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.
LOL...
I thought you might be up for a good debate, but alas I had to settle for the junior high students...
I'm embarassing MYSELF?!? . Compared to who? The sophomoric naval gazers who come on this thread and act like little boys huddled together around a playboy? LOL sheesh.
Either be specific about what you disagree with or I go back to sleep. I'm still tired from last night.
There is something we can wholeheartedly agree on!
Maybe that's one of the reasons Clinton wanted to hook schools up to the pornography superhighway. That transvaluation of values thing.
Great article.
That would require the average American woman to be more than a moneygrubbing self-centered shrew, dangling the enticement of a hope for companionship before men...
Pornography is a dead-end, but it's better than dealing with the average American woman of today.
Hell, on this subject I'm always up for a good debate. I don't know how this thread flew under my FRadar.
First off, it's "compared to whom" and "navel" vice "naval." < / needling grin, I'm no nit-picker >Second off, you're not embarrassing yourself compared to others on this thread, you're embarrassing yourself by holding up this article as empirical evidence that pornography is bad. From my first post: "Look at the sub-heads . . . all subjective, yet the author tries to prove each point objectively by quoting people/authors/experts who agree. This piece claims to appeal to reason but trumpets nothing but emotion."
The corporation that I work for cares not a whit about me as a person, but reduces me to a fuction to satisfy its own needs. In the same way, clothing models or actors in television commercials are reduced into depersonalized figures who serve merely to sell the product.
Thus, the reductionist argument advocated by the posted article seems to be more of an idictment of free market capitalism than it does pornography. This is perhaps why the Catholic Church has traditionally contained a large socialist strain...
I was hoping that instead of giving some grand sweeping dismissal of the article, you would have a reasonable opinion as to why you disagree with this or that. To say that the article has no worth and is melodramatic isn't my idea of good substance, but I will let you make the call.
Regardless, I appreciate you replying. =)
Actually it was Ted Bundy that said that Ted Bundy was influenced by pornography.
But in both cases, the person is reduced into an intrument for the satisfaction of needs, regardless of what those needs may be. There is no essential difference; depersonalization is depersonalization, plain and simple.
Not everything "legal" is defensible. In some cultures, eating captives from another tribe is "legal." In some cultures, beating your wife is "legal." In our own, dismembering your child in the womb is "legal."
I happen to believe that sexuality is much more than a mechanical friction of body parts. For instance, for me, only a woman will do - not a man, not a child, not an animal, and not an inanimate object. Why is that? Doesn't that alone suggest that there is much more to it than a physical feeling?
So, I not only believe there is much more to it than the "f*** anyone or anything at any time for any reason" message of pornography, but I believe sexuality is at the core of creation. It is not only not mundane, but so much a part of what we are that it is highly important.
Therefore, I would want to teach my children the importance of sexuality, and the danger of spitting in the face of God, and embracing what is nothing more than sexual gluttony. I believe when a man and woman copulate, they "become one" as an apostle of Christ once said. They become one spiritually, as well as physically, whether they like it or not. Eros was not meant to end. So when people copulate, then part ways, they are engaging in a spiritual self-mutilation which hardens the heart. What are all the painful love songs about? This seems so obvious that it seems strange to have to point all this out, but that is something immorality does to us - it confuses and clouds our minds, as well as our hearts.
So, if I'm driving down the road and see a big billboard telling not just me, but my children, to gratify my sexual appetite with the equivalent of sexual narcotics, or I see a movie (and they almost all do these days) spouting the same propaganda that sex is mundane or meaningless, or I see an airplane fly over my house (this actually happened at my brother's house in Tampa) advertising a t**** bar, or if one of my children finds someone's stash of porn in the woods and is damaged by it, I get a little resentful.
IN fact, I get so resentful, that burning down the billboards or shooting down the plane crosses my mind. This is a war for the hearts, minds, and souls of my dear children, after all.
So, the fact that you are blind, from your lusts, to the nature of the universe is not going to keep me from protecting my children, or my liberties, for that matter. I oppose laws that are unenforcable, such as trying to control what adults look at in their homes, or eat, or smoke, but the billboards and the banner planes don't have to be tolerated, in the guise of "freedom." The Founders knew that the immoral HAVE no freedoms, so to slant our laws in their favor is suicide.
But the immoral are such a majority today that they run our government. And that is why we are headed for civil war, a police state, or both.
PLease think about what I'm saying. My position has been held by billions of people throughout history in the western world, and even in much of Asia and other cultures. Suddenly, a few of you modern men decide we can do without that common wisdom. You better have darn good reasons to scrap it all overnight. As G. K. Chesterton says, if you come to a bridge and don't know why it's there, you better find out why it was built before you wantonly tear it down.
DEPERSONALIZING
"Pornography displaces love with lust."
When? To what degree? What kind of love does it displace? Does pornography always displace all love whenever it's present?
ENSLAVING
"Pornography enslaves by imprisoning people in the material."
What does this sentence mean, exactly?
"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."
So does everything else that produces the chemical reaction we call happiness.
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."
Does the high rate of suicides among musicians or authors indicate that music or literature is inevitably self-destructive? Or how about the high rate of suicide among dentists and psychiatrists? Is dentistry or psychiatry inevitably self-destructive?
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."
Exactly how does one measure personhood, love, and conscience?
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."
Porn is fantasy. "Alienation" is not the correct word for the fantasy world pornography creates.
ISOLATING
"Alienation between people leads to the isolation of the self."
This point is so obtuse I have trouble questioning it. Is the author trying to suggest pornograpy somehow violates the "right to privacy" because it . . . I am terribly confused.
REDUCTIONISTIC
"Pornography reduces the person to a thing."
Well here, I agree. But I'd rephrase: pornography is about fantasy. It uses human actors to create an unreal fantasy world. But that could be said of any movie, television show, photograph, book, song, etc. ever produced.
You made much ado about the fact that no one on this thread was dealing with your reductionism argument. Then, when I provide you with an intellectual counter-argument against it, you can only respond by calling me a libertine and with other ad hominem attacks. Rather disingenous of you, really.
...the devil would have you believe - While it may rank low, look back 150 years and ask yourself what has driven this declining standard.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.