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.
You're going off the deep end Lorianne. Most men would take (inconsequential) sex over porn any day!
Lets see, she divorced her husband for no valid reason. Did not graduate from High School and can not find a decent job. Has a daughter to support, but must rely upon the Government to give her money.
Unfortunatly, she gained too much weight and this is noy an option for her.
A woman in a strip club can easily earn $2000 a night if she is good. Nothing sexual, just dancing on a stage and NOBODY is harmed.
If my own daughter had kept her lovely figure, she could have used her body to pay for a college education. Nobody would be harmed in any way.
Instead, she sucks off of the public tit and expects everyone to feel sorry for her.
As a father, is this my first choice? Nope.
But as a father, I would be damn proud of a daughter that was able to use her natural tallents to raise a daughter the best way that she could. Even if those tallents are not exactly PC.
Porn can be criticized (as here on this thread). But it's main purpose is to arouse men sexually - not to send a deep message!
The Porn Profs' Plans for Your Kids
By Dr. Dennis Jarrard
From The Morality in Media Newsletter, November-December 1998
Note: Dr. Jarrard was Chairman of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
I recently spent a day in Hell.
I attended the World Pornography Conference (August 6-9, 1998) at the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles, and I was probably the only pro-decency person among the several hundred people who took part.
"Eroticism and the First Amendment" was the title of the confab, which drew advocates and defenders of porn from as far away as Russia, Japan, South Africa, and Australia. For eight very long hours I rubbed shoulders and even broke bread with top obscenity lawyers, the porn industry's political shills from the ACLU, porn video "actresses," and "academics" from major universities, particularly California State University at Northridge (CSUN). The town of Northridge is the world capital of porn video production.
The purpose of the proceedings seemed to be to advance a plan of the incredibly wealthy, $8 billion-a-year porn industry — namely, to get the public to accept the now-discredited Prof. Alfred Kinsey's anything-goes approach to sex as the basis for granting teaching credentials to all sex "educators" in both our public and our religious schools. Judging from what I heard, the plan is well under way.
I focused on the talks on "research and effects." The "academics" remarks were meant to provide the necessary pseudo-scientific intellectual basis for this all-out attack upon morality and reason. What these "intellectuals" said should frighten us citizens into action.
The first talk I heard was by CSUN's librarian, who described her efforts to protect the school's tax-supported porn collection. The only "academic" defenses she gave for this porn pile were "free speech," "academic freedom," the "First Amendment," and opposing "censorship."
In the next "academic" session I heard, the professor quoted tax-supported "researcher" Dr. Ed Donnerstein of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Donnerstein maintains that only violence in porn is dangerous. The speaker did not mention that porn was a form of violence in itself. Nor did he mention the money that Donnerstein has taken from Playboy and other porn interests to do some of his "research."
Dr. William Griffitt of Kansas State University informed us that porn caused no adverse effects, and that, why, even education can be distasteful to some — e.g., showing explicit sex films in the classroom. He cited the discredited, ACLU-dominated Presidential Commission on Pornography (1970) as showing minimal effects from making and using porn.
When I asked about the more recent Reagan-era [Attorney General Meese] Commission that found porn harmful, he dismissed it as politically inspired. He carefully dodged the issue of the link between porn and public health and safety problems such as rape, venereal disease, AIDS, incest, serial murders, child molestation, and sex addiction.
Griffitt quoted those "scholars" who support him, and largely dismissed the findings of Drs. Cline, Weaver, Zillman and others whose research points to severe harm from porn use.
He said not a word about the enormous increase in sex-related pathologies since Kinsey, as documented by Dr. Judith Reisman in her explosive new book, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences. I asked Griffitt about Kinsey, whose famous "research" Dr. Reisman has shown was a fraud that involved hundreds of sex crimes against children. He saw Kinsey as a very fine researcher, a real contributor to learning and teaching about sex. Porn, Dr. Griffitt assured us, was a valuable research tool.
One professor from California State University at Long Beach told how he brought "porn stars" into his classroom as guest lecturers. He told us this shielded him from direct criticism. (Conference organizers brought out porn "actresses" to speak, too; no one talked about how many of these women use drugs, die young, or are lesbians who were abused by their fathers.) The objective, scholarly title of one California State instructor's lecture was, "There Is No Relationship Between Pornography and Violence Against Anyone Or Anything."
On and on they droned. The "research" of "sexperts" such as Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Wardell Pomeroy and their direct descendants is being peddled endlessly. It comes from Vern Bullough's Center for Sex Research, from the other Kinsey-spawned sex "research" and/or teacher credentialing centers such as those in San Francisco and at CSUN, and from many other "centers" and "institutes" for sex "research" and credentialing.
But what about the real world? What about all the academic studies that show a direct connection between porn use and sex crimes and disease? None of the "scholars" mentioned Dr. Reisman's monumental findings about what they are doing to put our children and our society in the hands of Kinseyite cranks and their wealthy porn czar patrons.
Even the so-called legitimate entertainment industry received praise at this gathering, for its use of "erotic" images in Hollywood movies since Tinseltown discarded the movie decency code in the 1960s. Getting dirt on the big screen made it much easier to spread obscenity worldwide.
Did you know that 25 percent of all the videos sold and rented in the United States last year were porn videos? Or that organized crime controls 90 percent of the distribution of porn videos in America, including those in your friendly suburban video store? Or that the Clinton Administration ended almost all federal prosecutions of the porn czars? In large measure, you can thank the people at this conference.
The speakers definitely did not bring up Dr. Reisman's 30 years of research into how the Kinseyan sexology societies and teacher-accrediting agencies have metastasized sex "educators" out into our children's classrooms through such devices as their "Commission on Accreditation."
None of the learned professors pointed out the obvious similarities between this process and the way Soviet "educators" disseminated Lysenko's pseudo-scientific Communist theories on the brain, and Germany's teaching institutions accredited the "researchers" of Nazi racial theories.
These supposedly unbiased "academics" did not want to discuss Dr. Reisman's chronicle of the damage done by the Kinseyans through the incredible explosion of sex crimes and venereal disease (not to mention AIDS) that we have suffered since the 1950s, when the obscenity laws were still enforced and we had the movie production code.
They did not want the public to learn what she has written about the incredible and immediate impact of porn on the user, how he literally "grows new brain" whether he wants to or not. Nor did they want to admit that one of Kinsey's closest collaborators, Hermann Muller, did his "research" under the Nazi and Communist regimes, which could easily provide children and adults as "subjects."
The Kinsey model of loveless, dangerous, anything-goes sex is now the only model that teachers get credentialed to teach in America's schools. We parents and taxpayers must de-credential the Kinsey-clone sex "educators" who are teaching our children that condoms should replace chastity, that lust is better than love.
The damage that the "sexperts" are doing to our boys and girls is no less harmful than that done by Soviet and Nazi "educators" in the 1930s and 1940s. In those cases, crackpot pseudo-science led to the deaths of millions. In our country, venereal disease, AIDS, rape, murder, molestation, incest, sex addiction and the other effects of "harmless" porn are killing the minds, souls and even the lives of countless young people, not to mention adults.
A determined citizenry can still make a difference. Read up on Kinsey, porn, and the sex "education" industry. Support Dr. Reisman's "R.S.V.P. America" program to end Kinseyan "sex ed." Join a no-compromise anti-porn group. Educate your clergyman. Call the talk shows. Contact your lawmaker.
It is late in the day. As Dr. Reisman says, it's high time we pried the cold, dead hands of Dr. Kinsey off our children.
Oh, I totally agree. I do feel sorry for my daughter.
But as a parent, she dug her hole and she must live with it.
Now her former husband was a fantastic father and husband to her. He is an airline pilot and did everything he could to provide for the family. I still love him like my own son.
Instead, she got all "super religious" and into an anti-porno kick. Eventually, even he could no longer put up with her.
So today, my daughter no longer has to worry about porn in the house. She got her wish!
As her father, will NOT bail her out, since she gave away the best dang thing she ever had. But that was her choice.
Was it worth it?
If his theory is correct then porn consumption becomes the benchmark for "interest in sex". If you extend that logic, that would mean that men who don't consume porn, aren't as interested in sex as men who do.
I call this the "prude" theory of marketing. People who criticise porn are put in a little box on the shelf and labeled "prude". In this way pro-porn men can control other men by shaming them ... implying that they are are not as "interested in sex" as they perhaps should be and by implication are not real men. Consuming porn becomes the new benchmark of sexual sophistication, everyone else is a loser, a prude, or worse .... possibly sexually dysfunctional without enough "interest".
Bingo! Men, YOUR sexuality has just been hijacked and defined by others. Your sexuality becomes defined by your porn consumption. This is indicative of your "interest in sex" (or lack therof).
[Among other things, this line of logic is a marketing ploy of the porn industry. It works like a charm. ]
I advocate the criticism of porn. I advocate that no one buy porn, or create porn. I am not endeavoring in any way to shield it.
I further advocate porn be understood, criticized and scrutinized for what is. It is a purely crass commercial and corrupting enterprise with the sole purpose to increase profits via the easily exploited male tendancy to lust.
Do men who don't consume porn have "less interest" in sex than men who do?
Essentially, yes. We're not spending x hours or dollars to satisfy that addiction. Does a sober man have less interest in alcohol, than an alcoholic? Yes.
Pornographers don't hold editorial meetings to decide what message they wish to communicate to women, or to the world in general. There is no political/social message added to their product ('intellectual articles' added to provide a facade of being socially redeeming notwithstanding). They merely strive for what most cost effectively stimulates the lustful tendency in men.
That you correctly observe the objectification of women, and that women may believe a standard has been set that must be achieved, resulting from porn is correct, but the producers didn't care one wit that you would think so. They didn't care one wit that you see anything. That porn consequently results in standards perceived is true. But again, the producers aren't trying to set standards any more than tobacco companies are trying to promote health.
They only care that their product be bought. Their only agenda, beyond profit, is to make/keep the world safe for porn.
Porn is a media just like any other.
Pornographers and consumers hide behind that viewpoint. As long as their true nature is concealed uncriticized and unscrutinized, it will persist and spread, and all that you object to will get worse.
Correct in your analysis! Outstanding!!!!!!
Her mother got "super religious" and divorced me. A few year later, she married a guy only 7 years older than my daughter. And yes, it did evolve into incest.
So when my daughter divorced her husband, I let him know exactly what her mother had done. Thank God he payed attention to what I telling him and was able to prevent the same abuse.
Just like her mother, my daughter followed the same script. But this time, the Judge understood what was happening and she got legally slapped.
Both her husband and father are good men and have once again married. For myself, it has been 17 years with a wonderful wife now, and I feel that his second marriage will be just as happy.
For my daughter, I hope her anti-porn issue was worth it.
Most reasonable people would equate a serious interest in porn with a serious interest in sex. And again, most people realize that men are, on average, more sexually driven than women. And finally, most people don't need academic studies to know that.
Like I said, she married a fantastic guy and BLEW IT!
Right, people can just rely on you to tell them how "interested" they are in sex relative to other people.
I believe most of the most profitable porn enterprises, like, for example, Vivid Video, are private. I believe many stay private for various reasons. First of all, some are afraid of public scrutiny that might come with a stock offering. Up until recently many porn producers in California did not even have signboards outside their studios announcing who they were. Also, they probably like to stay private to keep the business under their (the owners') control. Although these enterprises may not be quite as lucrative as people believe, they still appear to generate enough cash to make a stock offering superflouous in some respects (they don't have a business need to raise funds). However, I guess sometimes the owners may be too impatient to skim proceeds off the enterprise over a 20-year period (through salaries and other stuff to the owner) and may hope that a stock offering may quickly make them rich.
I am not going to discuss the economics of the business in general, such as the phenomenon that anyone who has a digital camera can now become a porn producer if they want to. Also, like the defense industry, it's sometimes hard to say where the industry begins and it ends. Is a video store owner that carries porn part of the industry? Maybe, if the few titles this person carries generate the majority of his or her profits...
Despite the fact that the vast majority of porn is still a private industry, I believe the porn stocks are a good way to track the industry's overall health from the outside. You might, for example, add up all the revenues from all the companies and then track the totals on an annual basis to estimate growth; I have not done this.
Playboy (PLA). Playboy is Playboy, but what some old timers may not know is that they do produce straight-out hardcore porn in addition to their tamer magazine.
Lodgenet (LNET) They do pay-per-view movies in hotels. Who knows what their exact profit breakdown is between porn and nonporn. Slogan "What you want...when you want it."
New Frontier Media (NOOF) I believe this mainly does streaming porn over the internet.
Private Media Group (PRVT) This is a European porn producer that both shoots its own porn films and distributes them over various outlets, mainly in Europe.
Metro Global Media (MGBL) This is one of a horde of American porn studios, except this one happens to be public. From what I've gathered in the past it produces fairly low-grade stuff, neither noted for its production quality nor originality.
Rick's Cabaret (RICK) This is a strip club. So, I guess maybe to some it's not porn exactly. Go to their website and you can see the flesh of some of the "Rick's Girls".
Also, I should mention Beate Uhse, the German sex shop, but that is listed in Europe, not in America.
There may be other "porn stocks" I have missed, particularly in Europe.
I suppose if Bill Gates or Warren Buffet were anti-porn crusaders, they could buy up all these companies and shut them down. However, the entrepreneurs would just take the proceeds from their companies and run across the street to open the same business again, with all of the screen and behind-the-scenes talent following them.
I guess my only hope to turn the tide with porn would be for each person individually to stop watching it, kind of like the "throw out your TV" phenomenon. I expect that to happen as much as I expect people to voluntarily to switch to wearing the scratchy black clothing the Puritans used to wear...
If you compare the porn of 100 years ago, the erotica was more literate and the images were of physically normal men and women.
But as porn produced an increased lust and appetite with which porn inturn had to keep pace, if not keep ahead, the producers employed ever more fanciful 'props'. Young, physically fit models, over-endowed men, increased production quality, but always the same 50-minute plot.
Computer generation now allows a new 'standard' to be set that is genetically unachievable for any of us.
Did pornographers have a strategic 5, 10, 25 year plan to do this? No. They are scrambling to competitively keep pace with or outdo each other.
If there were no competitive pressures, they could revert back to the 'standards' of yesteryear, and the porn consumer would have to take it or leave it, and in my view men would stand a better chance of declining it, and society and women would be the better for that.
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.