Pornography, God, and Universities

Pornography is surely offensive to God; and universities are surely places where the consumption of pornography is widespread. These are obvious truths. But more can be said. Specifically, by way of eight initial claims about the evil that is pornography, I’ll make a ninth claim about the way that pornography makes knowledge of God impossible, and a tenth claim about why universities should be especially concerned about the use of pornography by their students, or, indeed, faculties.

1. What makes something pornographic is the intention with which it is made or used.

What intention? To create or use material things so as to arouse or satisfy illicit sexual desires, such as: desires related to persons who are not one’s spouse, or desires to perform non-marital but sexual acts—or both, of course.

We live in a time in which pornography is pervasive in part because those who produce and distribute material stuff with this as their primary intention have more resources—such as the internet—at their disposal, and a more welcoming and compliant society and marketplace than has been known before. So porn is big business.

But pornography is also invisibly pervasive. In addition to material that is produced and consumed with this primary intention, there is a lot of dual-use pornography: items produced for some other purpose but also for the sake of arousing sexual desire, and items produced only for some other purpose but also consumed for the sake of sexual desire.

So a huge amount of advertising, movies, television shows, and other media are pornographic in intention insofar as a secondary purpose with which they are made is to arouse illicit sexual desire. And these social realities, combined with some ubiquitous human urges and emotions, also incline people to use not-essentially pornographic items pornographically more than they otherwise might. Trained to accept pornography, and to seek it out, they find it even where it does not exist.

2. The wrongness of pornography can’t be fully understood apart from an adequate understanding of the good of marriage.

By “marriage,” I mean a permanent, exclusive, and self-giving union of a man and woman, realized, expressed, and experienced by bodily-sexual union open to new life, and thus itself oriented to the procreation and rearing of children. And by “good” of marriage, I mean that this form of life gives us basic reasons for action: It is desirable for its own sake, and must be respected and protected in all our acts, even when we are not acting directly for its sake by, for example, getting married, or contributing to the good of our marriage.

To be a person capable of realizing or respecting this good—i.e., capable of being married, or of being unmarried without failing in respect for and protection of this good—requires among other things cultivation of certain virtues and dispositions. Among these dispositions is an absolute unwillingness to deliberately arouse or satisfy sexual desire with someone not your spouse, a disposition essential to, though not the whole of, the virtue of chastity.

The argument for this claim, in the most cursory form possible, in this: Commitment to enter into an exclusive, permanent and self-giving relationship is vitiated by one’s willingness to share the one feature of that relationship by which that commitment could be physically realized, namely, sexual intercourse—the one feature by which the unity of spouses is made more than spiritual or metaphorical. And so one cannot make that commitment without the absolute unwillingness that I just described: absolute unwillingness to deliberately arouse or satisfy sexual desire with someone other than your spouse.

But aim of the producers of pornography is to eliminate just that that unwillingness. Chaste persons are of no use to producers of pornography. So those who use pornography as intended erode in themselves a disposition essential for married life. This is a form of self-mutilation, obviously bad for the married and to-be married, but also bad even for those who intend never to marry: Self-mutilation in this respect is radically contrary to the good of marriage and is incompatible with an appropriate openness to all goods in all persons.

This is the core of the moral case against pornography. But there is more to be said.

3. Pornography makes public what should be private.

It can be helpful to think a bit on why privacy is important to marriage and sexuality. It is not because there is something gross about public nudity or sex, or because people find them offensive. Rather, the offense is related to features of publicizing sexual acts and our bodies’ sexual dimensions that stand in tension with the image of marital sexuality that I’ve just presented.

Consider the scope of marital commitment. Pope St. John Paul II often characterized that commitment as one of complete self-giving, total self-donation. I think that this language is defensible and correct. But if so, then it calls for a dimension of privacy to the acts that most fully realize and express that commitment, namely, sexual-marital acts. Sharing those acts with others vitiates the completeness and exclusivity of the commitment that those acts realize, as I just argued. But making those acts public is a kind of sharing. Sex tapes made by happily married people for distribution to their friends would be wrong, if for no other reason, then for just this, that they shared publicly what should belong only to the mutuality of the couple’s life together.

4. Pornography use has both an active and a passive dimension that each mirror something of marital sexuality, but in a distorted way.

Genuine freedom, as John Paul II made great efforts to explain, exists only in an agent’s relationship to truth and orientation toward self-giving. John Paul was fond of quoting from Gaudium et Spes 24: “Man is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, [and he] cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.” The Pope was especially insistent on this point in discussing marriage and marital sexuality.

This great truth about freedom is distorted in contemporary liberal, materialistic, consumer societies, as both relationship to truth and orientation to self-gift are eliminated from our conception of freedom. Absent these, freedom’s expression is reduced to the desire for control and obtaining satisfaction at will, and its realization reduced to mastery over material resources so as to satisfy our desires.

Pornography effects this very reduction. Its consumers are offered an entire world, literally beyond their wildest dreams, of sex, which they may take, and make their own, at will, with no more than the touch of a computer key. There can be no rejection, no vulnerability, no failure to get what they want.

But the consuming of pornography involves no self-donation at all; there is nothing of oneself that one is sharing with another. Even fornicators hold on to the hope and desire of engaging in sharing, of mutuality, but the consumers of pornography have given up on this. They merely take, and “consume” is manifestly a good description of what they are doing. Whether more gravely sinful than fornication or less, pornography consumption is thus further away from marital sexuality than acts engaged in with others.

Marital sex is not only self-giving, but as a corollary, it is receptive: It accepts something that is offered by another as a form of that person’s self-giving. Marital sex is a form of communication: something of one’s self is offered to another, who receives it into his or her own self.

Consumption of pornography mirrors this too. Once obtained, pornography works upon its recipient by way of arousal: The consumer is passive in its presence. And its producers perhaps could tell themselves a story of how what they do is to the benefit of the consumer and thus is a form of self-giving. But there is no personal communication of self from the producers of pornography to its recipients, and thus nothing of a personal nature to be received—the communication of pornography is paradigmatically impersonal. And so while there is a kind of sexual passivity, it is only a distorted mirror of the personal receptivity characteristic of marital sexuality.

5. Pornography is boring.

What does it mean to be boring? The condition of being bored is a condition of being unable to stand in the present moment in a way that holds the past and future together in that present. When we are fully engaged in an activity, it is inevitably temporal but in an unusual way. The past is present to us in the meaningfulness of what we are doing now, and cannot be disengaged from that meaning. If you are reading a novel intelligently, what has already gone before is part of what you are reading now and crucial to its significance. But there is also, right now, an anticipation of the future that does not evacuate the present of its meaning. That is, if all you want out of something is yet to come, then the present means something to you only for where it brings you in the future. But our most meaningful activities manage to anticipate the future without this evacuation of present meaning. In fact, often the opposite is true: recognition of the way the future will be related to what we are doing now can give increased significance to the present activities.

The boring is not like this. There is no holding of the three times together, only the movement from past to present to future. Think of the difference between a long car drive, in which the miles just come and go, and a vacation trip, in which where we have been and where we are going both contribute to the significance of where we are. The former is boring in a way the latter is not.

History, it was famously said, is one damn thing after another. That could be more accurately said of pornography. What has already been viewed is done, history; what is present is nothing but passing into the future. No moment of its use captures its past or anticipates its future. Thus it is boring, and its use realizes neither the good of play nor work, nor knowledge nor aesthetic experience, goods the realization of which might be superficially like the use of pornography, but whose realization requires past and future be caught up in the present.

As boring, pornography use distorts our sense and use of time. Having no natural end, no natural fulfillment to give narrative sense to its use, pornography consumption can go on and on, a meaningless parade of images. The opportunity costs to using time in this way are surely enormous; and the failure to appreciate a different relationship to time (the one described above) is also, as I’ll suggest below, significant.

6. Pornography is reductive of the body.

In sex, the bodily nature of oneself and one’s spouse can hardly be forgotten. But pornography weirdly distorts bodily existence to the point of elimination. The other person initially is just a body, and is reduced to no more than a set of desirable organs. But then that body is itself flattened out into images on a page, or on a computer screen: connection to the other person’s organic existence is radically mediated by the medium in question. And connection to everything personal about this flattened body is also eliminated: Even a prostitute is someone with whom one must have personal contact; but the object of pornography is out of touch.

And one’s relationship to one’s own body is likewise distorted, especially in the paradigmatic masturbatory cases of pornographic consumption. As noted earlier, one is passive in relation to pornography’s content: The exploratory forms of engagement that characterize our connection to the real world are absent and we render ourselves merely eyes for taking in images. The receipt of those images, if it works, renders us passive subjects of sexual desire; and then we manually, so to say, address our body to force it to give up its pleasures in a momentary “expense of spirit in a waste of shame.”

As others have shown, treatment of one’s body in this way effects a dualistic separation between one’s conscious self and the body that one instrumentalizes in order to please that self. It is thus a violation of the good of integrity.

7. Pornography distances us from the rest of the social world.

A person who uses pornography is committed in principle to the possibility of treating some other human beings merely as objects for arousal and satisfaction of desire, namely, the human beings who are the subjects of the pornography. But it is difficult to see how this does not change one’s relationship to all others who are capable of arousing that same desire. I doubt the most extreme theses of thinkers such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon, who argue that pornography use makes rapists of men, but I don’t doubt at all that they are on to something.

8. Pornography corrupts family relationships.

We are beginning to better appreciate the problems introduced into marriage by pornography use by one spouse. For example, a pornography-consuming spouse, like an adulterous spouse, often lies about what he or she is doing. Pornography use thus erodes mutual trust in a marriage. This is to be expected, of course: A spouse willing to be aroused by someone outside the marriage is an insufficiently committed spouse.

But if marriages are harmed by pornography use, then so are the children of those marriages harmed as well, beginning with their deprivation of parents who fully realize the good of marriage. Such children lack models of sound marital love, and possess poor models for their own subsequent choices. So pornography use exerts a top-down bad influence on family life when it begins with parental choices.

But pretty clearly it can exercise a malign influence that is bottom-up, too: The use of pornography among minors in a household must also be disruptive of family relationships, requiring, for example, disobedience, lies, and dishonesty of children to parents, and often an ongoing failure to exercise adequate parental responsibility or oversight by parents who would rather look the other way. Pornography thus harms families wherever it begins within the home.

9. Pornography distances us from an adequate understanding God.

Among the most essential aids that God has given us to understand who He is, and how He is related to us, are images that are sexual, marital, and familial. God is three persons, whose distinctness is intact while at the same time those three persons are one God, something as spouses are two persons yet one flesh.

The relationship of the Father to the Son described in the Creed is one of begetting, and is understood by theologians as one of mutual loving and receiving of love. God’s love is thus generative and creative. Understanding marital love, its fecundity, and the way in which male and female are made in God’s image is thus essential to understanding, in our limited way, who God is.

God’s relationship to His chosen people, like Christ’s relationship to His Church, is spousal, and characterized by spousal fidelity. We can have insight into that relationship by understanding the nature and requirements of marital commitment.

God’s relationship to us is also paternal: We are His children, and should show toward Him something like the piety that we owe to our parents on earth. That cannot be done if we do not rightly understand parent to child, or child to parent relationships.

The second person of the Trinity became man, incarnate, a being of living flesh and blood, who died and rose again in His bodily nature to take kingship of a heavenly Kingdom in which we hope to live as resurrected bodily beings. That can make no sense to people who think of their bodily lives in merely instrumental terms, who are dualists at heart.

Christian history is not just one damned thing after another: It is all captured in the now of Christ’s life, and particularly, in his redeeming sacrifice on the cross and resurrection from the dead. Christ’s life, death, and resurrection were anticipated by the past of the Jewish people, and are anticipatory of the eschaton when He will hand all things over to His Father. That “now” that was Christ’s life, shaped by past and oriented to future, is shared in by Christians in the Eucharist, which perpetuates that sacrifice. But how can these truths be fully appreciated by those whose sense of time is distorted and dulled by what is boring? And pornography is boring.

10. Universities are corrupted by pornography.

A university is a home for free inquiry into the truth. But pornography diminishes our freedom and erodes our grasp of truths about sex, marriage, family, self, society, reality, time, and God. If so, the widespread presence and use of pornography on a university campus, and especially a Catholic university, should be a source of very great concern.

Editor’s note: This essay is adapted from Tollefsen’s paper presentation at the “Pervasive Porn” conference sponsored in part by Ethika Politika and held at the University of Notre Dame on January 31.