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.
Also the author never brought up the "role of government". You're projecting. The hypocrisy is bewildering Yes it must be especially bewildering to you since he didn't bring up the government or censorship at all.
Meanwhile, your "do not lecture me" ditty DOES imply you don't want this author to avail himself of his free speech rights. Hypocrisy indeed.
___ LOL you should take your own advice! If you don't like what this author is saying don't read it !!!!! Free speech and all that.
___Also the author never brought up the "role of government". You're projecting.
The hypocrisy is bewildering
___ Yes it must be especially bewildering to you since he didn't bring up the government or censorship at all.
___Meanwhile, your "do not lecture me" ditty DOES imply you don't want this author to avail himself of his free speech rights. Hypocrisy indeed.
Sorry, but I don't have an inferiority complex when it comes to Europeans so your pseudosophisticated, peer-pressure argument doesn't carry much weight with me.
It wasn't an argument, slick. It was an observation.
Hey there, Lorianne. I try not to be a hypocrite. I don't think it helps men to be promiscuous either! As a Christian, I really do believe (and I know this is radical for most) that sex is best reserved for marriage. My wife was a virgin when we married, and while I was not, I tried to be (and failed). In a deep sense, my wife had more to offer me in this regard than I her. I regret that, and value what she offered me. But it is nevertheless true that, on average, men are far more swayed by sex, by thoughts of sex. It is wired into them. Until recently in our society, women tried to use their own self control and virtue to help keep men's lust under control. Men knew that women wouldn't respect them if they just went after their bodies. Women knew to hold out to see if the man in question REALLY cared for her (enough to forego sex). Today, women have given that up for the most part. Men don't need to restrain themselves and most women never find out what the man really feels for her. Sex in the City is the greatest show because it illustrates this so clearly. Out looking for a committed man, the women on the show run from one date to another, bedding each man along the way. They've made themselves cheaper and subsequently attract cheap men. I'm not being hypocritical. I'm saying that men were always thugs (on average) sexually and women didn't used to be (on average). Now women (on average) are as well.
I am 34, and have been "pornography free" for less than a month now. I already feel better psychologically and find my marital relations improving, although they weren't bad before now.
I have viewed and paid for pornography since about age 17. The amount of money I have spent on it (and concealed) in all its forms would easily add up to $10,000, if not much more.
I decided that I want to go clean now for my family's sake. I have a daughter who is 4 and a son who is 2, and I want them to have a father who is clean. I don't mind them finding out later on about my past addiction, provided it can serve as a teaching tool about its dangers and temptations.
I guess since I am under a month without porn I am high-risk for a relapse so I would appreciate anyones' prayers about my situation.
I am still fairly inarticulate about my philisophical objections to porn, it just seemed to be something that I didn't want to have in my family anymore, even if when I was viewing it it was by myself.
I think it would be really cool if everyone individually decided to turn away from porn without banning it, and that all of the porn purveyors went bankrupt. Not that I expect that to happen.
For those keeping score on the bankruptcy front, "Porn Stocks" include PLA, LNET, NOOF, PRVT, MGBL and RICK. I'm only including companies that provide the stuff directly and not those with "side" porn businesses like AT&T. It would be interesting at least to see these companies have a revenue decline...
The intense sex drive is wired into both genders. But Western culture has traditionally required and depended on women maturing beyond this adolescent phase and using responsibility and restraint. In other cultures, women are considered the irrepressible sexual animals. Many Western women have in the last few decades simply followed the lead of men in refusing to take responsibility for their sexual thoughts, impulses and actions. Both genders have the God-given ability to rise above animalistic behavior.
I agree that society was better off when at least women exercised responsibility and maturity in sexual matters. But I pray for the day when our culture and most men realize that they have the ability to mature beyond the adolescent raging hormones level.
If we follow your logic, which seems to make women responsible for men's behaviour, we'll end up like some countries which stone women for adultery while the male component of the adulturous act is not punished at all. I'm not saying this is what you advocate, just that this is the trajectory of that type of logic.
Each man is responsible individually for his own sexual actions and his own morality. No one else. Ditto for women, each individually. No person is responsible for the moral decisions of another. Individual free will is our only claim to "humaness".
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I also agree with you about shows like Sex in the City. These shows do not reflect the values of American women, they instead attempt to construct them. The same could be said about much pornography and the values of men.
There is an editorial/tutorial aspect to all media (including by the way the Bible). Media is used for communication of ideas and concepts and values. Porn is no different in this respect. It is only the message which is different in each form of media, but ultimately all media is broadcasting an idea or concept. All ideas/concepts are subject to criticism in our society.
What is most effective in our pluralistic free society is free and open exchange of ideas and counterering of ideas and concepts with other ideas and concepts. Therefore, criticism of porn (or TV shows) or ANY other media and the concepts held within them, is a valid pursuit.
Those who wish to shut down free exchange of and open criticism of various ideas and concepts in media are the true enemies of Free Speech.
Thankfully we're coming to the end of that era.
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