THE PORNOGRAPHY PLAGUE

William E. May, Ph. D., Senior Fellow

April 23, 2010

The April 10, 2010 bulletin of iMAPP Marriage News [1] highlighted this issue. It
focused on the Witherspoon Foundation’s recent conference and book, The Social
Costs of Pornography.[2]

After summing up Marriage News’s report of the Witherspoon Foundation’s

conference and book on the social costs of pornography, I will present the
masterful analysis of pornography and “pornovision” offered by a prominent
philosopher/theologian during the last quarter of the 20th century, namely, Karol
Wojtyla, better known as Pope John Paul II.

The Witherspoon Foundation’s Conference and Book on The Social Costs of

Pornography

The Conference (and papers included in the book) featured the following
presentations: “The Moral Bases for Legal Regulation of Pornography” by Gerard
V. Bradley; “Pornography's Effect on Interpersonal Relationships” by Ana Bridges;
“Pornography: Settling the Question in Principle” by Hadley Arkes; “Desire and the
Tainted Soul: Islamic Insights into Lust, Chastity, and Love” by Hamza Yusuf;
“Freedom, Virtue, and the Politics of Regulating Pornography”
by James Stoner; “The Impact of Pornography on Women: Social Science Findings
and Clinical Observations” by Jill C. Manning; “Industry Size, Measurements and
Social Costs”
by K. Doran; “From Pornography to Porno to Porn: How Porn Became the Norm”
by Pamela Paul; “On the Abuse of Sex” by Roger Scruton; “Pornography and
Violence: A New Look at Research” by Mary Anne Layden. In a later essay for
Culture of Life I will summarize and comment on these presentations.

Maggie Gallagher, president of iMAPP, summarized Layden’s paper. Layden

showed that the vast majority of men who use porn are not sex offenders. However,
men who view sexually violent porn are more likely to say that a "rape victim
suffered less and that she enjoyed it, and that women in general enjoy rape. ... Those
reporting higher exposure to violent pornography are six times more likely to report
having raped than those reporting low exposure," and “ordinary” men, after viewing
violent porn, urged sentences for rapists only half those of men shown other kinds
of images. In addition, Layden pointed out, "The large body of research on
pornography reveals that it functions as a teacher of, a permission-giver for, and a
trigger of many negative behaviors and attitudes that can severely damage not only
the users but many others, including strangers."

Gallagher considers that the most important potential cost of porn is the way it
affects ordinary men and their ordinary relationships. Layden makes this a major

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point in her contribution: "Exposure to pornography leads men to rate their female
partners as less attractive than they would have had they not been exposed and to be
less satisfied with their partners' attractiveness, sexual performance, and level of
affection, and expressed a greater desire for sex without emotional involvement."In
her conclusion Layden declared: "For males, more pornography use was associated
with greater acceptance of sex outside of marriage for married individuals, greater
acceptance of sex before marriage and less child-centeredness during marriage. The
reduced desire for children is especially pronounced in a reduced desire for female
children."

At the end of her report Gallagher said: “Porn disconnects the reward system of the
male sex drive from the drive to master reality. Porn is nowhere near as satisfying
as a real relationship with a woman, but it is a lot easier and much less fraught with
the possibility of failure or humiliation. Porn use thus is an aid to sexual failure in
men, and a contributor to our ongoing failure to create a culture that connects men
and women, parents and children, sex and love.”

But precisely what is “pornography,” and why is it so harmful to men, women,

children and the entire society? In my opinion, Pope John Paul II has given us one
of the most powerful and insightful analyses of this terrible evil available in some of
the “catecheses” we find in his celebrated Wednesday audiences devoted to
developing a “theology of the body.”

Pope John Paul II’s analysis of pornography and “pornovision”

In his “theology of the body” (hereafter TOB) [3] catecheses 60-65 John Paul is
concerned with “the ethos of the body in art and media.” A central theme of TOB
as a whole is that “The human body-the naked human body in all the truth of its
masculinity and femininity-has the meaning of a gift of the person to the person
(61.1, p. 367; emphasis in original).

The crucial difference between portraying the human body in films and
photographic arts from portraying it in paintings and sculptures

John Paul II thinks that the portrayal of the human body in films and in
photographic art differs essentially from its portrayal in paintings and sculptures.
“In painting or sculpture, man/body always remains a model that is subjected to a
specific reworking by the artist. In film, and even more, in the art of photography,
there is no transfiguration of the model, but the living human being is reproduced
and in this case the human body is not a model for the work of art, but the object of
a reproduction obtained by means of suitable techniques” (60.4, p. 366; emphasis in
the original). This is an important distinction for the ethos of the body in works of
culture. It is so, first of all, as John Paul II then notes, because a kind of anonymity
is associated with films/photos and photographic reproductions of paintings and
sculptures, and this anonymity, a way of “ veiling” or “hiding” the identity of the
person involved, is a specific problem (60.5, p. 367).

Moreover, and precisely as a result of its objectivization in reproductions typical of

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the film and photographic techniques of our time, the body “loses that deeply
subjective meaning of the gift and becomes an object destined for the knowledge of
many, by which those who look will assimilate or even take possession of
something that evidently exists (or rather should exist) by its very essence on the
level of gift—of gift by the person to the person, no longer of course in the image
but in the living man” (62.1, p. 368).

Continuing he says, “the man of developed sensitivity overcomes, with difficulty

and interior resistance—the limit of shame” when there are situations justifying
undressing the body to others (e.g., medical examinations). Still man “does not
wish to become an object for others through his own anonymous nakedness…to the
extent to which he lets himself be guided by the sense of the dignity of the human
body” (61.3). He then raises a question: “when and in what case is this sphere of
man’s activity—from the point of view of the ethos of the body—regarded as
‘pornovision,’ just as in literature some writings were and are regarded as
‘pornography’” (61.4.p. 370).

Art and the privacy of the body; the nature of “pornovision”

Both “pornovision” and “pornography” occur when “the limit of shame or of

personal sensibility is overstepped with regard to what is connected with the human
body, with its nakedness, when in a work of art by audiovisual media one violates
the body’s right to intimacy in its masculinity and femininity across the whole
structure of being human. This deep inscription—or rather incision—is decisive for
the spousal meaning of the human body, for the fundamental call it receives…of
forming ‘the communion of persons’” (62.1, p. 377).

Here it seems to me John Paul II gives us a good criterion for determining that
works of art are truly “pornovision.” It is this: if, on viewing the body, one wishes
to “consume it,” regarding it as object of personal sexual gratification and not as the
sign of the “gift” of the man-person to the female-person and vice versa, then it is
“pornovision; i.e., if its intention is to threaten “the element of the ‘gift’” (62.3, p.
378).

___________________

Notes

[1] iMAPP stands for Institute for Marriage and Public Policy; its website is
http://www.marriagedebate.com.

[2] The book, edited by Mary Anne Leyden and Mary Eberstadt, is available from
Amazon.com. for $5.00.

[3] All translations of TOB will be taken from John Paul II, Man and Woman He
Created Them: A Theology of the Body, Introduction, Translation, and Index by
Michael Waldstein (Boston: Pauline Books & Media, 2006). References will be
made to the number of the Audience (133 are given in the new translation), the

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paragraph number of that Audience, and the page on which it appears in the new
translation. Thus TOB 60. 4, p. 366 refers to Man and Woman He Created Them…,
60.4, p. 366.

(c) 2010 Culture of Life Foundation. Reproduction granted with attribution

required.

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