Let’s talk about Sex
The bishops of Southern Africa must be commended for their new campaign against pornography, Pure love, not porn, and for the content of that initiative’s message.
The moral arguments against pornography are well known. The Catechism of the Catholic Church frames it in this way: [Pornography] offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offence. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials (2354).
In our age, especially in Western culture, moral judgment tends to be relativised, with a result that a message which relies only on the ethics of an act often is dismissed as a subjective opinion in the private realm.
The bishops’ anti-porn campaign acknowledges that reality. While it rightly raises issues of morality and personal ethics, it also aims to educate the public on the dangers of pornography.
When the Catechism of the Catholic Church was written in the early 1990s, the drafters could not have foreseen the impact which the Internet and advancing technology, especially the smartphone, would have in making pornography easily and widely available.
The idea, therefore, that civil authorities today might have any power to prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials would seem to be redundant.
Even if governments were to attempt doing so, it would require potential violations of civil rights that are unrelated to morally objectionable material.
For example, the proposed Online Regulation Policy in South Africa, which would require almost all graphic media uploaded to the Internet to first be classified by the Films and Publications Board, intends to weed out child porn, working on a peculiar presumption that child porn producers would seek legal methods of distributing their criminal products, or that minors sharing their private sex videos on social media would first consider the legal implications of that act.
But such a law could also be used, by an unscrupulous government, to intimidate, prosecute and silence critics. Noble intentions notwithstanding, the Draft Online Regulation Policy is a very poorly conceived idea.
So, widely accessible pornography will remain a reality, and with it social acceptance of pornography as a personal choice will become increasingly entrenched.
This is evident even in fashion, with some young girls wearing T-shirts featuring legends such as Porn Star in Training.
Wildly popular TV programmes, such as Game of Thrones or Girls, normalise the voyeurism of pornography through graphic depiction of sexual acts.
Our response, therefore, cannot be limited to statements of moral revulsion and protests against the availability of porn. Our obligation also is to educate.
The bishops’ anti-porn campaign is providing the public with a good basis for that. It explains the effect of porn on people, as individuals and as members of society.
This ranges from the dangers of erectile dysfunction among men and the destructive consequences of porn addiction, to the objectification of women which gives rise to corrosive sexual attitudes and the normalisation of sexual violence towards women, to the extent that teenagers film the rape of girls on their smartphones and share these videos with others.
The bishops’ campaign cannot be dismissed as a finger-wagging moral crusade. Having been researched and designed by lay family people, it is raising concerns that apply alike to people with faith and those with none.
These are the issues that need to be addressed within families. Parents, teachers and others who shape our young must speak freely about sex to communicate the dangers of pornography.
They must be able to explain to the youths in their care why the depiction of sex acts in pornography does not correspond with the sex act in normal life, and has nothing to do with love.
The young need to be taught that girls are not objects of sex, available at a whim and girls must be empowered to resist this.
They need to be taught that the purpose of the sex act is not mechanical gratification, nor should it be filmed for the entertainment of others.
They need to be taught that pornographic acts that portray the degradation of women are perverse and a violation of human dignity even when the actress on the screen seems to enjoy it, or otherwise appears to voluntarily submit to it.
They need to be taught that many of the acts which women in porn permit to be done to them have nothing to do with normal, healthy sexuality much as the scenes in the movie franchise The Fast and the Furious do not represent normal traffic behaviour.
For that, we must be willing to talk about sex, openly and without shame, using reason in counteracting the pervasive message in today’s society that pornography is just another lifestyle choice.
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