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.
No, you're wrong. They are not the same thing. I didn't say that men can't be responsible, they can. I said that the way women used to behave (a real thing) tended to cause men to behave in a more responsible way (a real effect). I never said that men shouldn't or couldn't behave more responsibly all by themselves. (They should, and could!) - - But the result of women having lost that mode of behavior has not been good. They have lowered themselves, on average, to the low level of men, on average.
I agree, absolutely. My wife wouldn't have married me if I were a porno freak, or if I frequented whorehouses, or if I dated women for sex.
This is a great book. Highly recommended to anyone.
Yendu: 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 couldn't disagree more. Porn is portraying a wide range of concepts and ideas
One (of many) concepts porn promotes is of sex on demand and female compliance. The message being sent is the setting of a standard of sexual response in women that is not attainable nor desirable for most women. This sets the standard for what the porn consumer wants a "sexual" or sensual woman to be. How she is to be defined and identified in the larger society. The primary message underlying it though is that she not set that standard herself.
The underlying premise is that women are not sexual beings in their own right by their own standards and with their own sexual desires and goals ___ ie women's individualism (in all aspects including her individual sexuality, the most intimate and personal part of herself) are subordinate to men's. She does not "own" her own sexuality, others do. It is imposed on her, does not originate with her as an autonomous (sexual) human being.
IMO this message hardly needs reinforcing in our society. We can see evidence here of men presuming to "own" women's sexuality by presuming to speak on her behalf about her sexual nature eg "women don't have as strong a sex drive as mens" (again men setting the standard). There are no shortage of men in society who TELL women what women's sexuality is ... or should be ... every step of the way. This is a concept reinforced in porn.
Porn sends many messages, again just as all of media, tv music etc. does about our society. A good part of "entertainment" is actually marketing of social ideals and concepts. Your Sex in the City references are a good example of this. This is not only entertainment it is prosyletizing a concept lifestyle ... or selling it as the "norm" when it clearly is not (yet) the norm. There is an agenda in all media, whether overt or covert. This includes porn.
Most of them have small minds, if you know what I mean.
Fair enough. I agree on this. But of course, as I was saying, women these days hardly need porn to send that message.
We can see evidence here of men presuming to "own" women's sexuality by presuming to speak on her behalf about her sexual nature eg "women don't have as strong a sex drive as mens" (again men setting the standard).
In the first statement of yours above, you say that men are setting too high a sexual response standard for women. In the second, you accuse men for saying women don't have as high a sexual response as men. It could just be, Lorianne, that women, on average, as a factual matter, are less interested in sex than men. (Without any agendas, or oppression, or anything like that.) That's been my observation, all my life, and of the vast majority of people I know.
Well, no one is forcing women to listen!!! (Men's) Porn is just men's fantasies about what men want sexually. The problem, as I see it, is that so many women today think 1) that they can get what they want by having unbridled sex (a big mistake, if they're looking for commitment) and 2) that that liberates them (big misconception) and 3) that men respect them more for their licentiousness (big mistake).
I agree with what you say about the media. But porn is by far for the most part designed to stimulate men sexually (and it's very competitive). I don't think the purveyors of porn are trying to send any message. They want men to be attracted (and even, better, addicted) to it, so that they pay up for their fixes. What bothers you is that what men fantasize about sexually doesnt' represent the reality of women's sexuality. That's true. Traditional sexual mores (marriage, chastity before marriage, etc.) were designed in part to tame men's inflamed sexuality. Those have been cast aside.
If I might jump in, this exactly true, and because of the addictive nature and need to for ever more intense 'imagery/fantasy' to achieve the same level of interst/stimulation in the sexually and morally 'numbed' receiver, the porn gets worse, the user gets more depraved (even if hidden), and it all spirals down.
The reverse can be acheived, but it is an uphill battle when porn is so pervasive and seemingly too few people perceive it's corrosive effects on society.
Like other corruptive influences, the bad effects will be obvious to us long after the damage has been done. A little like the Catholic Church, which allowed active homosexuality to flourish in seminaries and dioceses, and then ended up with priests (in Boston) promoting man/boy sex and then with raped and molested teenage boys all over the country.
There is a spiritual component to sexual corruption that is difficult to discuss on a pluralistic, secular thread.
The reality is 'we battle not against flesh and blood, but powers and principalities'. The enemy knows us exceedingly well and exploits disbelief to maxium effect.
Do you have documentation for this? I would love to be able to dry up the ACLU's money flow.
The truth of this resides all around us.
I don't agree. If you set the standards then everyone else is graded on the curve of your benchmark. If you say interest is sex is detemined by _x_ then this becomes the standard for everyone (roughly 6.3 billion people). How are you measuring "interest in sex" and what is your sample size? One person, two persons? It is by this type of reasoning that men arrogantly assume "ownership" of women's sexuality. This is a constantly reinforced theme in porn (and other media). Men dictating women's sexuality and defining it for them, placing women in sexual categories from saint to whore, slut to prude. [Also in one fell swoop individual differences between women are negated in favor of an "everywoman" which is just what porn projects].
I reject that premise from the ground up. I object to it in porn and every other media as well.
Men's sexuality is collectively defined in relation to women as "high interest" and this in turn is given a positive "spin" in the media. Not so women's sexuality. Women's collective sexual personae is "owned" by men and given positive and negative "spin" as a means of control.
By defining the standards for women in relation to themselves men control the benchmarking process. This gives them the tools to categorize/chastize/shame women for either wanting sex "too much" or "not enough" or "not in the proper context". We've seen all of these tactics used on this very thread.
I assure you I have no interest in 'ownership' of women's sexuality. (How would I do that anyway?)
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