The New Challenge of Porn

WARNING: EXPLICIT

PLEASE REVIEW FOR CHILDREN

Back in college, before he was a successful lawyer and practicing Catholic, a friend of mine was at his fraternity house one night, partying with his friends while they waited for a stripper to arrive. And arrive she did, beginning her performance—only to catch my friend’s eye. She froze. So did he. They had been in high school together. She gathered up her things and fled.

There’s something almost quaint about this story. It could have taken place in the 1990s or the 1890s. It involved a live sex performance with real flesh-and-blood human beings. And when their gazes met, she and he suddenly knew the same thing: This was a woman with parents, and siblings, and maybe children, and certainly friends, and a history, which presumably once included dreams that had gone horribly wrong. She even had enough shame—more shame than he did, at the time—that she would not dance for someone who knew her real name.

Something different, I think, lives in our more recent Internet-based pornography. Apologists for pornography say it has always been with us. There is, for them, a direct descent from Roman graffiti to Renaissance literature to live webcams.

Maybe. But these always involved a community of some sort: You had to sit in the theater for the stag show or XXX movie; you had to show your face to the clerk or older peer and ask for the magazine; you had to go to the frat house that night. But not now. The providers of pornography have so mastered the art of marketing their wares according to the three A’s—accessibility, affordability, and anonymity—that no one ever has to know. The Internet is an essentially gnostic, disembodied medium: You can dispense ideas through it, but not sacraments, community, or –embodiment.

We are so awash in pornography these days that most of us don’t recognize it anymore. Of Internet users in the United States, 40 percent visit porn sites at least once a month. The number rises to more than 70 percent when the audience is men aged eighteen to –thirty-four. The Internet has long been a driving force for the porn industry, pushing the bounds of access speed, streaming downloads, and file sharing. Now the cell-phone industry hopes porn will do for it what it’s done for the Web—make it very, very rich. The pornography industry brings in between $10 –billion and $20 billion in the United States alone, and around $60 billion worldwide. (Hard numbers are hard to find, since cable giants and hotels chains are loathe to publicize their take from the skin industry.) That’s more than all professional sports. It’s three times more than Google, Yahoo, and MSN make in a year—combined.

But if you don’t go for numbers, try this experiment: Unplug. Don’t look at the Internet, television, or even print ads for a few days. As soon as you plug back in, you will see it again: skin everywhere. Porn is now mainstream.

When I tried the experiment, one of the first things I saw when I turned the TV back on was a commercial for a prime-time sitcom on one of the big-three –networks in which a woman deflects a man’s proposition by saying that sleeping with her would mean also sleeping with her fiancé. “Is your fiancé, by any chance, a chick?” Play the laugh track.

A ménage à trois is commonplace in porn but not in your life, I bet. A recent stay at a hotel had me mindlessly flipping channels, bumping into a long commercial for Girls Gone Wild, the show in which drunk college co-eds strip for the camera in exchange for a hat or a T-shirt and a bit of fleshy fame (its founder, a thirty-year-old making $30 million a year, is now in jail for filming underage women). The ad had the key parts (barely) scrambled, but it didn’t matter—the pornographic effect was the same. And that’s tame compared to what was available on the hotel’s “On Demand” –station. Even if you don’t like stats, you’ll be impressed with this one: Half of hotel-room patrons purchase pornography there. Porn isn’t sleazy anymore. It’s ABC, Time Warner, and the Holiday Inn.

The omnipresence of pornography eclipses any sort of recognizable freedom. To board my afternoon commuter train, I walk past an advertisement for Apple Vacations in which a bikini-clad woman is playfully photographing the viewer. The position of her arms is such that her breasts are at my eye level and life-size. Only the blind could avoid it. As I see it, I wonder how my children will learn about sex. From their parents? From church? From Apple Vacations ads?

Probably they’ll get their education from the Internet. One survey suggests that 90 percent of eight- to sixteen-year-olds have viewed pornography online. Ninety percent. The average age of one’s first exposure to Web porn is eleven. What kind of freedom is it in which your preteen’s first exposure to physical love, which religious people generally take to be a holy mystery close to the heart of who we are as God’s creatures, comes at the hands of the sleaziest spewers of lies making the handsomest profit off smut in history?

Some would laugh and say that my Apple Vacations ad is not pornography. Indeed, Pamela Paul’s extraordinary 2005 book, Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, reports that many college-age kids don’t even think of Playboy as porn—it’s far too mild. What porn requires these days is actual penetration. Now eleven-year-olds learn about sex on the Internet by receiving an unsolicited emailed link about bukkake—a Japanese cultural treasure exported here in a computer’s nanosecond, in which groups of men all ejaculate on or in a single woman simultaneously.

There’s something tired about religious figures decrying pornography. Christian magazines and ministers are supposed to broadcast jeremiads about visual fornication. In fact, our condemnation is part of pornography’s appeal for its users. And, as it happens, they are often us: In a landmark 2000 Christianity Today survey, 40 percent of clergy acknowledged visiting pornographic websites; another survey in 2002 reported 21 percent do so regularly. A 2002 survey at Pastors.com reported that 50 percent of pastors had viewed pornography in the previous year.

Skeptics of religious and political conservatives often smell hypocrisy in this, and they’re not far wrong. Eric Schlosser’s recent book Reefer Madness, which includes a long section on the economics of porn, is full of examples of public opponents who privately indulged in the skin trade, not least Anthony Comstock, instigator and enforcer of some of America’s first antiobscenity laws in the 1870s. The fundamentalist, peering into others’ mail, is—according to Schlosser—merely playing out his own “compulsion to masturbate” while thundering against the “Infidels, the Liberals, and the Free-Lovers” who support smut.

Of course, advocacy for social justice and pietistic practices of holiness are not intrinsically opposed. A labor-organizer friend of mine, describing her organizing in Florida with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, mentioned almost offhandedly that the most difficult part was getting the workers off Web porn and into the union.

Still, even the fact that some opponents of pornography have been hypocrites offers a theological insight. Many of the porn-consuming pastors grew up, no doubt, in zealously evangelical homes in which fornication was regularly condemned. What was so interesting that pastor and mom and dad were so desperately keen to keep from them? The drama of the Fall is played out as they indulge in a bit of cyber-–fantasy, whether as naughty teens or as burnt-out, codependent, self-indulgent pastors. “I deserve this—all those years of school, my tiny salary, all the petty badgering I get at home and at church. At least these women ask nothing of me.”

The answer, say some, is to lift the restrictions. Cut out the obscenity laws and demand will wither. So argues Schlosser, for instance, with Hustler’s Larry Flynt as his witness. In Denmark, slashing of antiobscenity laws in the 1970s led to a quick spike of interest and then a continuous decline, which would be more precipitous still if not for foreign tourists in Copenhagen. Schlosser cites a study of the effects of –Denmark’s change: “The most common immediate reaction to a one-hour pornography stimulation was boredom.”

Perhaps he’s right, and European countries that feature nudity in prime time and on newsstands and explicit porn on noncable television have less of an interest-building stigma to entice pious children. But the problem is this: Porn works. One has to be trained to see it as banal, either through desensitization or through the reordering of desire so that the eye catches what is genuinely beautiful and ignores the rest. In the meantime, thousands will model, hundreds will profit handsomely off it, and billions will have their desires malformed, including our children and pastors.

Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, Virginia, has made the most theologically substantial response to pornography of any recent ecclesiastical figure I know. He reflects most helpfully on the “gift of sight.” Thinking of the Sermon on the Mount, Loverde lands on the promise of eschatological vision: “Our natural vision in this world is the model for supernatural vision in the next. Once we have distorted or damaged that template, how will we understand that reality?”

This takes on greater poignancy when we remember that beatific vision has traditionally been a way of speaking of salvation itself. So it is not just the posture of the scold from which Loverde intones, “Those who engage in such activity . . . deprive themselves of sanctifying grace, destroy the life of Christ in their souls, and prevent them from receiving Holy Communion until they have received absolution through the Sacrament of Penance.” His words are a diagnostician’s words: This activity yields that result. “The human person progressively builds or destroys his or her character by each and every moral choice.” When one’s gaze is directed askance, “one becomes the kind of person who is willing to use others as mere objects of pleasure.”

Would that others could speak with as much confidence as Rome’s bishops. We mainline Protestants rarely mention pornography at all, and our near silence is striking. My sense is that it stems from fear of sounding “conservative”—Catholics and evangelicals harrumph about the lad mags: We don’t like them either, but let’s not be prudes.

Pamela Paul’s Pornified shows just how dated this laissez-faire attitude is. Today’s porn is not the naughty deck of playing cards your great uncle owned. Paul’s extensive conversations with habitual porn users focus especially on Web addicts—commonly defined as those who view Web pornography for more than eleven hours a week (a quarter-time job). Online you can get gorgeous models to do whatever you want; in real life, you’re a loser with no friends. One middle-age man laments to Paul that he has wasted, all told, three years of his life on Web porn. Dante could have thought of no worse hell. Christians of all types, mainline included, should care.

Some do. The Evangelical Covenant (formerly the Swedish Covenant, a pietistic offshoot of the Lutherans) has issued an impressive pastoral letter about pornography, complete with the appropriate adjectival wail in the wilderness—“epidemic.” It turns then to Scripture’s use of the relationship between clothing and sin: Adam and Eve’s effort to cover themselves reveals their sin. St. Paul speaks of stripping as what we do with our old nature in baptism. The suggestion is that we have resources to combat this plague if we attend to the richness of our own scriptural and liturgical language.

The Covenant has noticed overlap between how pornographers talk and act and how the Church does. So, for example, the Darwinian claim is often made that men are biologically wired to desire sex with more than one partner. What then could be more natural than porn? Notice: A theological claim is being made here, which clearly competes with Christian anthropology. Or, for another example, the claim is often made that our sex life needs spicing up lest we become bored. Early Christian catechists, like Augustine, worried about the same problem in church: how to vary teaching enough to keep listeners interested when they’ve heard it all before.

Early Christians were baptized nude. It is one of the most striking images from the early Church, all the more so given our forebears’ supposed repression and our age’s proud liberation. When Paul says we are those who “have stripped off the old self with its practices” and been clothed “with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness,” ancient Christians took the language –literally enough to remove their outer garments and emerge from the water as naked as the day they were born and then be covered with a white garment, symbolizing the purity of the eighth day of creation.

Perhaps it should not surprise that ancient Christians were comfortable with earthy talk of nakedness. Many of today’s churches have bought the culture’s lie that religion is not about sex or anything else of much importance. But, as theologian Sarah Coakley has so brilliantly said, ancient Christian reflection on desire shows that Freud is exactly wrong: Talk about God is not repressed talk about sexuality; talk about sex is, in fact, repressed talk about God. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, porn users are not to be rebuked for desiring too much but for desiring too little.

I remember a friend who was frankly unapologetic about wanting to continue to sleep with women though he was unmarried. I responded that God –wishes a love affair with him more rapturous than that with any woman. I had in mind St. Augustine’s key vision of Lady Continence in the Confessions: “serene and cheerful without coquetry, enticing me in an honorable manner to come and not to hesitate.” Augustine, now convinced intellectually that Christianity is true, desirous to join the Church but unready to give up sex (“make me chaste but not yet”), realizes that continence is more lovely than any woman, more fruitful, with the greatest promise of satisfaction of his desire without regret. I told my friend as much, and his end of the phone went quiet for a long moment. “Uh, right,” he said. “Exactly how does that work?”

Second-generation feminists opposed to porn often argued that it leads to rape. Not so, as porn defenders in places like Slate.com have shown: Porn users may be staying home to masturbate rather than attacking women in the street. In fact, porn may be behind the general dampening of libido in our culture. Did everyone need Viagra and its competitors before it was invented and pushed on us? Maybe not—because they weren’t satisfying themselves online so much. A magnificent article in New York magazine in 2004 says enough by its title: “Not Tonight, Honey. I’m Logging On.” An accompanying article by Naomi Wolf describes a friend who converted to Orthodox Judaism and moved to Israel. Her long, gorgeous hair was covered; her bedroom was off-limits even to her children. “And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair. She must feel, I thought, so hot.”

Wolf has written elsewhere of the effects of our culture’s warped ideas of female beauty on ordinary women and girls. The naked and basically naked women on our airwaves have certain advantages over normal women: airbrushing and silicone and anorexia chief among them.

In fact, the models in porn suggest a kind of morbid preference for youth, another symptom of our culture’s sheer terror of age and death. Ever younger –models (websites often have names like “barely legal”), shaved private parts, unnatural skinniness, all suggest a truly macabre longing for youth. No wonder more ordinary wives and girlfriends and daughters come to loathe and abuse their actual bodies. It has been suggested that many college men, having been habitual porn watchers for all their short lives, treat their girlfriends like so many bad imitators of porn. Naomi Wolf writes, “When I came of age in the seventies, it was still pretty cool to be able to offer a young man the actual presence of a naked, willing young woman.” Not now. “Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”

Christians have resources with which to aid this recovery of genuine eros, though they’re a bit dusty at present. I think here that Orthodox iconography, when done right, is beautiful beyond words. It had better be: Worship bears the Church up to heaven into the presence of God. Liturgy is a drawing out of our true selves, our best selves, in union with God in reflection of God’s union with us in Christ through the Theotokos. It’s erotic in a chaste sort of way.

Protestants are not without resources here as well. Our great gift to the Church universal—the hymn—is surprisingly sexually charged, when done right. In summer revivals in small Southern churches, the piano belting a tune and all crooning like David before the Lord, people get saved not just because of manipulation but because the experience is physically glorious—no wonder the stories are legion of kids spooning in the woods or of entertainers making their starts in little backwoods hymn sings. Surely there are resources there. But how does it work? Surely it’s more complicated than giving a horny kid an icon and teaching him how to pray before it or setting him down in an uncomfortable pew for a revival. Or is it?

When I’ve taken retreats to Catholic monasteries, I’ve been aware of how surprisingly, and even frighteningly, erotic they seem. The Trappists of Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, South Carolina, worship in an exquisitely beautiful place: high white walls, cold stone floors, a slit in the side of the main sanctuary like a split in the universe through which the reserved sacrament is always visible. The great stone altar is big enough to sacrifice Isaac on. Candles flicker on the bronze face of Our Lady during Compline, and dozens of men chant the Salve Regina before the abbot dismisses with a flick of his wrist and a sprinkling of holy water. Pure desire for God could be wrung from the place like a wet towel. And one can begin to see how sex with another person could be given up for desire for God or made better by mutual longing for God.

There are treasures here with which we can become reacquainted to combat pornography, if we dare. And we may not: Moderns flinch when St. Bernard of Clairveaux seeks to progress up Jesus’ body, kissing his way up to his lips; when Bernini sculpts St. Theresa in the posture of orgasm; when ancient Christians stripped and spit and had their faces hissed at in exorcism before submerging, nude, to be born again.

A friend of mine likes to say that the Christian answer to pornography is soup kitchens. All our –senses are engaged there in community with others for the sake of serving Christ in the poor. What could be more erotic? That is—what more could draw us out of ourselves toward another? We have these parts, these desires, for a reason: to love and be loved by God.

- Jason Byassee is assistant editor of Christian Century. He has taught adjunct at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, North Park Theological Seminary, and Wheaton College. He is a probationary elder in the United Methodist Church.

Pornography Leads to Despair

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.

- Donald DeMarco

The Politics of Porn

In many major American cities, the tawdry sections of town that once house pornographic cinemas, and strip joints have given way to shiny new office buildings and Starbucks coffee houses. Does this sign of urban renewal also signify moral renewal? Has America finally grown bored with a surfeit of pornography? Unfortunately not. Pornography has simply relocated from inner city slums to a far worse location — the home, which it now infiltrates via the latest technology.

U.S. News and World Report (Feb. 10, 1997) revealed just how deeply mired this country is in explicit depictions of sexual depravity; it is a sign of the times that the cover article on pornography was carried in the “Business and Technology” section. The story states that hardcore pornography is now an $8 billion industry. A more recent Time magazine article (Sept. 7, 1998), “Porn Goes Mainstream,” also in the “Business” section, estimates $10 billion in revenues. In either case, hardcore porn out-grosses all of Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and rakes in more cash than the rock and country music businesses combined. In 1996, 665 million hard core videos were rented — over two for every man, woman, and child in America. Explicit sex has become part of the bottom line for video stores, long-distance carriers like AT&T, cable companies like Time Warner and Tele-Communications, Inc., and hotel chains like Marriott, Hyatt, and Holiday Inn. In addition, there are an estimated 100,000 pornographic World Wide Web sites on the Internet, offering millions of hardcore pornographic images, some of them “interactive.” Pornography is now mainstream. How did this happen?

One answer has been given by Milos Forman, director of The People vs. Larry Flynt, the movie about the Hustler magazine publisher. In defense of his film's subject matter, Forman said that, while we may not like pornography, its existence is essential to our freedom. He drew upon his personal experiences under Nazi and Communist regimes to illustrate the importance of the First Amendment. If we allow the suppression of one form of speech deemed undesirable by some, Forman holds, then we cannot prevent the suppression of any form of speech. Deny one choice, and you deny them all. It is all or nothing. Democracy must yield to pornocracy — because, it seems, democracy is about the unfettered freedom to choose whatever one wants.

Today, such a view hardly appears extreme. After all, the Supreme Court opined in the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey ruling that, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Applying this liberating philosophy to pornography, New Jersey Federal Judge Alfred Wolin recently found in favor of two pedophiles who challenged a law banning pornography in the state's Avenel correctional facility for repeat sex offenders. And the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned as unconstitutional an Arizona county's ban on depictions of frontal nudity in the jail cells of county prisons.

If the philosophy behind the Casey decision is correct, Forman's position is the right one. If we can make it all up as we go along, then there are no moral standards to distinguish between pornography and other forms of speech, only personal taste. The broad embrace of this view has opened the floodgates to hardcore pornography. The problem with this inundation is that it threatens the very democracy that allows it.

The reason is that the key to democracy is not free choice. As we know from the Weimar Republic, people can freely choose anything, even Hitler. The key, as our Founding Fathers knew, is virtue. Only a virtuous person is capable of rational consent because only a virtuous person's reason is unclouded by the habitual rationalizations of vice. Vice inevitably infects the faculty of judgment. No matter how democratic their institutions, morally enervated people cannot be free. And people who are enslaved to their passions inevitably become slaves to tyrants. Thus, our Founders predicated the success of democracy in America upon the virtue of the American people.

In light of this, it is positively Orwellian to suggest, as Forman does, that America is free because it produces hardcore pornography. The authors of the First Amendment would claim the opposite — that acceptance of pornography tends to destroy our capacity for freedom in both a personal and a political way, and therefore should be proscribed.

The Founders forbade pornography not only because it subverts virtue, but because it attacks the political foundations of society. Though largely consumed in private, pornography becomes a political problem when it is widespread because it undermines chastity. Chastity is not only a moral virtue; it is also indispensable to political order. Chastity is integral to the functioning of the irreducible core of a polity. Aristotle begins The Politics not with a single individual, but with a description of a man and a woman together in the family, without which the rest of society cannot exist. A healthy family is posited upon the proper and exclusive sexual relationship between a husband and wife. The family alone is capable of providing the necessary stability for the profound relationship which sexual union both symbolizes and cements and for the welfare of the children that issue from it. Violations of chastity undermine not only the family, but society as a whole. That is why chastity may be spoken of as the first political principle.

Nothing so undermines the marital sexual bond as does pornography. As Fr. James Schall has written in CRISIS (Sense & Nonsense, March 1995), “Whenever we seek pleasure without it being grounded in what is right in the action in which it exists, we isolate the pleasure, the act, from reality.” Pornography isolates the physical act of sex, and its pleasure, from reality by making it an object of observation. Pornography reduces the marital act to a glandular event; it is impossible to “see” it as an act of love, except as a loving participant. Sex, as John Wayne once put it, is not a spectator sport.

Making sex a spectacle sensationalizes it and severs it from its proper unitive and procreative context. Pornography makes the part into the whole and the means into the end. By doing so, it lies about what it leaves exposed: The very nature of the genitals is denied. They are sterile. Pornography censors conception, because the possibility of conception naturally orders sex to a purpose within the family. (If sex is seen as generative, depictions of it are almost never pornographic. This is why the fertility figures of African tribal art, with their vastly exaggerated pudenda and breasts, are neither in intent nor effect obscene.) The violation of the fundamental human relationship between husband and wife wreaks havoc on the whole social and political order. If chastity is indispensable to political order, then the politics of pornography is clearly chaos, and the tyranny to which chaos leads.

The ancients understood this clearly. Euripides and the Classical Greeks, from whom our Founders learned, knew that Eros is not a plaything. In The Bacchae, Euripides showed exactly how unsafe sex is when disconnected from the moral order. When Dionysus visits Thebes, he entices King Penthius to view secretly the women dancing naked on the mountainside in Dionysian revelries. Because Penthius succumbs to his desire to see “their wild obscenities,” the political order is toppled, and the queen mother, Agave, one of the bacchants, ends up with the severed head of her son Penthius in her lap — an eerie premonition of abortion.

The lesson is clear: Once Eros is released from the bonds of family, Dionysian passions can possess the soul. Giving in to them is a form of madness because erotic desire is not directed toward any end that can satisfy it. It is insatiable. The sheer quantity of pornography easily illustrates this point. Why is there so much of it? Since pornography is only about one thing, its expressive possibilities are limited — often to the purely documentary. Then would not a classic collection of a thousand pornographic films suffice? Apparently not, for there are tens of thousands of pornographic films. Each week, 150 are produced in the U.S. alone — nearly 8,000 per year. In addition, there are millions of pornographic images on the Internet and countless monthly pornographic magazines. Yet, no matter how much there is, it is never enough. “Never enough” is an appetitive disorder and a recipe for political disaster. Because it promises something it cannot deliver, pornography eventually produces a sense of betrayal. The futility inherent in pornography generates fury that leads to violence and despair that leads to self-destruction.

Pornography has been deliberately used as a social and political dissolvent during periods of revolutionary change. To prepare for the French Revolution, the radical Jacobins flooded Paris with pornography. Who would know the politics of pornography better than that greatest of pornographers, the Marquis de Sade? De Sade desired to indulge his sexual passions without moral restraint and saw clearly what that ultimately meant. In The Philosophy of the Boudoir, de Sade wrote that the murder of King Louis XVI was insufficient to bring about the desired revolutionary freedom. The morality of the social and political order had survived the King's beheading. How could it finally be destroyed? In the first known use of the phrase, de Sade wrote that the murder of the King must be followed by the “murder of God.” Only when the morality represented by Divine Kingship was abolished could man express himself in the fullness of pornographic existence. This would include, after regicide and deicide, homicide. De Sade perceived and approvingly depicted in his works the inexorable logic of pornography: sex outside of the moral order ultimately leads to murder and death. The Marquis would not be surprised by the FBI study on homicide that found that pornography is the most common interest among serial killers. As one convicted murderer and child molester told the Meese Commission: “(Pornography's) effect on me was devastating. I lost all sense of decency and respect for human life.”

Today, people are unlikely to learn these lessons from Euripides because he is not included in the current curricula. But the same message has subliminally resurfaced in modern horror movies. Their invariable, if often unintentional, teaching is: If you fornicate, you die. This is crudely expressed in such popular slasher movies as Friday the 13th, in which teenage premarital sex precipitates the arrival of the monster, who dispatches the fornicators with stakes through their hearts or axes to their heads. However, a more sophisticated treatment of this theme is offered by Aliens 3, the third in a popular quartet of monster movies.

In this sci-fi horror film, the hardest core male criminals are sequestered on an uninhabitable planet, where they are left to fend for themselves. Given the need to establish political order, the prisoners choose the vow of chastity as their founding principle. As a result, they are able to live in semi-monastic contentment. However, a female pilot, Ripley, is sent to them. She violates the vow by having intercourse with the prisoners' doctor. For this, of course, the doctor must die at the monster's hands. Ripley tries to fight the creature, but fails. The iron law of horror movies is that only a virgin can defeat a monster. In fact, we discover that the monster's spawn was actually implanted in Ripley during space travel. The symbolism is perfect: The real monster is Eros, unbound by the moral order, residing in our very selves when we capitulate to it. Needless to say, Ripley's betrayal of the colony's founding principle brings havoc upon them all. She is able to redeem herself only in an ultimate act of self-sacrifice, by throwing herself into a cauldron of molten metal as the monster bursts out of her chest. She takes the plunge with arms outstretched in cruciform shape. Once again, Eros unbound leads to self-destruction — albeit, in this case, with a hint of the salvific.

The only thing that can tame Eros and direct it to an end that can satisfy the sexual passion is love, which leads Eros away from death and, quite literally, toward new life. When a specific person is the object of love, no substitute will do. Love demands exclusivity, and receives it in marriage. The desire for oneness in marital union is also a thirst for fecundity. The wild and complete abandon of the marital act is a joyful affirmation of the possibility of more — in children.

Pornography is fraudulent because it depicts “love” without love. Since the other person is not loved, pornography requires depersonalization and anonymity. With pornographic sex, substitution is not only acceptable, it is essential. As theologian Josef Pieper said, pornography removes the fig leaf from the genitals and places it over the human face. Pornography strips its participants of more than their clothes; it strips them of their humanity.

The central act of civilization is the recognition of another person as a human being. Pornography suspends — if not ends — that act of recognition because it dehumanizes both its object and its subject. Solzhenitsyn once asked, “If we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of one another. We will decline to the status of animals.” Solzhenitsyn's quote highlights the political problems of pornography. How does one govern animals? Do they have free speech?

The alternative to the massive presence of pornography is not, as Mr. Forman might suggest, the loss of freedom, but its maintenance. Censorship of pornography is a sign of a morally healthy society that can distinguish between obscenity and free speech. From the time of our Founders until not too long ago, America was a place that not only forbade hardcore pornography but, through its laws and social mores, actively encouraged lives of virtue. These formative influences made it clear that sex belongs within the context of the family. This teaching was not the result of prudery, but of a political and moral prudence that comprehended the basis of a free society.

Lack of censorship is a sign of a society that no longer cares about these distinctions or has lost its ability to make them. That is why the legal presence of pornography harms even those who do not use it. On almost any newsstand (or its cable TV equivalent), one can see Playboy and Good Housekeeping side by side. What does any sensible person learn from seeing this odd juxtaposition? Certainly the way of life espoused by Playboy is inimical to good housekeeping. Yet there they are together, take your pick. In other words, the person learns, if only by osmosis, that it is a matter of public indifference as to whether one properly uses or abuses sex. More accurately, legal commerce in pornography teaches that no such distinction exists. Once this teaching has been learned, where does one draw the line? If sex is only a form of play or recreation, what could be wrong with a little sodomy, pederasty, or even incest? We have already traveled so far down this road that the only public defense mounted against pornography today begins with the protection of children. All the proceeding arguments have already been lost.

In such a case, trying to restore censorship in the short term is politically difficult and probably ineffective. It did not work for Augustus Caesar, who brought back the office of censor yet failed to halt the steady decline of Roman society. What must come first is far more important: the recovery of the sensibility underlying the prohibition against the desecration of sex. That it must be recovered is not simply the agenda of the religious right, but a profoundly political concern for the future of freedom. That freedom is already imperiled by the effects of pornography. Sex is so important that its misuse has become the principal means for dismantling our culture and political order. We have blinded ourselves to the connection between widespread pornography and the dissolution of the American family (those with children now represent only 25 percent of the population), rampant sexual crime (up 236 percent in public schools since 1994), the extraordinary rise in illegitimate births (now one out of three), abortion (one and a half million per year), and the brutal coarsening of our culture. Yet pornography has so corrupted our society that no one dares mention it as a principal cause of our debasement. Livy spoke of this kind of paralysis when he bemoaned the decline of ancient Rome: “We reached those last days when we could endure neither our vices nor their remedies.” Will we lament with Euripides's Agave? “Dionysus has undone us. Too late I see it.”

- Robert R. Reilly