On freedom and health

I saw a link to an article with a questionable claim. Pornography is vital to freedom? It's a "standard-bearer for civilisation?"

Then so is rampant obesity.

I hold the position that the existence of pornography is more accurately an indicator of our unhealthy and overstimulated appetite for sex. Like eating, sex is natural, necessary, and enjoyable. However, pornography is like junk food, and a diet of junk will certainly increase your capacity for it while serving to dull your appetite for the good stuff.

The relative luxuries of modern life, the moral relativism of postmodern secular humanism, and, yes, the technological wonders of contraception release sex from its merely physical constraints. Sex no longer has much of an opportunity cost in terms of time spent surviving. Nor does sex carry an explicit cost of another child to raise, another mouth to feed. Sex is indeed free to be celebrated.

But are we going to celebrate it like the college freshman who binges on Kool-Aid and Cocoa Pebbles because mother never let him eat any? Say hello to stomach aches, Pepto Bismol, and the freshman fifteen. Our bodies were designed for a healthy diet and physical activity, not lethargy and junk.

At least we can be thankful that our diets only impact our own health, and that our bodies have some capacity for junk. To that end, I can also be thankful that my capacity for food is at least limited by the size of my stomach. And, really, that's the live and let live way to look at it, right? If only the consequences of pornography were so well contained.

I read (and bookmarked) a great article on the New York Magazine: The Porn Myth, by Naomi Wolf. It's worth a read, and I think she does a brilliant job laying out the societal, purely secular and extremely dangerous consequences of pornography in our society.

The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as "porn-worthy." Far from having to fend off porn-crazed young men, young women are worrying that as mere flesh and blood, they can scarcely get, let alone hold, their attention.

For how can a real woman—with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own—possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification?

Is pornography really freedom? Or is it indulgence in a morally immature attitude of total selfishness and instant gratification? Is it celebration of sexuality? Or is it societal- and self-destruction?

I submit that pornography is enslavement.

Pornography distorts a man's appetite until he is no longer interested in the real thing. He is cheated out of the best kind of sexual relationship there is: a real one, with a real person, with real commitment and real demands. I'm willing to bet that philosophical arguments, moral relativism and psychological rationalization don't hold a candle to this kind of relationship. And yet we trade the good for the cheap easy and in doing so sabotage ourselves from ever enjoying the good.

Conversely, pornography holds women to impossible standards, as Ms Wolf explains so well. Who can compete with super-idealized imagery that is always available and perfectly compliant? Who wants to compete with that? Where's the freedom to be yourself and express your own needs and desires? How about when those needs and desires transcend intercourse to things like romance, love, commitment, and security? Animated pixels make no such demands.

Don't misunderstand me, I am not advocating moderation here. Pornography is not merely useless like junk food, it is poisonous. Toxic in any quantity. There is a reason for that which I ground very thoroughly in Christianity, but but this post is overlong already.

In the end, I may concede that the toleration of pornography is some indication of freedom in a society. But is the existence existence and "celebration" of pornography an indication of a healthy society? No. Society aside, think of your own health: is it really worth cheating yourself out of what's best? Certainly not.

Quite a rant here, and probably still a bit rough around the edges. I welcome comments of any kind. Or just offer up rants of your own.