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.
If you had read the thread you would have known that it was posted purely to sway people in the arena of ideas. It is you porn champions who are so void of any meaningful debate that you rip into others when someone merely posts a thread for debate purposes. I made no excuses for being against the subject matter, but I never "deigned" to tell anyone what to do. I simply tried to persuade by logic. Sorry you couldn't handle it.
Sorry, but your argument doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why wouldn't women tend to mate with every strong, virile candidate who came along to increase the odds of having a strong, healthy child? Men make millions of sperm because the odds are so high against a sperm making it through the female reproductive system to the egg. They aren't necessarily better off sprinkling their sperm hither and thither. In fact, monogamy would seem to work best for a man with weaker sperm. Otherwise, his sperm may always be beaten out by another man's sperm.
As an aside, if you look at some of the women who are having the most children today (the stereotypical drug addict or welfare mom), they are anything but selective. That hardwiring theory seems pretty shaky to me.
Jacques Barzun said it better in From Dawn to Decadence, 500 Years of Western Cultural Life
The sexual reality was often halfhearted and disappointing, much obsession but little passion-- what D. H. Lawrence had called "sex in the head." Men and women did not benefit from the boasted "revolution" as they had expected; it did give some people the free play they wanted, but it pushed many more into courses unsuited to their nature and capacities.It did not install the Mohammedan paradise on earth, although everything in sight suggested that it had. Pornography is a form of utopian literature and, like the advertising of Desire, it set a standard that brought on paralysis. When an erectifying drug was put on the market, the millions who rushed to obtain it numbered the healthy young as well as the ailing old, and women at once demanded its feminine equivalent. It was apparently not known that desire must be dammed up to be self-renewing.
I find it amusing that some who I recognize to be libertarian evolutionists here at FR are the most pro-porno on this thread. I'd love to hear them explain the evolutionary utility of porno, and its place in man's development on the African savannah 3.5 million years ago!
Amusing, but not at all surprising.
EODGUY
She doesn't want to 'make a statement', Lori.
She wants her hubby back.
Hold it, hold it! I didn't say women are responsible for men's behavior. I was saying the women's behavior, on average, used to make men more responsible. They are not at all the same thing!
I agree with the first assertion completely. However, I would point out that parents are responsible in part for the moral decisions of their children. As for individual free will being our only claim to humanness, I would point out that other things make us human as well: our ability to love, our ability to know right from wrong, our ability to imagine, etc. etc.
They seem to reflect quite accurately the values of many of the American women I see today. (As an example, in our high school, in a wealthy section of the NJ suburbs, we have lots of 9th grade girls looking for senior guys (any senior guys) to lose their virginity for them (which will give them bragging rights). Sex in the City is probably too tame, actually.
Alternate advice to women in her situation and/or all married women with trust issues in their marriage. Take off one weekend a month and go away. Leave the kids with somoene responsible. Don't say where you are going and don't say anything about what you did when you get back. Do this every month forever.
Trust is a two way street.
I don't think porn is predominantly about the communication of ideas and concepts. It's about sexually arousing the viewer (and not much more than that).
I agree that both genders do have the God-given ability to rise above animalistic sexual behavior. But I do believe that it's much harder for men. Every high school boy I've ever known (including myself at that age) is thinking about sex almost all the time, and looking for ways to 'relieve' himself of that drive. Women are certainly sexual and have sexual needs, but the drive, in my observation (and that of everyone I know) is considerably less.
I would not have wanted to marry a woman who had "made the rounds" for years. Most men I've known haven't wanted that. My son and my son's friend want women for their wives who are virgins or who have shown considerable restraint in the sexual area. I watch MTV from time to time, and I see young women (on a regular basis) there trying to decide if going to bed with a guy on the first date is too slutty. Usually they agree that it's OK on the second date! (But based on what? - The desire to feel virtuous?) The vast majority of men I know, from many walks of life, would never marry a woman like that. Of course there are men who don't care how many men their wives have received, so I guess such women aren't devalued for those men. But there are many, many men for whom such women are considerably devalued.
It's the ability to resist serious temptation, and to forego intense pleasure. It's much more difficult for men than most women understand, I think.
It IS the same thing. You're saying that men can't be be responsible on their own. They must use women's "policing" as a crutch because they are weak willed. It implies grown men need a "mother" or someone to keep them in moral check. The very next step is to "blame" women for not being there to do the mothering/policing work.
Men have just as much free will as women. Individual responsibility.
Watch it. Larry Flynt is worshipped as an intellectual heavyweight--a veritable philosopher king--by many of these pro-porn loons. To them, Viagra is a mind-enghancing drug.
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