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.
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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.
In the Apollonian-Dionysian worlds Pornography stands in the shadows while in the lihght of everyday we are constantly exposed to softcore porn as well as the hyper sexualisation of young people.
Where's the outrage? Railing against a regulated and small niche outlet is a form of masturbation while the larger issue of hypersexualised Abercrombie and Fitch marketing goes on relentlessly.
Here, I think is the real problem. Both the Abercrombie-Fitch catalog and Internet pornography, while issues themselves, are symptoms of the oversexualization in American society. Another was the years long discussion of whether two fictional characters, Scully and Mulder, who were co-workers at the FBI in the series "X-Files," would engage in a romantic or sexual relationship.
Historically, children were married young, and connsumations were also young, ca. 12, 13 years old. It was important in the past to get the next generation born, due to the historically short human lifespan. We now though have a much better medical care and there is no need to start families as young as in the past. Unfortunately, biology hasn't caught up to medicine, and teenagers are intrinsically sexualized. But that's not the real problem; children are exposed and sexualized nowadays, rather than being shielded as in the recent past. (I should note that they were not shielded from that as much in the more distant past.)
So, what's the solution? Reintroducing modesty and shame into American society is a good goal, but how?
Although it has problems, I'll back no-fault divorce. With "faulted divorce" we'll end up with unreasonable men like YOU setting the standards and "faulting" the wife because her husband is a porn addict.
The article seems to stress the harmfulness of porn addiction: but isn't ANY addiction harmful? If porn were as addictive as crack cocaine--which the article seems to imply--one look and you're hooked, well, that would be a serious problem. I don't believe that's true, though. I think that, just as with many other 'vices', like alcohol, there is a wide spectrum of users--including a few addicts, who naturally get into trouble. Addicts getting into trouble is not news. The article, to me, implies that any and all exposure to porn has the same detrimental effect as addictive usage--as if seeing a playboy could automatically destroy a marriage. No surprise if some guy ruins his marriage because he spends all night surfing for porn. The same would be true if he drank all night, or gambled all night, played video games all night, or even worked too much. But lots of people with happy, well-adjusted lives have a drink once in a while, go to Vegas once in a while, play video games once in a while, and, gasp--view porn once in a while. Does that make them drunken, profligate, lazy, and debased? I don't think so.
Hypocrisy only weakens your message.
Icky, I shudder to think
No thanks.
And if you don't want to share 1/2 when you divorce, don't marry. If you don't want be the heavy lifter financially, marry someone who makes as much or more as you do. If you marry a pauper you'll get half of nothing. Simple mathematics; its a wonder more men can't figure this one out.
Oh and for the record, your fat lesbian diatribes are getting old. There are far more men homosexuals than women homosexuals. More men are "fat" than women (check it out at the CDC website).
Actually, I think it's a lousy idea. Sex, sexuality, and sexual expression is not shameful at all. Treating it as such only adds fuel to the fire. You want to know how to pick out American tourists overseas? Stand outside a typical Amsterdam sex shop---one that's not even in the Red Light district. The people who walk by it and gawk and point and giggle at it like 13-year-old boys are the Americans. The people who don't give it a second glance are the Europeans.This whole thing is a uniquely American hang-up---that is, if you don't consider the Arabs. It's not some global "good vs. evil" battle.
I don't plan too not unless she is much richer than I am( my girlfriends family is rich but she has said she won't marry down or even either because she is just as cynical as I am).
The advocates of the contrary (actually, I'd usually refer to them as "creeps" but that would reduce the level of the discussion) are, I would bet a month's military retirement pay, the very same folks who fervently preach about the evils of government in peoples' lives. Thus, what he's really advocating is that for those things he opposes a role for government it should absatain from regulation or imposing law. But, on the other hand, for those things he finds offensive to him personally, it must therefore be offensive to everyone and axiomatically be a proper subject for government regulation and censorship.
The hypocrisy is bewildering.
Yeah, but isn't one of the points of the original piece that pornography makes people blase about sexuality, which is supposed to be a special gift from God, or something like that?
I do not believe that increasing the blase-ness...Wait a minute. What is the problem here that we are trying to solve?
Amen. Give 'em Hell on the Hudson, Cap.
Some would have you believe that, yes.
I do not believe that increasing the blase-ness...Wait a minute. What is the problem here that we are trying to solve?
Some people view pornography as the Great Satan and want to see it banished from America.
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