The God Squad
Pornography’s pitfalls
Published: January 16, 2010, 12:30 am
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Along with many people who’ve obtained my e-mail address, a certain man I know has begun forwarding to me articles, cartoons and jokes he finds amusing and insightful, and thinks I will enjoy, as well. Oh, and he also sends me porn.
At first, I tried to spam this reader out of my e-view, but for some reason it didn’t work; therefore, I decided to send him a personal e-mail, which I’ve decided to share with my readers—devoid, of course, of all identifying personal details. I do this because over the years I’ve written this column, I’ve also received many letters from readers about relatives who’ve become addicted to pornography Web sites, leading to a variety of heartbreaking, morally corrosive consequences.
For some time, I’ve wanted to address the issue of pornography. My thoughts came together in the following letter to my porn-addicted acquaintance:
Dear X:
I’m writing to ask you to take my name off your porn mailing list. I don’t know how I got on the list in the first place, but I’m asking you to remove my name immediately. If it is not possible or convenient for you to take me off your porn list, then please remove my name from your mailing list altogether.
It may seem defensive to begin this way, and I am not a prude. I really don’t care what your private sexual proclivities happen to be— as long as they’re legal and harmless; however, I do want you to know that I’m deeply opposed to pornography for the following ethical and spiritual reasons:
• Porn separates love and sex. This is the essential moral and spiritual offense of pornography. Sex is not just a physical urge; it’s the most intimate and profound way of expressing love; therefore, in my opinion, pornography is immoral because it destroys the link between sex and love. I’m not referring to naked women as subjects in true art, but to the stuff you send me. I’m also not taking up the question of censorship of pornography. My life is spent trying to figure out not just what is legal but what is right.
Sex is the deepest and most intimate way to bond and to show love for another person. Sex is a total physical giving of yourself. That is why we read in Genesis 2:18, 24: “For it is not good that a person be alone, . . . and therefore a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife so that they become one flesh.”
In pornography, sex is more like taking than giving—more like something that makes our loneliness even more desperate.
• Porn fosters casual sex, or “hooking up.” Casual sex is dangerous to your health and catastrophic to your ability to figure out what love means. Hooking up is what you do to connect two things, not two people. Neither our moral life nor our culture are helped by separating love and sex. That’s the worst thing about porn.
• Porn exploits women. The women in the photos you send me are, I feel safe to assume, being offered money to pose. This fact makes a lie out of the thin defense of porn that such women do this freely. In any case, this is not a good thing for you or them or our culture. Perhaps our modesty is one of the many things we ought not be able to sell and our decision to allow it is a moral, cultural and spiritual tragedy.
• Porn has produced an overabundance of predatory men and exploited women. It is bad karma.
• Porn also transforms women into sexual objects. Seeing women or men as simply collections of physical attributes distorts and diminishes their sacredness as thinking, feeling human beings.
Let me close by apologizing to you if the tone of this letter seems harsh. I hope you take it in the spirit in which it was intended. I’m just trying to live a minimally decent life and porn doesn’t help me do that. I don’t know why you thought it would.— God bless you
Send questions to: The God Squad, c/o Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY 14207, or godsquadquestion@aol.com.
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