Pornography and the Education of Sexual Desire
Some readers may be wondering why a book that opened with arguments about the need to reconsider eschatological speculations about sex in heaven is closing with an analysis of the contemporary world of pornography. Admittedly, the connection between the two topics is not immediately self-evident. But think for a minute about the trajectory of this argument and consider its implications. From the very beginning I have argued that discipleship calls Christians to bear witness in their sex lives on earth to their convictions about the life to come. When we (re)envision sexual desire and delight as constitutive in some transfigured sense of our life in Christ, then the decline here and now in such sanctifying desire and its virtuous enjoyment is seen as morally and spiritually problematic. As was discussed in the previous chapter, properly formed sexual desires need to be cultivated by Christians (just as malformed desires need to be curtailed). Sexual desire can not only nurture love on earth; it can be an important holy sign of the life to come. The development of ways—disciplines, in the technical sense of that moral term—to stimulate sanctifying experiences of sexual desire and delight is an important moral task from this eschatological perspective.
The sense that it is important to keep our sexual fires burning is commonplace, and many ordinary people, including Christians, turn these days to pornography in search of sexual stimulation when their libido wanes or withers. And indeed, porn usually does prove to be stimulating. There are many problems with this turn to pornography, but the fact that it is sexually stimulating is not central to them. Indeed, I will argue here that finding alternative ways to invigorate our sexual lives is an important moral task for all the faithful. The problem with porn is not that it is arousing; the problem is that the erotic desires it arouses are malformed.
Our sexuality is constructed by many factors, including cultural narratives about sexual desire. Many stories about sexuality are being told in North America (and across the globe) through a variety of popular media including novels, films, music videos, and advertisements. In this chapter we will evaluate the messages about sexuality being sent via pornography. As Robert Jensen notes in the conclusion to his book Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity, “pornography is telling us stories about what it means to be a man, to be a woman, to be sexual as men and women.” He reminds us of the importance of asking: “Are these the stories we want told? Is this the world we want to build?”1
As should be clear by now, Christianity too has a story to tell about sexuality, a narrative that might well include eschatological images of what Wendy Farley so aptly calls “beguiling beauty” and sensuous sweetness. Christians seek to embody this script here and now not only in their behaviors but in their very experience of sexual desire. The questions are: How do we school sexual desire for its “already but not yet” destiny in our life with Christ? Will the narratives sold in porn enable us to cultivate sexual desires compatible with the Christian story about sexuality?
This final chapter is divided into two parts. In the first section, Christian traditions about the formation of sexual desire are evaluated. While the relation of sex to reproduction will be reviewed, most of this discussion about the schooling of desire will focus on the potential of sexual desire to be cultivated in ways that fuel love making. Important caveats about sexual pleasure—about why it must be shared, if it is to prove to be love making, and why sexual pleasure by itself doesn’t really satisfy desire—will also be laid out here. The second half of this chapter focuses on internet pornography. Given the notorious problems associated with defining it, porn is described at this juncture in some detail. While there are many compelling arguments to be made against the porn industry, this analysis focuses the effects of pornography on its consumers, particularly on their cultivation of desire.
Since sexual desire and its pleasures can be good and gracious gifts from God, their nurture in ways appropriate to one’s vocational commitments are rightly considered spiritual and moral disciplines. For many couples in committed relationships the formation of sexual desire is likely to include not only its discipline toward steadfastness and exclusivity but its cultivation for love making as well. The decline or absence of sexual desire may threaten sexual partnerships. When sexual desire flags or disappears altogether, many look for ways to refuel it. It is critical to remember that such nurture is never value-neutral; desire is always directed toward this or that purpose. Christians are called to stoke the fires of sexual desire on earth in ways that are compatible with how we imagine they might be in heaven.
In their anthology Saving Desire: The Seduction of Christian Theology, F. LeRon Shults and Jan-Olav Henriksen aim not just to rescue erotic desire (which includes but is not reduced to sexual desire) from the repressive tendencies associated with “Christian” dualism. They also want to give an account of the power of virtuous erotic desires—including virtuous sexual desires—to order our lives together positively. In her essay in their volume, Wendy Farley describes the nurture and “formation of desire as a central task of Christian life,” noting that one’s theology of desire provides direction for its schooling.2 Yet another contributor to this volume, Christine Roy Yoder, argues that the possibility of directing sexual desire and modifying it if necessary is taken to be axiomatic throughout the scriptures. As she sees it, a classic example of this can be found in the opening chapters of Proverbs, where a father presumes erotic (including sexual) desires can be modified by changes in the way his son comes to think about such relationships. The father’s advice aims to reshape this youth’s vision of what is sexually desirable and thus to reform his sexual life.3 Clearly, there are more or less better ways to cultivate desire. The Christian task is to kindle desire so that it can be salutary and engender human flourishing.
As Robert Jensen notes, when desire wanes many ask: “In such a situation, why not use an outside stimulus such as pornography to jump start the sexual aspect of the relationship?”4 Certainly, the answer to that question depends upon what we think desire is ultimately for. This is the question in sexual ethics and the answers to it have been several. Traditionally, within Christianity, the desire for sexual pleasure was thought to serve the common good primarily by facilitating procreativity and the parental bonds that facilitate child rearing. More recently, Christians have recognized that sexual desire can be love making. Let us consider each answer.
Consider Thomas Aquinas’s reply to the question: what is sex for? His argument was actually quite nuanced. Some with whom he argued taught that sexual pleasure and desire were intrinsically evil. Instead, he recognized that our capacity for sexual delight had to be good, because God created it. The key was to identify and live in accord with its God-given purpose. For Aquinas the answer seemed obvious: normatively human (naturally good) experiences of sexual desire were designed to promote the propagation and proper education of children (and therefore the survival of the species as well as the building up of the church). Sexual desires and activities were natural only when ordered in accord with these goals.
Aquinas viewed sexual pleasure as the servant of procreativity. Although Aquinas greatly valued the intimacy of marital friendship and accepted the sacramental unity of the couple as a good associated with marriage, nowhere does he commend the promotion of intimacy and love as an intention befitting sexual activity. He came close to this when he noted that sexual activity can bond parents together, but pleasure is good not in itself, nor for spousal love, but because it serves child rearing.
At the denominational level no mainstream church in the West these days teaches that procreation alone is the purpose for which sexual desire was designed. However, some still teach that this purpose must be at least symbolically embodied for a sexual relationship for it to be good. In debates about IVF, sterilization, contraception, and especially in disputes about heterosexism and homosexuality, many denominations teach more or less consistently that openness to possibility of procreation is an essential element of good sex. My own communion—the Roman Catholic Church—teaches that openness to the possibility of procreation is essential to each and every expression of good sex and that such openness is inseparably connected to its unitive, love-making function. In contrast many other Christians do not think that openness to the possibility of procreation is essential to good sex, or that it is inseparably connected to the capacity of sexual activity to be genuinely love making.5 They recognize children as a great blessing from God and that some of the faithful are called by God to responsible parenthood. But they think sexual desire is primarily or essentially for something else.
Sexual desire opens us to love. The first awakening of (what might become) love is our spontaneous response to the beauty that has attracted us. This initial response may not be subject to choice, but as Margaret Farley points out, we can be actively receptive to sexual desire’s invitation to open ourselves and pay attention to the beloved (or not).6 Given the argument of this book—about the likely destiny of sexual desire in the life of the world to come—it should come as no surprise that I think the sexual desire has been designed by God to draw us toward each other and to build up a holy communion, to make great lovers of us all. This natural, built-in inclination to love does not conclude our inquiry; it is but the launching pad. As Farley puts it, for Christians and many others, “love is the problem in ethics, not the solution.”7
What might it mean to say one’s sexual desires should be love making? To fuel a just love, Farley notes, sexual desire must be shaped so that it will help us attend to the concrete realities of the beloved as a person. Minimally, a well-formed experience of sexual desire will be alert to and respectful of our lovers as an end in themselves. This requires that we avoid harming the beloved. A well-formed experience of desire will also respect the beloved’s capacity for choice and self-determination. Such respect requires that we respect their bodily integrity and ensure the free consent of our sexual partners. To enable such genuine consent, we must be truthful and committed to honoring our promises.8
Farley goes on to argue that well-formed experiences of sexual desire will also be alert to and respectful of the human capacity for relationship.9 Sexual desire can help us embody this capacity to know and be really known, to love and be loved, and so on, only if it inclines us toward certain kinds of sexual relationships.10 Sexual desires that are love making will fuel relationships characterized by mutuality, equality, fruitfulness, and commitment. Sexual desires have the potential to incline us toward genuine love only if they do not fuel rigid, active/passive models of interaction, unequal patterns of vulnerability and dependence, and unilateral experiences of pleasure among lovers. Relationships that turn in on themselves or fail to care adequately for children conceived therein should also be avoided. Farley notes that even brief sexual encounters may open lovers to relationship, but she warns that the pursuit of sexual pleasure in such a context might well prove isolating instead.
It is important to note here that despite considerable “romantic” rhetoric to the contrary, there is actually little cultural support for the idea that sexual desire should be formed so as to fuel love making. Currently, in North America most Christian churches only give lip service to this notion. Few have taken such a claim about the love-making potential of mutually pleasurable, sexual intimacy seriously. I say this for two reasons. First, for the most part, churches still do not treat the sharing of sexual pleasure (or the failure to share it) as morally significant. Second, much of popular culture (at least in the United States) fails to recognize that the pursuit of pleasure alone will not orient us toward the genuinely intimate relationships that can satisfy our deepest desires.
Consider contemporary Christian teachings about sexuality. Most mainline denominations in the West now celebrate sexual pleasure in their official teachings and note that sharing sexual pleasure can be love making.11 These recent developments should be applauded.12 Yet, the discussion of pleasure therein remains superficial. The androcentric myth that coital activities are widely pleasurable for women appears to remain unchallenged by clergy of both genders. Furthermore, many denominations that explicitly teach about sexuality give little attention to the moral significance of sharing sexual pleasure, or even to the moral import of not causing pain during sexual activities.
The exceptions that prove the rule in this regard are the sex-affirming manuals written for conservative, evangelical Christians. They have been plentiful since Tim and Beverly LaHaye first published their blockbuster book The Act of Marriage in 1972. Even though this book and its many descendants emphasized the goodness of sexual pleasure (including female sexual pleasure), they are inclined generally to prioritize sexual submission (particularly ministry to a husband’s sexual “needs”) over the value of mutually shared pleasure.13 Few note explicitly that if sexual activity is not mutually pleasurable, then it will not promote intimacy and it cannot be love making.
Consider as well the ongoing emphasis on openness to the possibility of procreation. Roman Catholic Church teachings continue to imply that vaginal-penile intercourse is the only form of good sex. It appears that most teachers of the church presume that most women delight in coitus, but this is simply not true. While many women enjoy coitus, research indicates that 70 percent of women do not have orgasms through coital activity alone. Studies suggest that in fact some women do not routinely enjoy coital activity at all. Many actually find it painful. In her book Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, Christiane Northrup, MD, reports that 25 percent of women say they have painful vaginal-penile intercourse virtually all the time and another third report pain a significant amount of the time.14 For these couples, sexual intercourse that is potentially open to the possibility of procreativity is far from love making. It does not take a great deal of moral imagination to recognize that sexual activity that is not mutually pleasurable will not be bonding or prove to be love making.15 Instead of enhancing a loving bond, such sexual activity might well prove destructive of it. Sexual activity cannot be love making apart from the sharing of mutual delight, and coitus by itself is a source of pleasure for only some women, perhaps only a relative few.
Ironically, in light of its own teachings on the importance of the unitive purpose of sexuality, the Catholic emphasis on coitus should be qualified, on the grounds that coitus alone often does not serve the unitive end of sexual activity adequately. The problem is that noncoital sexual activities in themselves are not procreative and much of what constitutes at best “foreplay” from this procreative perspective has traditionally been judged “unnatural,” particularly if it should result in male ejaculation. Ongoing silence about these activities speaks volumes to couples about the comparative importance of baby making over love making, though officially neither purpose ought to have primacy over the other. Much, much more needs to be said by all denominations during sex education programs, marriage preparation, and marriage enrichment courses about the importance of sharing pleasure and about the candid sexual communication in intimate relationships requisite for such sharing.
Another problem at least in the North American sexual climate is the failure to recognize that the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure alone cannot satisfy our deepest sexual desires. It simply isn’t enough. We know this to be true because deep down we don’t just want sexual “release” or merely to be entertained. We want connection. We want to be wanted. We want to be the focus of another person’s attention. Indeed, we want to be deeply known for who we truly are and ferociously loved in response. This is what we really want. Built into human being is this deep longing for intimate companionship. While making such a love can be terrific, the problem is that it is also terrifying.
Sexual desire incarnates our yearning for intimacy. It inclines us toward such connections. This is why people frequently experience phone sex or cybersex as so much “hotter” than solo forms of masturbation, even those involving porn. These technologies facilitate—from a distance, of course—a measure of intimacy. Sexual desire can incline us toward even more passionate attachments and can empower the maintenance of such bonds. It can draw us into one another’s arms and hold us there. Sexual desire can enable people to know themselves as significant and fiercely wanted, as an occasion of joy and tender delight for another. This is why many Christians believe sexual activity can be sacramental; it is part of the body’s grace, to use the apt phrase of the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams.16
What does it mean to say sexual desire can be bonding? This cannot be answered exactly, because it varies with each couple. But sexual partners can become so interconnected that the other’s concerns, interests, and agendas become their own. For example, I care about what happens to my husband; his business is my business. If he is treated poorly at work, it concerns me. Likewise, he cares about me. When my mother needed end-of-life care, he cared for her. A lover’s concern expands to include his or her lover’s concerns: his or her parents, siblings, friends, biological and stepchildren, more distant relatives, and even to the institutions with which they are associated—like the unions and public schools—that touch them.
Christians believe that this expansive relational design is built into sexual desire for deeply theological reasons. This inclusiveness of the other’s concerns mirrors God’s love for us. This image of God is recognized as stamped into our very experience of erotic desire. Since it is by God’s design that people’s boundaries blur when they so love, Christianity affirms that the many expressions of human sexuality—the attraction of desire, the heat of arousal, and the joy of genital pleasure—can be good and gracious gifts of God. The longing for connection built into our experience of sexual desire is an inherent image of God’s longing to commune with humanity, indeed for all of creation.
God’s love for us is unfailingly steadfast, deeply passionate and personal, yet inclusive and welcoming of all. God’s incarnation in Christ—that is, God’s becoming “one flesh” with all of humanity—reveals more fully still than even creation itself God’s own boundary-blurring activity and the erotic destiny for which we as humans have been made. Christ’s passion tells the terrific and terrifying story of the lengths to which God will go in an effort to woo us back into the great communion that is God’s Dance.
Human love can be terrifying too. Our bodily availability to one another and our longing for intimate engagement leaves us at risk. We are extremely vulnerable to abandonment and humiliation, to hurt, betrayal, and rejection in sexual activity. Perhaps no one said it better than James A. Baldwin when he described what lies behind the refusal to love: “I think the inability to love is the central problem, because the inability masks a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And, if you can’t be touched, you can’t be changed. And, if you can’t be changed, you can’t be alive.”17 Touching—especially sexual touch—is boundary-blurring behavior.
Boundary-blurring behavior nurtures intimacy. But such relationships are not just a lot of work; they are a lot of trouble. Sex is risky business. We have good reason to be afraid of getting hurt. We also have good reason to be afraid of our power to hurt others—there is something both seductive and corrupting about our power to humiliate and degrade someone who is physically and emotionally naked before us. Our touch is very powerful. So, we sometimes harden our hearts and separate our personal selves from our sexual relationships. This is why people sometimes look for relationships “without strings attached.” We are afraid. This is why people “hook up” with strangers. This is why we settle for the “benefits” of sex with a casual friend. While such a friend will not take our beauty to heart, neither will he or she leave us broken hearted. Nor will we be tempted to harm him or her.
Boundary-blurring behavior can also slide easily into boundary-violating behavior. If you watched the movie Lars and the Real Girl, you saw the tender truth about the dangers of intimate partnerships. Lars isn’t the only one afraid of really standing naked and vulnerable before another human being. We are all afraid both of being hurt and of hurting others, of being violated and of violating others. Precisely because it is so valuable and potentially harmful, sexual desire requires both discipline and nurture.
Ola Sigurdson reminds us that the process of sustaining and constructing desire takes place in communities (“cities,” to use Augustine’s term), that will either foster or inhibit the edification of our desires.18 As discussed in preceding chapters, the formation of our sexual desire is social and so, of course, will be its (virtuous and/or vicious) reformation and nurture.19 Our mothers were right! What we do regularly (our habits) and who we hang out with (our lovers and friends) really does matter! Let us consider whether pornography can help in cultivating sexual desire for love.
There are at least two ways to rekindle and stoke sexual desire. One, notes Margaret Farley, is to extend through commitment the sexual relationship sufficiently “through time to allow the incorporation of sexuality into a shared life and an enduring love.”20 To this path we will return at the close of this chapter. The other way to keep sexual desire alive is through novelty. As Farley notes, “moving from one partner to another prevents boredom, sustains sexual interest and the possibility of pleasure.”21 Novelty is what the internet offers in spades. Nothing in human history has enabled such movement from one sexual “partner” to another faster and with such ease of access and anonymity as has the World Wide Web. The stimulation associated with such novelty is why so many are increasingly inclined toward various forms of cybersex. It is undoubtedly one of the factors that explains why the consumption of virtual forms of sex has exploded.
It should be noted here—lest there be any illusions to the contrary—that the rising popularity of internet pornography is not an exclusively secular or liberal phenomenon.22 A 2009 state-by-state study done at Harvard University reported a positive correlation between subscriptions to online porn sites and religious and political conservatism.23 In her essay on “Pastors and Pornography” Amy Frykholm noted that well over 50 percent of the men in Promise Keepers use porn.24 Whatever the precise numbers, porn use is growing in popularity among people who occupy both the pews and pulpits of Christian churches. While there are undoubtedly still significant gender differences both in attitudes toward and the consumption of pornography, increasingly women as well as men use porn for sexual stimulation purposes (and not only as a result of the pressure or coercion of male sexual partners).
In the United States most boys have been exposed to soft-core porn by the age of eleven and 84 percent have been exposed to hard core porn by high school.25 Prior to the age of eighteen, 93 percent of boys and 62 percent of girls viewed online porn. Whether we like it or not, a considerable amount of sex education appears to be occurring online. According to a recent study in CyberPsychology and Behavior, “Boys were more likely to be exposed at an earlier age, to see more images, to see more extreme images (e.g., rape, child pornography), and to view pornography more often, while girls reported more involuntary exposure.”26
The explosive growth in the consumption of sexually explicit materials online is widely reported in the social science literature to be linked to its affordability and to the easy, anonymous access provided by the internet.27 In his TED Talk on “The Great Porn Experiment,” Gary Wilson28 notes that early in the twenty-first century when Simon Louis Lajeunesse began to study the impact of internet porn on college age men, Lajeunesse could not identify a control group, that is, he could not find enough college age men who were not already using sexually explicit materials on a regular basis to constitute a randomly defined control group.29
Given these statistics it is certainly reasonable to conclude that significant exposure to pornography is commonplace in the United States. Beyond exposure, encounters with porn appear to be part of a typical male rite of passage in North America. They are often a shared secret and their use a type of male bonding. It is important at this juncture to underline for some what others know to be obvious: most of the time porn is not just viewed or read. It is nearly always accompanied by masturbation.30
Should Christians view this as morally problematic? Historians of the West can trace sexually explicit materials apparently intended to spark sexual desire clear back to ancient Greece. We know from the discovery of the statues of erect penises and the images of explicit sexual activity found in many homes and public buildings entombed at Pompeii that such material was not judged obscene in the ancient Mediterranean world, at least not during the Pax Romana in Italy. Indeed, in her book Fantasies of Femininity: Reframing the Boundaries of Sex, Jane M. Ussher reports that sexually explicit materials were not routinely judged negatively (and hence closeted from public view) until the mid-seventeenth century. They were not repressed in private homes until the mid-nineteenth century.31 Generally speaking, Ussher concludes, explicit representations of sexual activity were not viewed as obscene—that is, as threatening to morally corrupt viewers—until relatively recently in Western history.
The nature of sexually explicit narratives, images, statues, videos, and so on, continues to evolve, so that today in the early twenty-first century many people want to distinguish between forms of sexually explicit material that might energize desires that could prove to be just, if not love making, from those that could not. But the dividing line between the two is notoriously difficult to articulate. This is not a question just for the likes of academics, state legislatures, or Supreme Court justices either. I once received a phone call from an irate mother who had overheard her son talking with one of mine about a book—a wonderful, “coffee table” book—we brought home following the year I spent teaching in Rome. Among its pages were images reproducing many of the sensuous nude statues and gorgeous paintings so typical of the Italian Renaissance found on nearly every corner in Rome. I have no doubt that our son and his friend found these beautiful nude images to be erotically stimulating. I also have no doubt that these images were not obscene. I see its impact on sexual desire as edifying, as drawing those who view its pages to the beauty and sensuality of the human body. But my neighbor clearly did not share that judgment.
Robert Jensen suggests we should simply agree for pragmatic purposes to label all of what is sold in sex shops and on adult sex websites as pornographic.32 (Of course, this does not truly solve the problem; it only defers the question.) Jensen reports that in these marketplaces one can find two types of sexually explicit materials: (1) feature films that are barely organized around the thinnest of plot lines and (2) what is known as gonzo or films that simply record sexual activity, “wall to wall” so to speak. At these locations, a production is likely to be categorized as soft core (instead of hard core) if it portrays nudity and sexual petting but avoids directly showing genitals and acts of penetration. But, of course, the issue of import is not what body parts are uncovered, or what sexual activities are explicitly portrayed, but rather the script for the person or relationship that is narrated and its effects on the viewer.
What could be problematic about stimulating sexual desire through the use of such sexually explicit materials, if sexual desire is a good and gracious gift, both here and quite possibly in the life of the world to come? Might pornography have any place in the Christian schooling of sexual desire? To answer that question, we must have a clear sense of what some of the effects of using internet pornography to stimulate desire might be. We need to understand the complex relationship (1) between the consumption of porn and violent, abusive relationships, (2) between porn, sexual addiction, and the loss of desire, and (3) between porn, sexual communication, and developing skills for intimate relationship. Obviously, these three concerns are not the only important moral questions related to pornography, but their consideration will give us a better handle on porn’s formative impact on sexual desire.33
Marvin Ellison contends that in porn frequently the source of arousal is “not merely the sexual explicitness of the images but the subjugation and humiliation” portrayed therein.34 Pornographic books and films eroticize phallocentric, crudely (mostly hetero)sexist scripts of subordination (usually of women) and domination (usually by men) as well as violence (again usually against women and often sexual). Jane Caputi concurs and emphasizes that pornography conditions its viewers “to eroticize domination, subordination, violence, and objectification, even when, as in some contexts, a woman takes the masculine role or the man the feminine.”35 Two questions follow: (1) How much of the sexually explicit materials sold in sex shops and on the web falls into this category? (2) What are its effects?
Those who favor increased censorship of pornography believe materials that normalize, indeed make sexy, structures of domination and violence of many types are widely representative of what is available on the internet. Others however do not think such materials typify most of what is sold there. Ussher reports:
In my own research, I found that the most common theme was of a woman on her own—no man in the scene at all—strongly reminiscent of the archetypal nude we see in “art.” … Soft-core is certainly more ubiquitous, and if we examine the vision of “woman” in this context, it is not as easy to say that it can be explained away solely as “woman hatred.” It appears to be as much about fantasies of untrammeled desire, or about warding off fear, as it is about desecration or dread.36
She argues that though some studies suggest the portrayal of violent, illegal activities may constitute as much as 25 percent of the porn market, other researchers have concluded “that only 3 to 4 percent of pornography is violent.”37
In her chapter on pornography, Ussher reviews the social scientific literature generated in the 1970s and 1980s surrounding the claim that there is a straightforward cause and effect relationship between pornography and violence. She concludes that such a claim lacked sufficient support, noting that the scientific community was divided on whether there was even a positive correlation between an increase in the consumption of pornography and an increase in sexually aggressive behavior among men. And yet, in 1985 the U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography concluded that there was a link between pornography and harm to women. In her summary of the research available to this commission, Edna F. Einsiedel concluded as follows.
Sexually explicit material designed to be arousing is arousing; rapists are aroused by both forced and consenting sex depictions, but college males are only aroused by forced sex if the victim is shown to enjoy it; arousal associated with rape is positively correlated with attitudes to rape and acceptance of rape myths; both of these correlated positively with aggressive behavior toward women; and laboratory aggression toward women positively correlates with self-reported sexually aggressive behavior.38
The problem is, notes Ussher, that this interpretation of the evidence did not represent a scientific consensus. Other social scientists had assessed the same evidence differently and concluded “that a simple stimulus-response model of pornography and violence cannot be substantiated.”39 For this reason similar public commissions in Britain in 1979, in Canada in 1985, and in Australia in 1988 determined that there was not sufficient evidence to conclude that the consumption of pornography by “normal” (that is, not convicted sex offenders) men harms women.40
It continues to be difficult to assess the relationship of porn to violence because pornography itself may well simply reflect scripts even more deeply enmeshed in popular culture. Marvin Ellison makes the point this way: “the burgeoning pornography industry in the U.S. displays sexuality as a dynamic of dominance and subordination. Good sex is depicted as requiring inequalities of power and status between man and woman. In this regard pornography expresses mainstream cultural values about sex though, granted, in exaggerated display.”41 The violent (hetero)sexist scripts found in pornography are in evidence in many other genres—in art, advertising, popular music, movies, television, and so on—and porn may be far from uniquely educative in their regard.
Macrosociological studies that positively correlate increases in the consumption of porn with increases in the rate of sexually violent crime must also be carefully interpreted. Ussher cautions that other factors may be at play, given the fact that the roots of (sexual) violence are quite complex. She cites the work of Dennis Howitt, whose review of the literature on divorce highlights one such additional variable. His studies indicate that there is an even stronger positive correlation between increases in reported rape and increases in the number of divorced men in a society. He argues that when we control for this factor, no statistically significant correlation can be found between the consumption of porn and reported rape.42 Additionally, it may well be that the consumption of porn impacts different viewers differently. For example, one study positively correlated the exposure of unhappy individuals to pornography with nearly a sevenfold increase in their having engaged in casual sex, but this same study found the use of porn had no impact on the rates of casual sex behavior among happier adults.43
But when Ussher examined studies that focused on the impact of pornography on women and children subject to sexual abuse, she found the evidence more compelling. For example, studies suggest that child abusers expose children to images of incest and pedophilia in an effort to “normalize” such behavior and to undermine the potential internal resistance children might have to abuse. This strategy proves effective especially among children who have considerably less capacity to interpret critically what they are exposed to, and if they do, they may simply feel shame at their own sexual response to it. (Of course, because what we see is “real” for those involved in its production, pornography that involves the abuse of children and/or adults should be illegal, regardless of its effects on viewers.) Ussher concludes: “We should be able to condemn violent pornography, child pornography and the sexual abuse of women and children without having to exert a blanket censorship over all sexually explicit material … ”44
Additionally, porn often treats acts that can actually be harmful to one’s partner (including substance abuse, risky sexual behaviors, and pressure, if not outright coercion) as sexy. Some studies have positively correlated risky sexual behavior with the consumption of porn.45 But as with porn’s relationship to violence, this does not establish a causal relationship. Engaging in unprotected anal intercourse (referred to in the literature as UAI) has also been found to correlate positively with age, HIV status, and substance abuse (particularly the use of inhalant nitrates). The point here is this. As has proven to be the case with sexual violence, the factors underlying dangerous sexual behaviors are multiple and their interrelationship undoubtedly complex. The consumption of sexually explicit material that eroticizes such risky behaviors alone will not account for them. What we do know is that porn use may well be one among many contributing risk factors.46
The central promise of porn is that it will spark sexual desire and in the end lead to sexual pleasure. As Robert Jensen puts it, porn usually “produces sexual stimulation that can efficiently lead to orgasm.”47 This is the one well-established effect of porn. But even this claim requires some qualification. Those who develop a sex arousal addiction in response to their internet porn use—and this is a sizable minority of viewers—will eventually experience a drop in their libido, followed by erectile dysfunction in men and a numbing of desire in women.48
In her helpful review of the neuroscience behind desire, Joyce Ann Mercer explains why this happens. Sexually explicit images trigger the release of dopamine in the brain. The viewer learns to associate this pleasure with that external trigger. Digital technology enables viewers to see at high speed a succession of novel, sexually explicit images. One study, Mercer cites, makes it clear that any trigger that does not extinguish the release of dopamine with repeated exposure is a potentially addictive substance or process.49 When viewing internet pornography, “dopamine rapidly and continually floods the brain,” effectively rewiring its reward circuit.50 Habituated to this flood of dopamine, porn use (this trigger) then becomes requisite for any experience of desire and its pleasures. For those who become addicted to internet porn, arousal requires an ever greater volume of, and constantly intensifying, sexually explicit imagery. No merely human sexual encounter can produce what technology has made requisite. Thus internet porn addicts frequently suffer ED and the loss of desire.
As is the case with substance addictions to drugs, food, alcohol, and the like, the addiction to internet porn, like other so-called behavioral or process addictions, is associated with multiple relationship difficulties. This should not come as a surprise since the very reward circuits of the brain likely to be changed by behavioral addictions (think here of various forms of sex addiction, including cybersex addictions to internet pornography and hot chatting) are critical to our most intimate social relationships. Labeling this the “theft of desire,” practical theologian David A. Hogue concludes that sex addictions “in effect ‘hijack’ these circuits from their support of loving desire.”51 Admittedly, not all who consume internet porn will become addicted. Perhaps about only 8 percent of men and 3 percent of women will become addicted to porn and eventually suffer the loss of desire. But in 2015 this might well have amounted to roughly thirty million Americans. No moral assessment of the effects of consuming porn should exclude this risk, but this can only be recognized as a serious moral issue when the proper cultivation of desire is seen as constitutive of sexual virtue.
While agreeing that at least some kinds of pornographic materials should be banned, many argue that other kinds of sexually explicit erotica send wonderful, positive messages about sex. After all, women are often portrayed as sexually adventurous and appreciative, voracious (indeed insatiable!) symbols of sexual desire who eagerly seek phallic penetration. But this fantasy does not square with reality. Many women are not so enthusiastic; they are certainly not always and endlessly available for and interested in sex. In contrast to what is portrayed in porn, few women walk around already aroused, nearly ecstatic at the mere prospect of penetration. Likewise, even among adolescent males, penises are not always and already rock hard.
Ussher may well be right to interpret such narratives as reflecting male fantasies about their sexual prowess and women’s desires. They may well express efforts to ward off male anxieties about women’s lack of sexual interest. She suggests that much of porn may aim to allay male fears about the ability to get and keep erections and to pleasure females. It is interesting to note that studies indicate that women’s sexual fantasies are often similar to the scripts present in porn. And yet, research also suggests that these fantasies “rarely reflect the experiences actual women found the most pleasurable and satisfying in their partnered sexual lives.”52
The question remains: are such fantasies helpful? Admittedly stimulating for many, do such scripts bring people to satisfying sexual partnerships in reality? Pornographic fantasies do not eroticize the good communication about sex requisite for sharing pleasure. On the contrary they teach that there is no need for sexual partners to pay close attention to whether they are sharing pleasures with each other and/or to negotiate their sexual encounters. The message they send is that there is no need to communicate, that is, to speak about one’s own and to attend to one’s partner’s sexual preferences. In a recent article on the loss of sexual desire, a couples’ expert from Boston, Terry Real, takes note of the lack of concern for the reciprocity of delight expressed in pornography.
What will you never see in a porn video? “Honey, I don’t like that, could you stop doing that, could you take a shower first?” The archetype of the porn queen is that she is a woman who derives sexual pleasure by giving the man pleasure—and here’s the key—everything he does is perfect! What you don’t see in porn is anything that needs to be negotiated, the woman having needs of her own or the roles being reversed.53
Were this “queen” to speak up, she or he would break the “magic” spell cast over the sexual activity, particularly its power dynamics. These fantasies fuse erotic stimuli with the active partner’s inattention to (if not outright disregard for) the passive partner’s (usually women’s) pleasure, and those roles are not reciprocated.
Some users of porn might respond: Well, of course not. That’s the whole point. It is a sexual fantasy! It is not meant to be a unit on the importance of good communication in a sex education course. But the fact is: like it or not, these genres are confused in our culture. Internet porn is for many people a (if not the) major source of their sex education, and tragically it communicates a lot of misinformation about what makes for mutually pleasurable sexual relationships. Likewise, porn does not eroticize safer sex practices (unless it is produced in a state that requires condoms be used) or other habits that express a sense of shared responsibility regarding the spread of STDs or family planning.
In sum, when detailing its impact, certainly the stimulation of desire can be correlated with the consumption of internet pornography. At the same time, the risk of addiction—and with it the loss of desire—should also be linked to the use of porn. The sexual fantasies envisioned in the vast majority of sexually explicit “scripts” available online do little to foster among their viewers better skills at sexual communication, sharing pleasure, or sharing responsibility for reproductive or other health concerns. And while admittedly no simple causal relationship can be established between the consumption of porn and sexual violence and abuse, some studies suggest it may be one of many contributing factors.
This is what I recommend. Because of the role they play in sustaining abusive relationships, I would argue that violent and child pornography, as well as any sexually explicit materials whose production requires the abuse of people, should be outlawed. Because of their many, likely positive correlations with unhealthy outcomes, much of the remaining sexually explicit material available for consumption on the internet should be avoided. Scripts can be harmful in multiple ways. We need to eroticize good communication and consensual sexual encounters—but not only that. As we see in narratives like that found in Fifty Shades of Grey, people can agree to participate eagerly in their own violation and debasement. People called to embody sex on earth as it might well be in heaven need to ask whether what they use to stimulate their sexual desire fosters both intimacy and respect for human dignity.
I would also argue that we need to turn our gaze away from what is external to our sexual relationships. We need to turn away from virtual (exclusively visual and audio) realities and to “(re)materialize” sexually, as it were. We need to turn away from screens and devote more time to actually smelling, tasting, and touching our sexual partners. We need to make time in our lives for sex play. Before suggesting in a bit more detail what such a discipline might concretely entail, let me say a word about our contemporary tendency toward excarnation and why I think it is problematic.
It is critical to concede in our day and age that the contemporary social production of sexual desire is and will be primarily visual. “Without claiming that this dimension is exhaustive,” writes Sigurdson, “I would suggest that it would still be a good idea to start with the so-called turn from a ‘textual’ to a ‘visual’ culture in the West, in which the written or printed word no longer has a hegemonic status when it comes to the production of meaning.”54 Indeed globally the formative power of “moving pictures” cannot be doubted.55 There may be no more powerful medium whereby people’s lifestyles are “produced” than movies. Like all narratives, movies (sexually explicit or not) provide the categories, roles, and scripts for our sexual desires.
The philosopher Richard Kearney has explored the differences between negotiating sexual relationships virtually (through sight and sound) and through touch. He traces these preferences back to an ancient debate about which way of mediating the world—visually or through touch—produces the most wisdom. Plato, whose hermeneutic was largely opto-centric, commended our visual sense because it facilitated through distance the development of theoretical understanding. In contrast, Aristotle advocated a more carnal hermeneutic, noting that proximity did not foreclose the possibility of wisdom because touch is cognitive as well as sensitive. To make a long story short, the Platonists won this argument in the West, and touch was stigmatized in the various dualisms that followed.56
Technology has accelerated the movement in the West toward what Kearney (presumably building upon the work of Charles Taylor in A Secular Age) has labeled “excarnation.” Our steady divestment in matters of touch and the flesh is expressed powerfully in the phenomenal growth in the amount of time we devote to “screens” each day and in internet porn industries. We can see the impact of “excarnation” in the explosive consumption of pornography today.
It is not without painful irony that the impact of the excarnation of sex has been told so well by Spike Jonze in his movie Her. In this examination of the limits of virtual love, we meet Theodore, who was left deeply wounded in his real life by a divorce. He and “Samantha” (an operating system’s digital persona) eventually become virtual lovers, but this does not prove satisfying. Proxies for “Samantha’s” presence—even the surrogate lover Samantha sends Theodore in the flesh—cannot adequately replicate the connection established by a lover’s touch. Why? Because when we touch someone, we are exposed immediately to that person, to the adventure they are, the risks their carnal presence introduces as well as its delights.
What has all this to do with the appeal of porn? Basically, as we know it pornography is a visual medium. It is voyeuristic. And in such visual relationships, power is unilateral. We have much more control over purely visual relationships than over those that are enfleshed. This is why more and more of us, especially chronic users, prefer the relative anonymity of a casual sext and to gaze at internet pornography over taking the multiple risks of trying to initiate a sexual encounter and share pleasure with a real partner. Like any “blind rut,” as James Joyce so indelicately put it, porn is far less challenging than a relationship with a three-dimensional, sometimes smelly and blemished, sometimes exhausted or angry, sexual partner who can and often does both look and talk back.
Whether we watch it as a couple or as an individual, porn turns us away from knowing and being known by a real person, whose affections we can neither turn down or off when they make us uncomfortable, nor turn on with the click of a switch. No matter how eager, lovers encountered in the flesh are not always available for or even interested in sexual activity. Unlike the idealized, disembodied avatars we might encounter or become on the web—who like porn stars apparently never pick up a pound or two over the holidays, suffer menstrual cramps, and so on—sex play on earth cannot ignore the limits and messiness that accompany finitude.
Most porn is problematic, not because it is sexually explicit or stimulating, but because its narrative often (but perhaps not always) fuels a desire to take, rather than share, pleasure and because its promise of the easy release of sexual tension reinforces our fearful inclination to turn away from each other in real life. When we pay close attention to what is truly delightful, however, pornography’s disorienting, if not always deadening, impact on our heart’s desire for shared joy is revealed. When we habitually divorce sexual pleasure from its power to sustain and deepen intimate relationships—which is I would argue what the chronic use of porn does—we harden our hearts to the sensuous joy for which sexual desire was designed.57
The Christian tradition has devoted significant attention to the way sexual desire wanders off in new and different (and not coincidentally in sexually stimulating) directions. Much in traditional Christian sexual ethics speaks clearly to and negatively about such wanderings in search of novelty, to the habits of “hooking up” (fornication), to adultery, even to lust practiced “only” in one’s heart (or increasingly online). The Christian literature on sexual exclusivity is extensive, but there has been comparatively little analysis of the connection between the wandering of desire and its fluctuations, between the search for novelty and the hope of reigniting that delicious fire that is desire. The church has offered little counsel as to how spouses might otherwise cultivate sexual desire, as noted earlier by Margaret Farley, through its incorporation “into a shared life and enduring love.”58
If the sexual incarnation of love is to serve as an antidote to their heart’s desire wandering off in search of novelty either online or across the street, then partners must set time aside to play sexually with each other. They must focus their time, energy, and attention on each other, so they do not lose touch with each other amid the clutter and work that accompanies building a shared life. Perhaps those among God’s people who are in committed relationships ought to treat such dates as a way, along with worship, that they “keep the Lord’s Day holy.” Instead of “giving up sex” for Lent, perhaps “sex play” should become a Lenten discipline.59 Since we have established that there might well be sexual desire and delight in heaven, then at least some Christian disciples are called to cultivate and enjoy such transfigured expressions of sex on earth.