I am a man. I am a man who is in love with God. I have pledged myself to be the one who serves Him. With everything I got, all I am capable of, I am spiritually married to God. Even the most fabulous beautiful intelligent woman is no match for my faith that goes vertical.

But I am a man and I have a confession to make. I think the most beautiful thing in our universe is not a sunset or the stars, not a mountain or a beach, not a forest or a deep blue bay, but rather the female form, the aesthetic beauty of a woman…

Now, I am going to be honest, and I feel a little ashamed, but it hopefully opens up a line of conservation that we need to have as a society. In short, what is the ethical dimension to pornography in all its different forms? From there we will make an emergency landing, and find out what we are all left with.

What I want to ask is, “What is pornography?” 

Pornography is about ‘capturing’ beauty on a screen, and it has become a massive worldwide industry. When it comes down to it, porno is more ugly than it is beautiful. There is a risk that you could get lost in that world even when seeking something innocent, but that might reveal things that you will never be able to unlearn.

There is horrific pornography dealing in gratuitous and perverse sex that should be scoured from the earth–and the Internet. On the other hand, there are nude pictures of women–not having sex–but posing for the camera. I will say that for me nude is as far as it goes. They say you know pornography when you see it. I wouldn’t say those pictures for me are any more revealing than what you might see in a movie or on television.

If I ever do comb through nude pictures, I am occasionally confronted with images that are so deeply wrong on so many levels. From what I understand, the vast quantity of pornography is unfortunately very cruel to women. It is unfair to women who are financially desperate enough to sell images of their bodies. And it is unfair to other women and girls who are leered at by men who are accustomed to undress women by sight.

On the whole, it is all more destructive than constructive. Women do deserve pity for being co-opted sexually, but they shouldn’t be judged either–whether by women or men. Aren’t they entitled to feel a semblance of pride for how beautiful they are and respect the decision they made to share that beauty with the world, especially when they do so knowingly and willingly? But there are other ways to take pride in oneself. And there are a multitude of ways to appreciate beauty, without consuming images of naked women on the Internet at such a grand scale.

As they might, men have defended pornography by claiming it provides an outlet for their repressed sexuality–who are for lack of better words–horny and lustful. The more pornography in the world the better behaved we are as men? The victim of that logic is the women who are selling their sexually objectified bodies to be distributed by Internet to men all over the world…husbands, boyfriends, fathers, sons, brothers, uncles, nephews, it is rare for a man to have never dabbled in pornography, or at least taken a peak.

Ultimately, it is incumbent upon the consumer of pornography to navigate the garbage that inevitably surfaces and that hopefully does not taint healthy inclinations and sexual identities.

I’ll look at it differently…what about gay porn? In my freshman year of college in my dorm room there was a gay student who was still in the closet, and he apparently was watching gay porn when his roommate came in and found him as he was. The roommate proceeded to tell the whole dorm that his roommate was gay and watched gay porn.

There was a roommate change, and the now out-of-the-closet gay student became my new roommate. I share sympathy for that ‘curious’ gay boy who had become a gay man overnight who didn’t have many sources that dealt with gay sex. I can understand searching for ‘insight’ into what gayness actually is. 

So much of our lives are lived digitally. Digital sex? Is this the direction we want to go in? This is a runaway train that needs to be stopped…if it can be? 

What are we going to do to prevent boys from learning about sex through unregulated sessions of perverted pornography? Does it rob boys of their innocence? Are girls subject to that pornographic ‘education’? 

If you are a little boy growing up, getting taller, deeper voice, girls begin to seem less annoying and more interesting, then do whatever you can to preserve your naivety. You are on the cusp of experimentation, and that process could not be any more sacred, sexy, and physically sensual. Searching for pornography is like opening all your Christmas presents early, it ruins the surprise!

What does curiosity amount to? It seems normal to be curious, but that is something to be negotiated at the right time in the right place with the right person. Healthy sexuality does not come from being able to click a few buttons and presto, a naked woman! There’s something much too easy about that. That is not something that should be so easy. I am going to exercise restraint, and I hope to God that my young nephews in a few years are not going to get lost in the cesspit of ugly, cruel, sexually demeaning pornography. 

What I hope for them, I hope for the world of men–to regard those women as their sisters, not sexual objects. May that knowledge–that those women are your sisters–hinder the sexual gratification you felt for them before.

And what about God? He must be horrified and deeply disappointed in us for carrying around doing all these nasty things. At least in my church we believe God is everywhere and we believe that we are His children. That’s important. If we consume pornography we are not acting with the innocence of a child, and maybe you should consider that Mother Earth might notice your behavior too. What would your mother think: that’s a question you might want to ask yourself.

Men, we should be embarrassed. Embarrassed enough to stop doing it and set an example for our boys so they never use the Internet for such nefarious purposes. Pornography isn’t going away. We have to talk about it. Personally, I’m going to stop looking, I’ll make that promise.

Women are strong and beautiful, and as delicate as a flower. Don’t deflower them, don’t strip flowers of their innocence or you might lose yours. 

PS 

Perhaps pornography isn’t the whole problem, but is in fact, a symptom of a culture that is overwhelmingly sexualized. Sexual objectification starts not with nakedness, but the scanty way we dress in a grocery store, a coffee shop, a bar. There is a blurry line differentiating sexy public appearances and the suggestion or the hint of nudity underneath, where almost nothing is left to the imagination. At every turn we are confronted with sex in magazines, movies, even advertisements. It is not my place to tell anyone how to dress, I am not judging, but I wonder if pornography would not be such an epidemic, if sex was not on display throughout our culture, everyday, everywhere you go.

Complicity in the sexualization of our culture is a matter of cooptation. I pity that little girl who grows up in a place where she does not know how to love her body for herself. But rather she squeezes into short shorts that put her on display for other boys and even perverted men. There is an alternative for little girls in other cultures that do not sexualize them at such an early age. We mock other cultures for being oppressive towards women. If only you turned it around and saw what our variety of patriarchy has done for our little girls. Revealing almost everything, for women and girls, is not feminist empowerment, it is cooptation. Quite frankly sex is an obsession, more than anywhere in the United States, it is an epidemic. Sexiness is perpetuated by both men and women, boys and girls.

It’s no wonder that in our sex obsessed culture, men turn to pornography. Sex is put in their face everywhere they go. This is dangerous territory, I know women are not to be blamed. But if men are confronted with sex every time they go to the grocery store, watch a movie, or see an advertisement for a perfume, it is on the forefront of their awareness. And we all know that men are animals, and that’s not a legitimate excuse, but could we collectively decide to dial down the sex in our culture? 

We must all participate in such a transition from sexual objectification and sexualization, towards sisterhood, motherhood, and mutual respect. It breaks my heart that my 13-year-old niece would be so vulnerable in her environment that she would treat her body with disrespect. And yet what is the cost to dress respectfully? Maybe she wouldn’t fit in, maybe the boys would make fun of her, maybe the small power to turn heads would not be hers. 

Sex is power. We have to find a way to participate in our society without resorting to the power of sex. We have to resist it, each and every individual needs to challenge our patriarchy. Feminism has not been achieved, in some ways, it might be at its worst. To understand our particular variety of patriarchy we also need to acknowledge that men are sexually objectified too. Images abound of bronze statued men who sell sex in much the same way as women. 

We are hypersexualized, overstimulated, and distracted from the more important things in life, all of us. One thing we can do is to stop the industry of pornography from heightening our perversion.