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.
If somebody views some porno, it doesn't get me killed like that idiot on the road almost caused to happen to me.
Jeannine LeBlanc
PORNOGRAPHY HAS A PLACE IN SOCIETY
So what then is the problem with pornography? None of these issues is new. Is it morally wrong in and of itself? The conclusion
has to be no. Pornography no more contributes to crime and deviant behavior than does the writer who creates the murder
mystery. It is merely a tool, and likely one of many, for the deviant mind that chooses to commit an act of violence.
In the 1965 Gephard study it was confirmed from police reports that sex offenders often have pornography in their possession.
But this same study also concluded that there was no difference between male sex offenders and nonoffenders in their exposure
rates to pornography. (Olen & Barry, 1996). People read about murder in great detail today, but relatively few commit the act
as a result. Even if a sex offender views pornography, how can anyone be certain that he would not have committed the crime
anyway?
Not even the U.S. Commission on Pornography and Obscenity can conclusively say there is a link between pornography and
negative sociocultural effects. One objection seems to be that of forcing individuals to either participate in it or to view it against
their will. And, as always and without question, it is considered immoral to bring children into this dark world for the obvious
reasons.
Not everyone holds a negative view of the pornography industry. If one accepts the view that pornography leads to violence
and sexual aggression it will be difficult for them to look at the other side. Pornography can provide pleasure to those who find it
appealing, and it can boost a waning sexual relationship.
It is used in therapeutic techniques as discussed by Barry M. Maletsky in his book Treating the Sexual Offender. He has
designed a reconditioning exercise called Saturation Aversion that involves requiring the client to masturbate to pornographic
material and to continue this exercise for the 30 minutes immediately following orgasm. The client reported physical irritation and
lack of rearousal during this period, sensations that would hopefully teach him to associate a negative result with his behavior.
(Maletzsky, 1991).
Another technique, called fading, used also as a reconditioning exercise for treating pedophiles, involves showing slides of young
girls to the client, followed by a rapid change to pornographic slides of adult women. The slides of the young girls are gradually
decreased over time until only adult slides remain. Ideally, sexual pleasure becomes associated with the adult slides rather than
the pictures of young girls over the treatment time. (Maletzsky, 1991)
The Sexual Abuse Clinic of Portland, Oregon has an elaborate collection of pornographic videos, slides, photographs, and
audio tapes for its various treatment plans. All were collected from various patients or confiscated through police investigations.
(Maletzsky,1991).
CONCLUSION
No matter the source, it can be assumed that, in some ways at least, pornography has a positive place in society. To attempt to
censor it, regulate it, or otherwise altar a freedom to choose what one reads or watches for entertainment, gives a few
individuals the power to regulate the arts for the rest of society. What's destroyed in this process may be worse than what's
there in the beginning.
One's feelings about pornography can be determined by whether the individual is taking a passive or active role in either the
viewing or the producing, his or her intentions in this role, and social factors such as age, gender, and religion. With the
exception of perhaps murder, it is difficult to find anything that can universally offend a population,which is the ultimate necessity
for censorship of this material.
This writer concludes that since no one is culture neutral, pornography's effects on society are largely in the eyes of the
beholder, and that issues with pornography and a propensity toward sexual deviation are in the genes, or is it jeans?
References
American Family Association. (retrieved April 21, 1998). Facts about pornography. [online]. Available:
http://www.afa.net/outreach
Downs, David Alexander. (1989). The new politics of pornography. University of Chicago Press. [0nline]. Available:
http://xxx.xxxtaboo.com/pndef.htm
Loth, David. (1961). The erotic in literature: a historical survey of pornography as delightful as it is indiscreet. New York, NY:
Jillian Messner, Inc.
Maletzsky, Barry M. (1991). Treating the sexual offender. Newbury Park, CA: SAGE Publishers, Inc.
Mcclelland, Abbey. (1997). The effects of pornography. [online]. Available: http://samiam.colorado.edu/~mcclelaj/negative.html
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Mcclelland, Abbey. (1997).Violence and agression. [online]. Available: http://samiam.colorado.edu/~mcclelaj/rapemyth.html
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http://samiam.colorado.edu/~mcclelaj/benefit.htm
Matrix, Cherie. (retrieved April 20, 1998). Women and British porn laws. Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 17, Number 4.
Available: http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/matrix_17_4.html
Olen, J. and Barry., V. (1996). Applying ethics: A text with readings (5th ed.) . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co.
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http://xxx.xxxtaboo.com/pndef.htm
Unauthored. (April 2, 1998). Internet porn restriction moving ahead in Congress. Reuters, Ltd. [online]. Available:
http://www.senate.gov/~coats/prip.html
Unauthored. (December, 1996). The Internet Museum of Pornography, Kobenhavn, Denmark. [online]. Available:
http://www.imp.dk/museum/ENT_HALL/ENTHALL.htm#EXHIBITS
Unauthored. (retrieved April 21, 1998). Definition of pornography. [online]. Available: http://trfn.pgh.pa.us/guest/mrfoot.html
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I also hate having filthy language and visuals paraded across the TV screen when my daughter or son is present. I was particularly offended once in Amsterdam, when, in a checkout line, I was subjected to close-up photos of fellatio on magazine covers in the presence of my teenage son.
On the other hand, I am an adult, and if I choose to watch skin-flicks, it's nobody's business but my own. And as to whether or not it is harmful to me--I'm the best judge of that.
It's not that I like porn (most nowadays is very boring). It's just that I don't really get all worked up into a frenzy over it. On a scale of "evils" it ranks mighty low. Definitely much lower than drunk driving which I mentioned.
Ain't that the truth. Either they are shallow-minded perverts or have never witnessed first hand a family torn apart by pornography.
Oh, really? So then, you fault all the boys who complained about the priest's molestations?
A little twisted are you?
I don't really care one way or the other if porn is good or bad. Maybe it's net effect on society is bad. If so, what should be done? If the answer is, 'educate people that it's bad but don't get the government involved', well, fine. Beyond that--well, what would you suggest?
Yet others are filled with marriages wrecked on the rocks of golf, the reefs of debt, the minefields of substance abuse. Addictions, from porn to bingo... the common threads are compulsiveness, immaturity and lack of character. One person's recreational diversion may be the next person's eternal damnation.
"The nature of the liberal and libertarian errors is easily seen in discussions of pornography. The leader of the explosion of pornographic videos, described admiringly by a competitor as the Ted Turner of the business, offers the usual defenses of decadence: 'Adults have the right to see [pornography] if they want to. If it offends you, don't buy it.' Those statements neatly sum up both the errors and the (unintended) perniciousness of the alliance between libertarians and modern liberals with respect to popular culture.
"Modern liberals employ the rhetoric of 'rights' incessantly, not only to delegitimate the idea of restraints on individuals by communities but to prevent discussion of the topic. Once something is announced, usually flatly or stridently, to be a right --whether pornography or abortion or what have you-- discussion becomes difficult to impossible. Rights inhere in the person, are claimed to be absolute, and cannot be deminished or taken away by reason; in fact, reason that suggests the non-existence of an asserted right is viewed as a moral evil by the claimant. If there is to be anything that can be called a community, rather than an agglomeration of hedonists, the case for previously unrecognized individual freedoms (as well as some that have been previously recognized) must be thought through and argued, and "rights" cannot win every time. Why there is a right for adults to enjoy pornography remains unexplained and unexplainable.
"The second bit of advice --'If it offends you, don't buy it' -- is both lulling and destructive. Whether you buy it or not, you will be greatly affected by those who do. The aesthetic and moral environment in which you and your family live will be coarsened and degraded. Economists call the effects an activity has on others 'externalities'; why so many of them do not understand the externalities here is a mystery. They understand quite well that a person who decides not to run a smelter will nevertheless be seriously affected if someone else runs one nearby.
"Free market economists are particularly vulnerable to the libertarian virus. They know that free economic exchanges usually benefit both parties to them. But they mistake that general rule for a universal rule. Benefits do not invariably result from free market exchanges. When it comes to pornography or addictive drugs, libertarians all too often confuse the idea that markets should be free with the idea that everything should be available on the market. The first of those ideas rests on the efficacy of the free market in satisfying wants. The second ignores the question of which wants it is moral to satisfy. That is a question of an entirely different nature. I have heard economists say that, as economists, they do no deal with questions of morality. Quite right. But nobody is just an economist. Economists are also fathers and mothers, husbands or wives, voters citizens, members of communities. In these latter roles, they cannot avoid questions of morality.
"The externalities of depictions of violence and pornography are clear. To complaints about those products being on the market, libertarians respond with something like 'Just hit the remote control and change channels on your TV set.' But, like the person who chooses not to run a smelter while others do, you, your family, and your neighbors will be affected by the people who do not change the channel, who do rent the pornographic videos, who do read alt.sex.stories. As film critic Michael Medved put it: ' To say that if you don't like the popular culture, then turn it off, is like saying if you don't like the smog, stop breathing. . . .There are Amish kids in Pennsylvania who know about Madonna.' And their parents can do nothing about it.
"Can there be any doubt that as pornography and depictions of violence become increasingly popular and increasingly accessible, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, divorce, obligations to children, the use of force, and permissible public behavior and language will change? Or that with the changes in attitudes will come changes in conduct, both public and private? We have seen those changes already and they are continuing. Advocates of liberal arts education assure us that those studies improve character. Can it be that only uplifting reading affects character and the most degrading reading has no effects whatever? 'Don't buy it' and 'change the channel,' however intended, are effectively advice to accept a degenerating culture and its consequences.
"The obstacles to censorship of pornographic and viloence-filled materials are, of course, enormous. Radical individualism in such matters is now pervasive even among sedate, upper middle-class people. At a dinner I sat next to a retired Army general who was no a senior corporate executive. The subject of Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs came up. This most conventional of dinner companions said casually that people ought to be allowed to see whatever they wanted to see. It would seem to follow that others ought to be allowed to do whatever some want to see.... Any serious attempt to root out the worst in our popular culture may be doomed unless the judiciary comes to understand that the First Amendment was adopted for good reasons, and those reasons did not include the furtherance of radical personal autonomy."
Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, pp. 150-152.
That was back when they could be pretty sure they weren't going to be sued for child support.
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