Pornified: Part 3, Scruton, Fassbender and Wojtyla

People have gotten into the ridiculous habit of thinking that human nature may be overcome by human will. The steroid wars in baseball have given evidence to this. In fact, sports culture in general has a habit of speaking as though the only reason runners aren’t getting to the finish line as fast as cheetahs is because they lack the proper footwear. So too, with human sexuality. It is a remarkable paradox (and not the Chestertonian sort) that those persons who most loudly proclaim the gospel according to Charles Darwin will also proclaim the right of a person to, through chemical or surgical means, change their gender in order to “become who they really are.” Blunt evolution doesn’t describe a world where the spirit of a male may be in the body of a female…only a pseudo-religious worldview can do that.

Human beings, when considered as we really are, are actually captive to far more limitations than is commonly supposed. The “great athletes” only differ from the “good athletes” by milliseconds or mere inches. The difference between gold and last is a tiny temporal slice. Human sexuality, even though its boundaries are being pushed daily, still is operating within a limited scope. The proponents of gay marriage who have been insisting that marriage can be limited to two people, even when sexual complimentarity has been thrown out, give evidence to this. People subconsciously realize the limits exist, even if they cannot publicly acknowledge them.

The cost of transgressing the limits of our humanity usually manifests in pain or failure. I cannot run a mile at full sprint. I will pass out. Though I may try unceasingly, I have never achieved mental clarity in discerning the plan of God. Attempts to do so bring anxiety. So too with pornography. It causes marriages to break up, women to be abused, children to be confused, and the family to crumble. Like other transgressions of human nature, it is evident that porn brings about harm. Why is that? Unlike running too fast or pushing the bounds of mental reflection, at first blush, porn looks to be complimentary to our human nature, not opposed to it. As a chastity speaker I heard said, “Porn is addictive because men are hard-wired to like porn.” This subtle point was lost on more than a few in the audience, who went around for the next few weeks excusing all manner of behavior as things they were “hard-wired” for.

As Roger Scruton and Karol Wojtyla will help me argue below, we are (snubs to that speaker) not wired for pornography. We are wired for sexuality. Porn attempts to fill that need for intimacy, the way potato chips and cola attempt to fill our need for food.

In addressing the modern view of sexuality, which allows for pornography as being perfectly normal, Scruton identifies five myths which have become prevalent. The first is that “sexual desire is for a particular kind of pleasure, located in the sexual organs.” On this view, sexual desire is much like the desire to scratch, and sexual pleasure is much like the pleasure of scratching. In either case the instrument is morally neutral. Be it your hand or the edge of the wall, the instrument of scratching is only “good” or “bad” in so far as it provides the most sublime scratching experience. The second myth concerns the actual pleasure being had from a sexual experience and insists that “sexual satisfaction depends upon such factors as the intensity and duration of sensory pleasure, culminating in orgasm.” After a long day of skiing, I find myself fatigued and sore, sometimes barely able to walk up the stairs to my condo. On this “duration and intensity” view, sexual experience may be judged the same way I judge my post-skiing method of relaxation. A round in the hot tub can last for a while, but it is not very pleasurable with all those other people. On the other hand, a boiling hot shower, and frequent jumps into the snow pile on the deck, can be both intense and lasting. I almost always prefer the second option to the first.

The first two myths combine to make sexual experience intellectually and morally manageable. The phenomena of sexual arousal doesn’t require its own analysis, it can be categorized with eating or drinking. “(Sexual pleasure) helps the reproductive process, in just the same way that the pleasure of eating helps to keep the organism fed.” These two myths also make sex morally manageable because, as long as the person or object with which you achieve the most amount of pleasure for the longest time will agree to it, there is no other moral criteria to consider before engaging in a sexual act. Notice how even love, a word often touted by advocates of gay marriage (ie. “Love is Love” or “Who are you to judge who someone loves?!”) is absent from consideration if these two myths are taken as truth.

The third myth takes the desire for sexual pleasure and grants it a quantity. “Sexual urges need to be expressed, and…attempts to ‘repress’ them are psychologically harmful.” Sigmund Freud considered the welling up of sexual desire to be “hydraulic” in nature. Pressure will build and build until a channel is found for release. This myth is responsible for a great many pseudo-critiques of chastity, the assumption being that only an orgasm can release the urge proper to a sexual being. Wilhelm Reich went so far as too argue that repression of sexual desire would lead to insanity. What a shame he never got to meet Alfred Kinsey…

Please note that even at this stage we are getting an argument drifting toward pornography. If sexual desire is just desire for pleasure in my loins, which ought to be as long and intense as possible, which I cannot repress lest I lose my mind and which I can only release with someone or something who voluntarily agrees to let me, then it follows that porn, which is always available and never says “no”, is the only guaranteed means of avoiding my psychological doom. The fourth myth cements this conclusion. “Sexual desire is the the same kind of thing, whatever the nature of the partner who arouses it.” Perhaps convention and decency will limit the object desired, but there is no moral reason to restrict who or what is used for arousing and relieving sexual desire. On this view, a man may choose from a woman, a man, porn, an animal or really anything to release his desire, much like he may choose from Chinese, Mexican, American or Italian food for lunch.

The fifth and final myth provides the intellectual ammunition for much of what constitutes modern sex education. “Attitudes such as shame, guilt and disgust are unhealthy.” Elaboration on this myth really isn’t necessary. One glance at your average “Pride Parade” shows how much shame and disgust are being overcome. If you don’t respect the right of men and women to walk down the street only wearing leather briefs, then you must be a hateful bigot.

There is a method of argumentation in philosophy known as reductio ad absurdum. A statement may be shown to be true, by taking its opposite to its logical conclusion. A positive view of human sexuality can be at least strongly suggested as right by taking the five myths to their logical end. Don Jon didn’t do this. For all the fallout from porn that Jon suffered in that film, Levitt backed off from a full-throated critique. The logical ends of porn, the insanity to which it all leads, is found on full display in the 2011 film Shame, starring Michael Fassbender.

The film itself is gross. No other word can describe it. Upon its release, it was smacked with an NC-17. The irony is, for all the sex in the movie, it is the least sexy film I have ever seen. Fassbender plays Brandon, a sex addict whose hard drive is “filthy” (according to his boss) and who trolls the bars and subways of New York for potential mates. The extent to which porn harms people is evident in two scenes. In the first, Brandon takes a girl from the office out on a date. They make awkward conversation, they go for a walk and share a few laughs. The night ends without even a kiss. On their second date Brandon takes her to a hotel, as per his usual preference for getting to know women. He first offers her a glass of water and makes small talk. The glass of water is important. It is the one sign that Brandon actually likes her as a person and wants to give rather than get. When they try to have intercourse, Brandon has a psychological episode because he cannot perform. His date leaves and he sits staring out the window, paralyzed. The movie jump cuts to the same room, where Brandon is now engaging the services of a prostitute, lest he repress his urges. It is clear that he is only capable of having sex with people whom he doesn’t care about. He only offers the woman water when she asks for her money. We later see that porn almost costs Brandon’s sister her life, since she attempts suicide while Brandon is out looking for cheap sexual thrills.

The five myths cannot be lived out because we aren’t just looking for pleasure in sexual relations. If we were, porn could easily fill our needs. What we are looking for is intimacy, a relation to another person, who is not simply treated as a means, but as an end.

Blessed Pope John Paul II, as a young priest was studying the works of Thomas Aquinas and Dietrich von Hildebrand while counseling young couples who were struggling in marriage. The fruit of that time is a book called Love and Responsibility. A summary here is impossible, but a hint will suffice. His book begins with an analysis of the verb “to use.” The using of others proves to be a philosophically untenable position. As his later work which articulated a ‘Theology of the Body’ explains, the human person, made in the image of God possesses a tremendous dignity; the sexual urge pushes us not to seek out pleasure but to give of ourselves. Consider God: God the Father loves God the Son and that love is called the Holy Spirit. This trinitarian synergy is one of total self-gift to the other and provides the creativity which brought the world into being. “Through him all things were made.”

Men and women are created with both the biological compatibility as well as the spiritual compatibility to reflect this self giving creativity. The sexual urge, which the five myths claim is merely a desire for pleasure, is actually a desire to give of oneself to another. The spiritual reality, which makes the five myths at least understandable (if not reasonable) is original sin.  Because sin has distorted our perceptions, clouded our minds and gives us a desire to move away from God, the Love expressed in the sexual encounter must be expressed with a corresponding Responsibility.

Responsibility begins when a person decides to be what they ought, not what they want. “Art like morality consists in drawing the line somewhere” writes Chesterton. The five myths reduce “to a technique what is more properly described as an art,” writes Scruton. The “art” of living as a sexual being is beyond my ability to elaborate. What I can attempt in the forthcoming essay is a defense of responsibility, that is; a defense of rules.