Pornography

In our over sexualised society how we can discern what pornography is and what is not?

Pornography is sadistic acts of sexual, emotional, spiritual, and at times physical violence towards women and children, and with information emerging, of young men. It is voyeurism, obscenity, sodomy and bondage.

It always trades in the flesh and lusts of human beings and in this it easily co exists with abortion.

Pornography desensitises human beings to violence, sexual perversions and degradation and is today a multibillion dollar industry, making the purveyors of such an industry loathe to decrease, diminish or even eradicate it.

It has often been said that pornography is a victim less crime that it is an experience carried out in the privacy of home usually between adults, however evidence seems to be pointing to other.

Pornography deals in abject humiliation of its victim and total abuse of its victim’s innocence and leaves its victims and perpetrators an indelible image recorded in the  memory, of deviant sexual behaviour, and such a memory is un erasable and becomes in due time unbearable.

This occurs because there are strong emotions and forces (sexuality) at the core of pornography and the visual abuse of these ultimately victimises both abuser and those being abused and the viewer of such horror.

An overview of the psychology of offenders in this area shows that it is an addictive power game. A game of dominance, and within this game are found emotions of anger, rage, fear (victim) and evil within the perpetrator.

Pornographers and other purveyors of sexual violence and sexual perversions (incest, paedophilia, bestiality, abortion and prostitution) exploit mainly women and children and promote a culture of degradation, violence and death. A culture where rape, incest, sexual abuse, assault, and violence dominate and where innocence, honour and esteem is silenced. A culture where degradation is accepted as a norm. Where abortion and infanticide (late term abortions) become a normal and legal because voices of disgust and voices of peace and innocence are silenced.

Pornography always exploits women and children and vulnerable but really any unsuspecting viewer and in this way is very much like abortion. And it is about power over them. Pornography sees the victims (child/girl/boy/woman/man/porn addict) as objects and so much  dehumanised, and is again very much like abortion where the pre born child must be seen as non human and dehumanised in order to be able to be aborted. This is done both by the parents of the child (it’s a bunch of cells, tissue) to be aborted and the abortion industry itself which is safeguarding its lucrative business, and porn industry (it’s a victimless past time) are protected by their purveyors.

How does pornography dehumanise its victims? Human beings feel dehumanised when intimate parts of the body are used and abused. When intimacy is not held as sacred but used for the purpose of someone else’s voyeuristic pleasure.

When intimacy and intimate parts of another’s body is used for illegitimate purposes. When sexuality becomes a means of tying knots in the psyche of another human being. This leads to the utter helplessness of dehumanisation.

Both the victim and perpetrator become dehumanised, and with each new level of perversion attained a new and more explicit level must be found and so that the addiction is ensured. More and

more dehumanisation becomes accepted as the norm. As tolerance develops the addict needs more to get the same dopamine level and so sensitisation leads to increased desire for more and more exposure in order to satisfy the excitement level.  The addiction.   The pleasure system.

Pornography, as with abortion, renders the victim disabled. This, by the slow destruction of the victim’s innocence and the deep wounding of the spirit, and most importantly, with pornography as with abortion, results in the deep and deliberate assault and wounding of the “mothering”  and “fathering” instinct in the victims and perpetrators. The “feminine genius” (words used by St. John Paul II) is deeply damaged. The masculine strength and honour is deeply distorted.  Abortion and pornography mean the brutalising indignity and dishonouring of innocence of the male and female as created by the Father God.

Pornography is dangerous to all but most especially during the developmental stages of childhood and especially in the development of personality. Intrusion with pornographic imagery and violence into this domain of the developing child leads to warped beliefs about human sexuality and the human being which then this child takes into maturing adulthood and then such adulthood will be marked by exposure to this knowledge. Exposure of a child to pornography is dangerous leading to distortion, dysfunction and addiction. Further, integration of deviant sexual values of pornography into the forming personality of the child results in subsequent behaviour of sexual dysfunction.

Fear and shame gives the porn industry power. This, because of the fear and shame of those caught in the maelstrom of ugliness who are too afraid and too ashamed of what they have done to come forward with their pain.

Pornography and abortion deeply wound the human spirit because it introduces information for which it was not created. Pornography we know is addictive and more and more as we understand the wounds relating to abused human sexuality the more we understand that wounds in the sexual area lead to a life filled with pain. We also know that pornography feeds on itself with need for new and more explicit levels of perversions and constant stream of new measures to activate the brains pleasures centre and add to the addiction.

Pornography we know leads to a belief in a warped portrayal of children, women and men. Learning includes values and beliefs that are not compatible with wholesome life and love but instead with sexual aggression against women and children, and as I said earlier young men.

This sexuality is lust. It is the total antithesis of love.   There is no “love” involved in pornography it is purely instinctual and perhaps the viciousness of porn is that is cyclical, which means that it carries its wounds from generation to generation because the horror remembered from childhood is replayed and remembered ad nauseum within the victim’s mind, perpetrators’ and viewers mind. Victims of pornography live with the memory daily even though the actual pornography viewing or participation may have finished many years earlier, the memory or visual cannot be erased and the victim battles to suppress the memories of images in order to live what appears a “normal” life. Or alternatively live with the memory.

Pornography violates personal dignity, sexuality, the body. It trivializes women, desensitises men and says that women, men and children are things. More pornography used the more abortions will result and just like abortion the more thought to be “ harmless” and “necessary” it will be  eventually seen by community.

Today pornography is not the domain of back alleys, dingy rooms and secret houses but is found in marriage, families, prostitution, jobs, prayer houses, schools, police, lawyers, magistrates, respectable professions,   and is very rarely between strangers.

Its market is staggeringly expansive and we know that when there is a glut of pornography, then torture, abuse, will be seen as normal. Or even as entertainment

The difficulty is that like abortion when it was first seen as “necessary” for woman’s health the slippery slope led to abortion on demand and to full term in less than 30 years.  Pornography’s trajectory is the same.  The disrespect for life is deeply embedded in the disrespect for sexuality found in pornography.

Anne Lastman

………………………………

http://www.fiamc.org/bioethics/a-pastoral-response-to-pornography/