objects and secondarily as persons. They then made aprons of fig leaves to cover themselves. Pornography and pornovision, by placing the part before the whole, sexuality before personality, is preposterous and therefore, in a sense, ludicrous.
ALIENATING
The porn world is not without rules. One cardinal rule is that its performers remain safely alienated from their clients. Because pornography is primarily centered on the despiritualized, depersonalized body, alienation is essential to it.
In the telephone sex industry, operators are instructed to advise customers who want to arrange a tryst that "company policy" forbids it. Also, because pornography in its various forms, relies heavily on illusion, it cannot abide the light of realism. The voyeur is obliged to remain an alienated spectator. The tenuous relationship between the voyeur and the exhibitionist evaporates once personality enters the picture. As C. S. Lewis pointed out in his Allegory of Love, lust seeks "for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness."
ISOLATING
Alienation between people leads to the isolation of the self. This isolation of the self from a significant other and from community must not be confused with the right to privacy. Privacy means two things. In the first sense, it is contrasted with what is public. Sexual intimacy between husband and wife is private in this sense. John Paul II has rightly criticized pornography and pornovision for violating this legitimate right to privacy of the body.
On the other hand, privacy can refer to self-isolation, of withdrawing from social encounters. Pornography violates legitimateprivacy and encourages the illegitimate privacy of isolation. It exposes a personal privacy that should be protected, while it promotes an isolated privacy that should be avoided. Consequently, it is highly injurious to marriage and the family, often leaving spouses, particularly husbands, isolated from the rest of their kin.
REDUCTIONISTIC
Pornography reduces the person to a thing. Perhaps a more revealing way of putting it is to say that pornography exchanges a name for a number. Hence its preoccupation with numbers: the size of the organs, the duration of intercourse, the number of partners, the frequency and intensity of orgasm. The so-called "vital statistics" do not denote life as such as much as a person reduced to a thing.
Mechanization, which invariably stamps things with sameness, has a strong affinity with pornography. They are both highly impersonal processes whose language is not of names, but of numbers. Pornography forces the impression upon the imagination that a human being is not an individualized person, but an amalgam of parts. One of the more pernicious consequences of the Freudean reduction of the person to conflicting parts is the willingness to ascribe rights to its most basic part, namely, the id. O. Hobart Mowrer has inveighed against Freudeanism for "championing the rights of the body in opposition to a society and moral order which were presumed to be unduly harsh and arbitrary."
Nonetheless, a human being is not a conflict of parts but a dynamic whole that has a communal nature and a personal destiny.
***************
The porn industry, with its words, images, voices, and videos, is, indeed, a formula for despair. From its very essence springs the need to create the illusion that the body is in fundamental conflict with the unified person. Its unremitting aim is to bring about a condition of utter shamelessness through the gradual annihilation of authentic personality.
And a good woman knows this.
I disagree. There are plenty of virile young men who know how to appropriately control their sexual desires, and who are strong enough to not need porn. That's the kind I'd like for my daughter.
Well, the legal system where they are is not like ours, or yours.
Sorry for being so obtuse but there's a good reason for it.
Of course - life is full of choices like that. We have only a limited amount of time, and so we must prioritize our desires in order to make efficient use of that time. Perhaps you can inspire someone else to take up the slack if you find that you lack the time.
But I would really prefer to not constantly be assaulted by my government(s). That's obviously too much to hope for these days.
LOL - I think we would all prefer a society that was perfectly in accord with our own personal notions of how things should be, right from the start. The problem is that everyone feels that way, and most people can't agree on toppings for a pizza, let alone how society should be organized. Thus, we are forced to spend a great deal of time persuading others of things that seem self-evident to us.
But, if you can find a way around that, and you make me an absolute dictator, with unlimited powers and the means to enforce my desires, I promise to ruthlessly and swiftly implement my preferred vision for society.
No? That's okay - I'm not quite ready to cede that power to you either ;)
I'll second that! However, it may not be my choice when the time arrives. Unfortunately, youth is wasted on the young.
"There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us," wrote C. S. Lewis. "Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance."
Our porno culture has made most American men as easy to manipulate as a bull with a ring through its nose. Real men don't need porn.
Hell, real men can't stand it.
I used to believe this when I was younger and a bit more naive about things in general. This type of thing is said often to anyone who decides not to "go with popular opinion"... as was my case during my college years. As time passed, I've come to realize what a lie this is. Some people will try to manipulate and derail you when it comes to issues of moral consequence if they don't agree with your viewpoint. They will tell you things that reflect more upon their own views about life rather than reality. As a teenager, my father was right in telling me "wait until you're ready to marry", "don't date a dirtbag", and that he'd point his shotgun at anyone that tried to touch me. lol
"Man is always something worse or something better than an animal; and a mere argument from animal perfection never touches him at all. Thus, in sex no animal is either chivalrous or obscene. And thus no animal invented anything so bad as drunkeness - or so good as drink."-G.K. Chesterton
Speaking of "meaningful debate", it hardly helps when you whine about wanting meaningful debate in the very same post that you erect and then kick over a very transparent straw man argument (e.g. no one here has made the assertion that "porn is perfectly harmless" -- you're vastly distorting their actual positions, in a cheap attempt to slander and/or pretend that their positions are truly that simplistic and easy to dismiss).
Or maybe your level of comprehension really *is* that bad.
Either way, I'm not impressed.
You have also complained repeatedly about how no one (you say) actually addresses the essay itself (even though a number of people have).
This is ironic, because when *I* deconstructed a portion of the essay and pointed out the flaws therein, your response is to ignore my actual points and do a bait-and-switch of your own by responding with nothing but an irrelevant rant:
Funny how you porn champions have to slam people of faith. Notice no one has preached on this thread. It was strictly the effects as described in the article. I guess, though, when you cheer porn it shouldn't be surprising that you're hostile to religion.
You need to get your glasses checked, because I didn't mention faith or religion in the least.
Hint: The phrase "holier-than-thou", which apparently caused your knee to jerk so violently, is not restricted to theological uses. It's quite often used to describe any sort of "I'm a better person than the scum who aren't like me" attitude, and that's how I was using it, as should have been entirely clear from the context.
I have no "hostility to religion". Your reflexive rant, based on nothing more than your hypersensitive reaction to a single word in my post, says a lot more about you than it does about me.
I am hardly a "porn champion", I have never "slammed people of faith", I said nothing that would indicate that I thought anyone was "preaching" on this thread, and I don't "cheer porn".
You presume hugely. Your arrogance is breathtaking. I regret to inform you that you are not nearly as insightful as you apparently think you are. You struck out with every conclusion you have attempted to draw about me.
And you ran away (spewing insults) from the opportunity to address my comments on the essay directly, with anything approaching a rational rebuttal. You're more interested in broadly denouncing me.
Despite your protestations, I don't think you're as interested in having an actual discussion on this topic as you are in exercising your (here's that phrase again) holier-than-thou attitude. Any time someone has dared take issue with any aspect of the article, you've slammed them as sex-crazed/god-haters/lowlifes, and dismissed them as being beneath your righteous self.
Pride is one of the deadly sins, too, you know.
Your complaint, that the posters did not directly refute the original post can not be resolved. It is like two people arguing about computers; one says "I like the IBM because it has more MHz", the other says "I like the Mac because it has a friendly user interface", and the first replying "But you didn't show what was wrong with my reasoning."
That said, I will give my opion. First, pornography is clearly immoral. To quote Jesus, "You have heard it said 'Do not commit adultery', but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart."
Secondly, a great many Christians, including the original author, are hypocritical by focusing too much on pornography compared to other sins. In his speech, Jesus makes an identical comparison between anger and murder. Yet where are all the articles ranting about the evils caused by short temperedness? If one preacher looses his temper, and another buys a playboy, which one is in danger of being expelled from his job?
Also in that same speech, Jesus says "anyone who divorces his wife, except for martial unfaithfullness, causes her to become an adulteress, and anyone who marries the divorced woman commits adultery." And yet, where are all the Christain articles saying that divorces should be outlawed? The Catholic Church is quite clear on its stand -- although the law may give you a second marriage, the Church will not bestow its blessing, but most Protestants give no more than vague assurances that there should be "fewer" divorces. Forgive my bluntness, but Clinton's attitute toward abortion ("safe, legal, and rare") falls in the same category.
So in summary, while I grant that pornography is sinfull, I think that not only is it a minor sin compared to others, but also many of the people condemning pornography are hypocritically ignoring other sins mentioned in the same speech which are just as bad [or worse if we believe that murder is worse than adultery].
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