Gentlefolk,
I just finished reading, On Tyranny And Television: The Mainstreaming Of Pornography. This is another case where I'm at odds with my church, the Roman Catholic one. I am vehemently opposed to sex acts with non-consenting individuals. I define anyone under the age of sixteen as unable to give proper consent. I define anyone between sixteen and twenty-one submitting to someone more than two years older as non-consensual. I also define people unable to understand the intent, implications, and possible outcomes of sex as unable to give consent….
With the exception of child and mentally handicapped porn, defined above, I don't have a problem with video porn. Most of it is rather boring and repetitive to be frank. Most video porn does illustrate acts between two adult people who have agreed in advance to what they will do to each other for the enjoyment of a very intimate and pleasurable experience. The fact that some things are beyond what an individual watcher may have thought of, or personally enjoys, does not remove the fact that there are lots of people around engaging in such activities for their pleasure. Strange and different do not equal wrong.
Simple viewing of an unclothed body I cannot understand in a negative context, with the exceptions I outlined in the first paragraph. I understand all too well that people find such nudity sexually exciting and stimulating. But I am also old enough to remember the hyperbole issued from some pulpits and newspapers about young women wearing two-piece swimsuits in public places, such as the swimming pool or beach….
Yes, if more nudity is broadcast it will loose its shock value. I am of the opinion that nudity is not evil, bad, or even wrong. Why are we shocked at the sight of a naked body? God gave us each a body. Then He gave us the freedom to treat it the way we choose to. Some of us starve the body, some exercise strenuously, and some overfeed it. But that does not make the body bad. So, exposing and viewing the naked body should not be considered evil or bad.
It is how the body is used that makes things bad or evil. Using the body to beat someone up is not good. …But the body itself is neither good nor bad, and exposing it and viewing it should not be considered bad….
Now, what I really find offensive, and what causes me to turn off the TV more than most folks I know, is profanity and violence.
I admit I was born in late 1950. Thus, I came of age watching Red Skelton, Jack Benny, John Wayne and Marshall Dillon. Those shows were able to be funny, politically pointed at times, and entertaining without the use of profanity at all. …The worst shows I have seen so far have been The Simpsons and Roseanne. I admit I have never seen one completely because I turn them off within two minutes because of the profanity and vulgarity.
Violence I find almost as offensive, but very much more disturbing—probably from watching so much John Wayne and Marshall Dillon-Gunsmoke. But those two shows combined probably didn't have as much violence over all of their shows as some current shows do in one season. To me the violence is gratuitous. I believe the writers can't, or are too lazy to, think up convincing dialog to move the plot along, so they stage a fight.
The disturbing part about violence on TV is that children pick up on it and act it out in the schoolyard….
One quick example as illustration: my mother taught school for over forty years in an elementary setting; thus, she had her share of playground duty. Over the years children would verbally relate to her the silly antics that happened in cartoons and explain why the characters were so silly. Think Coyote and Roadrunner. But when the Batman show and Darkshadows were on, the children didn't talk about the show. Instead, the boys would come to school the next day and jump on each other, and younger and weaker kids, in much the same manner as they had seen the previous afternoon on the shows they watched. Once my mother did an experiment. She had most of the teachers go home, watch the shows and then attempt to predict exactly how the boys were going to be jumping on others. By the end of the third week the principal was sending notes home to the parents asking them not to let the children watch those programs because of the violence that was brought to the playground the day after the shows were on. …The teachers could immediately see what effect withdrawing the violent programs had on the kids. …The experiment ended there, but the principal sent three notes a year until his retirement asking parents to keep their children from watching certain programs. The injury rate for children at that school went down and stayed down until his retirement….
Thus, I explain that I am much more repulsed by the vulgarity, profanity, and violence in modern entertainment. Outside of the Olympics, I probably watch less than ten hours of television a year. I seldom see more than one movie a year. I choose not to expose myself, or my family, to such language and violence. But I do not understand all the outrage of so called Christian organizations, including yours, over exposure of the human body and acts, without which, no one reading or writing such things would be here.
Narrowmindedly yours,
Kelly Stevens
Dear Mr. Stevens:
Thank you for your comments, and thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my article.
I want to begin by noting that your equation of pornography with nudity is unjustified. We are not talking about banning Michelangelo’s David or Rubens’ Judgment of Paris. You say, “the body itself is neither good nor bad and exposing it and viewing it should not be considered bad.” Indeed, I would go one step further and affirm that the body is not only neither good nor bad, but positively glorious. God created our bodies and they are wonderful to behold. As Christ reminds us, however, pearls should not be cast before swine (Mt. 7:6). Engaging in immoral sexual practices, such as fornication and adultery, waste the awesome gift of human sexuality. Those who dissent from the Church’s teaching regarding human sexuality are fond of claiming that the Church has a hang-up about sex. In fact, the very opposite is true. The Church is so impressed with the magnificence of the human body that She believes the gift of self that sex entails should be confined to the only relationship—marriage—that appropriately nourishes and sustains this gift. Having sex outside of marriage is not a form of liberation, but a harmful and shameless act—equivalent to using the Mona Lisa as a dartboard.
Your letter implies pornography is harmless so long as the persons involved “have agreed in advance to what they will do to each other for the enjoyment of a very intimate and pleasurable experience.” You define consensual pleasure as the standard by which you distinguish good from evil acts. While I do not agree with this assumption, I can demonstrate that the making of pornography is rarely consensual or pleasant. (As for “intimacy,” I regret to inform you that film studios do not allow for the sort of privacy usually associated with making love.)
Women do not make pornography for free. Pornography, by definition, is thus a form of prostitution. In a previous article I wrote for Catholic Exchange, Empowered or Destroyed? — The Case Against Legalized Prostitution, I note the obvious fact that prostitution is not simply a career choice. In the United States, the average age of entry into prostitution is 14 years old. Hungry and homeless, many a naïve runaway has fallen into the hands of a pimp. Pimps use physical and psychological violence (such as, encouraging the formation of drug addictions and threatening to harm the victim’s relatives) to keep these women in prostitution. Prostitutes are also circulated through different parts of the sex trade, including strip-clubs and the porn industry, in order to prevent them from forming stable attachments and friendships. Prostitution is a form of rape, with the violence subcontracted to a pimp. Insofar as pornography depends upon prostitution, pornography is also a form of violence against women (and men). True, a very few women do enter the porn industry simply for the money, but, by and large, these films cannot be made without recourse to prostitution rings.
So, even if you maintain, as your comments suggest, that consensual pleasure is the proper measure of human action, good reasons exist for banning pornography. I wonder, however, if you really hold such a hedonistic philosophy. Your strong condemnation of television profanity and violence indicates you may not. You rightly suggest such programs are harmful because children who view them tend to “act out” what they have seen. Why do you not suspect that children who see scantily clad actresses and actors pretending to have sex on television will not likewise act upon what they see? Similarly, how can you oppose profanity and not take offense at the depiction of the very deeds most profanity alludes to?
I find it difficult to believe you are unaware of such glaring inconsistencies in your argument. For this reason, I must revert to my original conclusion that you are of the opinion that value-judgments should be made according to personal pleasure. That being the case, it seems to me your distaste for television violence and profanity is really nothing more than a matter of personal preference. You do not like to see such things. On the other hand, you do not have a “problem” with pornography; or as you seem to indicate from your very precise introduction, with any type of sex performed by any variety of consenting individuals. I hope my interpretation of your comments is incorrect. Thus, I will leave it at asking whether you believe in the existence of an objective moral order?
The way out of the irreconcilable impasse of moral relativism (and the tyranny of opinion that inevitably accompanies such a philosophy) is found in the affirmation of an objective personalistic and natural order. I do not have the space here to outline the basis of this order. The primary reason I think pornography is wrong, however, is not because it personally offends me, but because it violates these objective norms. The making of pornography requires the participants to abuse their bodies and their sexuality by engaging in practices that do not accord with God and nature’s plan for human sexuality. The viewing of pornography is a form of material cooperation with these sins because the person who watches pornography tacitly approves of the actions entailed by the making of the videos. Moreover, the viewer, at the very least, exposes himself to the near occasion of sin (through which he is tempted to abuse his own sexuality) and risks causing scandal. Pornography dehumanizes the actresses and actors who make it and debases the viewer who takes pleasure in seeing other human beings mistreat one another.
Thank you, again, for your comments. May the Holy Spirit always guide you.
In Christ,
Jameson Taylor
Associate Editor
Catholic Exchange
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Capitalism & Catholic Economics
Dear Editor,
Congratulations to Mr. Fitzpatrick for his honest assessment of John Clark's article on Distributism for the Latin Mass Magazine.
Mr. Fitzpatrick is correctly hesitant regarding all of Mr. Clark's corrections, however he fails to recognize that it is not only Distributism, but also the teaching of the Church, that allows for the intervention of the State in order to control properly economic life.
Mr. Fitzpatrick's analysis suffers, specifically, from two problems.
First, he uses the term “socialism” in a very vague way, linking it simply with “excessive state power,” when, in fact, socialism really means the ownership by the state of the means of production. Criticizing Distributism because it allegedly paves the way for socialism assumes that the Distributists are content to let the state own the means of producing wealth in society – and they plainly aren't. Distributists have in mind the better distribution of property among citizens of a nation, not its government.
The second error in Mr. Fitzpatrick's critique perhaps flows from his first. While he may not like Distributism because in Belloc's specific vision of it, the power of the state would be used to defend widely distributed ownership, Mr. Fitzpatrick cannot therefore accuse it of socialism unless he espouses another flawed assumption. That flawed assumption is that the state which exercises its power to give a Distributist tone to society is inherently arbitrary and lawless, and could thus at any moment unbearably infringe on the liberties of its citizens. Such an argument can be reduced to an erroneous syllogism, as follows:
Distributism harnesses the power of the state to ensure widely distributed ownership of the means of production. Tyrants interested in eliminating civil liberties harness the power of the state for their own ends. Thus, Distributism is tyranny.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I will merely point out that (1) the State which uses its power to defend the small owner of property is inherently orderly and lawful, since the very proposition implies that the State's power is being used toward some pre-defined end; the task of Distributism, practically speaking, is to figure out how to imbue the men of government with these correct, noble principles; and (2) the unregulated free market, which is often “settled for” as the only possible alternative to the kind of State power which Belloc's scheme would involve, is no better than the allegedly unacceptable consequences of Belloc's scheme, insofar as the corporations which control the economic playing field are under no obligation or compulsion – in fact the system works in quite the opposite way – to think of the common good above their own self interest. Almost without question the small owner is made into a mere employee, following the dictates of “economic” priorities such efficiency, conglomeration, and cost-reduction.
Regards and God bless,
John Sharpe
Dear Mr. Sharpe:
Your analysis of the “Chesterbellocian” vision is perceptive and persuasive. My point was not that distributism would necessarily lead to socialism, but only that the amount of power that would be have to be given to the state to determine how much wealth any one individual would have the right to own in Belloc's scheme would very likely be abused.
Sincerely,
James K. Fitzpatrick
