Undressing pornography

Pornography is a $7 billion-a-year industry worldwide. Pornographic films outnumber other films by three to one, and gross $1 million a day in the USA alone. British pornographic magazines sell 20 million copies a year. One American man in 10 reads Playboy, Penthouse or Hustler each month. Italian men spend $640 million on pornography a year, with pornographic videos representing 30-50 per cent of all Italian video sales. All that pornography, yet no-one talks about it. It’s like an unacknowledged cancer that metastasizes best when no-one goes for x-rays or feels for lumps. What is pornography and is it anything to get steamed up about? David Miles reports.

Pornography is difficult to define, but here goes: porn is “anonymous visual or verbal communication intended to excite you sexually”.

The intention is crucial. Nudity per se is not pornographic. Nudity displayed with the intention of provoking sexual excitement is. There’s a big difference between a nude at the art gallery and a centrefold in a magazine showing her breakfast, lunch and tea.

The intention is what puts the ‘porn’ into pornography—the publisher’s intention and also the viewer’s intention. The nude at the art gallery may not be pornographic, but you can view it pornographically. Voyeurism is a pornographic activity. A voyeur is someone who finds sexual pleasure watching sexual objects or acts (e.g. the guys snooping around in the sand dunes behind the beach). You make things pornographic if you view them voyeuristically. Don’t kid yourself that poring over every millimetre of the nudes in the art gallery isn’t pornographic.

The intention is crucial—why they are presenting it, why you are viewing it. If it is presented pornographically, it is almost impossible not to view it that way. It is very hard not to read Penthouse voyeuristically. When a sex scene is placed in a movie just for the sake of a sex scene, you’re a pretty unusual person if you don’t watch it pornographically.

One problem with an article like this is that we can make it pornographic. If I’m presenting it or you’re reading it for the wrong reasons, then we are engaging in pornography.

But the intention alone doesn’t make pornography pornography. The anonymity of porn is also crucial. Visual or verbal communication intended to excite you sexually isn’t pornographic if you’re married to the person or if you’re in a caring relationship with them. The latter may be adultery, but it is not pornography. The intention and the anonymity together define pornography. What is missing is what makes it porn, and what is missing is a personal relationship between the viewer and the person being viewed.

She is with me alone in my living room. She removes her clothes just for me and lets me see all of her. She tells me about her favourite book and what she likes in a man. She lets me in—she has no inhibitions.

But the truth is, if I met her in the street in real life, she wouldn’t give me the time of day, let alone take her clothes off for me. She does not know me, nor does she want to. Anonymity is characteristic of pornography. Even sex has the quality of pornography when it is anonymous. Anonymous sex in movies is more pornographic than sex in the context of a loving relationship, and it is also more likely to have a pornographic intent. So what is wrong with a bit of anonymous sexual stimulation? The Bible doesn’t specifically condemn pornography, but the broad term ‘sexual immorality’ covers it. Sexual immorality is something to avoid at all costs according to Acts 15:20-29, 21:25, 1 Corinthians 5:1, 9-11, 6:9, 13,18, 7:2, 10:8, 2 Corinthians 12:21, Galatians 5:19, Ephesians 5:3, Colossians 3:5, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, Jude 7, Revelation 2:14, 20, 21, 9:21, 14:8, 17:2, 4, 18:3, 9, 19:2, Matthew 15:19 and Mark 7:21.

Why should pornography be categorized as sexual immorality? To see why, we’ll undress it. The naked truth is that pornography is an escape from relationships and reality.

Escape from relationships

Just as some women escape into Mills and Boon romantic fantasies, so men escape into the world of pornography. Men illicitly enjoy a world where there are no humans—male or female; only bodies. No-one returns their gaze. Men finally have to avert their gaze from a woman in the street, but they can stare openly at a woman’s body in a video or magazine. They are free to be anonymous—free from the complications of relationships. In the world of pornography, women are easily aroused, they have no periods, there is no fear of reproduction, and sex is endless.

Pornography teaches men to view women (and I know it’s the ultimate cliché, but it is true) as sex objects, rather than as persons to be loved. It teaches men to walk around with their eyes always at breast level. It teaches that sex can legitimately be divorced from love and tenderness. Naomi Wolf, in The Weekend Australian in September this year, wrote:

So rare is it to see sexual explicitness in the context of love and intimacy on screen, that it seems our culture treats tender sexuality as if it were deviant or depraved, while embracing violent, anonymous sex as right and healthy.

Porn is a cop-out. God made us for relationships, not anonymity. God made sexuality to be expressed in a relationship. Sex is meant to be a person-to-person activity. Pornography depersonalizes sex, it depersonalizes women and it even depersonalizes men. To sit alone in the dark, watching anonymously, is to be a complete non-event. Real men can deal with the real world of relationships.

Escape from reality

Pornography is a lie—a fantasy set in a world that is not real. Since the 1960s porn upsurge, the sexuality of an entire generation has been shaped, not by parents or real people, but by everything from Playboy to music videos. Baby boomers and beyond have been imprinted with a sexuality that is false—a mass-produced lie.

Porn tells two lies.

Lie 1: The beauty myth

Defenders of pornography (balding men with great tans, large stomachs, unbuttoned shirts and gold chains around their necks) base their position on the idea of freedom of speech. But if we turn this argument around, something obscene emerges about pornographic representations of female sexuality—that is, that representation itself is heavily censored.

Most women don’t look or act like the women in porn. Most women in porn don’t look or act like the women in porn. Centrefolds are touched up in the miracle of dye-transfer printing. They’re the creation of a team of art directors, photographers, stylists, make-up artists and airbrushers. How many women can carry around a giant wind machine to give them that perfect windblown look? They take hundreds of photos and choose the best one. Even after the photo has been taken, they can remove imperfections, wrinkles and stretch marks. Yet, many women feel that if they don’t have those breasts, that face or that body, they are not sexy.

It is not just pornography; it is advertising generally that is a problem here. More and more we’re seeing pornographic conventions used in advertising. Beautiful women in semi-orgasmic states are used to sell everything from sports bras to Fuji cassettes. The message of many women’s magazines is she’ll have to look like this if she’s going to feel like this.

Debbie Taylor, in Women: A World Report, wrote: “So powerful is pornography and so smoothly does it blend in with the advertising of products … that many women find their own fantasies and self images distorted”. ‘Betty’ in Nancy Friday’s collection of female sexual fantasies, My Secret Garden, says,

I fantasize that I have changed into a very beautiful and glamorous woman (in real life I know I’m somewhat plain). I close my eyes and seem to be watching this other beautiful woman who is me, from some other place, outside myself … I can see her so vividly that I want to shout encouragement to her: ‘enjoy it—you deserve it’. The funny thing is that this woman isn’t me.

How often do you hear ladies say stuff like this? They lean forward, their voices lower, and they tell their terrible secret: ”It’s my hips, my thighs. I hate my stomach.” It is not just that they think they are ugly; it is that they think they aren’t sexy. Sexiness has been redefined as beauty. That’s the beauty myth of pornography—that sexuality is identical to beauty, instead of viewing beauty as only one factor of sexuality. So many of us honestly believe, because of the bombardment of porn since the 60s, that beauty is sexuality.

And it is the lie of porn that this physical ideal is oh so attainable. The man taken in by this lie expects his wife to have Elle’s smile, Cheryl’s voluptuousness, Angie’s legs and Miss October’s flaming red hair and sparkling eyes. He begins to focus on his wife’s minor flaws. He loses sight of the fact that she is a charming, warm and attractive woman that he is lucky to have. He devalues her as a sexual being.

We are asked to believe that pornography promotes the display of female sexuality, although it actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women’s bodies so that only the official versions are visible. We see living mannequins required to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable under hot lights and professional set pieces that reveal little about female sexuality.

Lie 2: Flesh and blood

The fantasy world of pornography can often take on violent forms. The second lie links flesh to blood. It teaches that violence is sexy. Several recent studies have shown that soft-core, nonviolent porn makes men less likely to believe a rape victim, and that sexually violent films make men progressively trivialize the severity of the violence they see against women. In the end, only violence against women is perceived by them as erotic (see “Flesh and Blood”, New Scientist, May 5, 1990).

Pornography is an escape from reality. Not all fantasies are dangerous. Fantasies that teach lies are very dangerous. Porn teaches two lies at least: that beauty is sexuality and that violence is sexy.

A ‘porn’ in the game of lust

Pornography arouses our desire for sex, but never satisfies that desire. Desiring pornography is like craving salt when you are dying of thirst. All porn does is feed lust. If left unchecked, the porn-lust-porn cycle can spiral down into obsession. Like all obsessions, it sucks the life from your passion for other things. You can lose your passion for your wife.

For many men, sex in marriage is just an overflow valve—an outlet for the passion that mounts inside them because of porn. Their wives are victims of mental adultery—objects of necessity, not of romance and passion. He and she are just ‘porns’ in the game of lust.

The quest for purity

Paul says we must pull our minds out of the gutter and think about what is pure (Phil 4:8). Bad information is damaging; it corrupts you. Porn feeds us with bad information. Pornography is impure—not because it is obscene (obscenity is whatever you are not used to … yet); porn is impure because it is an escape from reality and relationships.

If you want to beat porn, stop thinking about it and start thinking about its opposite, which is relating to people properly—especially women. Work at loving people. Build healthy relationships. Fill your mind with what is pure, not with what is impure. If you do, don’t be surprised if passion returns to your marriage, that your wife again becomes the object of romance, that her body (and no-one else’s) regains the gravitational pull it once had, and that sex takes on an inexpressible delight that hugely transcends the pleasures of pornography.

Sexual expression can be emotionally detached, as in the uncaring fantasy world of pornography, or it can be gentle, loving and the best of all connections.

The problem is, women who love themselves, despite their non-standard bodies, are threatening. Men who love real women are even more dangerous. A mass deviation into tenderness and mutual respect would spell disaster for a $7 billion-a-year industry!

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