In my previous post, I noted that pornography is a kind of story, promoting and advocating a certain way for people to relate sexually. (Sociologists would call it a “script”, a cultural narrative that people rely on to make sense of and direct social encounters.) The story goes something like this:
Pornography would suggest that men are socialized to find both male power and female powerlessness sexually arousing. In pornography, domination of women by men is portrayed as sexy. It is the power of the man or men to make the woman do what she does not want to do—to make her do something humiliating, degrading, or antithetical to her character—that creates the sexual tension and excitement . . . . In pornography, women are raped tied up, beaten, humiliated—and are portrayed as initially resisting and ultimately enjoying their degradation. (from Karen Lebacquz, “Love your Enemy: Sex, Power, and Christian Ethics,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics 10 (1990) 8)
While it seems unquestionable that pornography dominates our understanding of relationships (the new statistic that I ran across was that 53% per cent of girls under 13 had watched or seen porn, and, by 16, it was 97%), it also seems true that unhappiness with pornography is equally pervasive. As Steve Biddulph notes in Raising Girls
Porn teaches credulous schoolgirls that they should be enjoying sex with boys they barely know. The reality, of course, is that they usually don’t, and are often confused by their reaction. In fact, psychologist Deborah Tolman discovered through numerous interviews with girls that the way they talk about sex is overwhelmingly negative. Their sexual encounters were most often described in weak and passive terms. ‘It just happened,’ was a frequent remark. Being with a boy they weren’t sure they liked, having a bit too much to drink and sex just ‘happening’ seemed to be almost the norm.
In her recent article “Sex in the Meritocracy”, Helen Rittelmeyer notes a similar phenomenon. She argues that what one finds at Yale is not a hedonistic enjoyment of moral relativism (Nathan Harden’s explanation for the sexual culture at Yale in his Sex and God at Yale). Instead . . .
Most students, not just the feminists, know that there is something wrong with pornography, serial hook-ups, and a code of sexual ethics that recognizes no restriction other than consent. They’ve all either seen the dark side of that culture or been burned by it themselves. They just don’t have a moral framework that allows them to explain why such a culture is wrong, and they don’t feel that they have any alternative. So they fall back on their most ingrained habit—setting ambitious goals and then meeting them—while all the time suspecting that there must be a better way.
While Rittelmeyer is discussing Yale culture, I see at as applicable more broadly. People feel constrained by the pornography story: they know it is destructive and makes them unhappy but they do not see any viable alternative.
I think Donna Freitas’ analysis of hook-up culture is equally applicable to the acceptance of the pornography script. Pornography is a story of pretend and coercion. It is a story of pretend because fewer people are having sex and most people want meaningful relationships. It is a story of coercion as people not only feel forced to participate in it and it provides a cover for sexual violence. (According to the Center for Disease Control, around twenty percent of dating relationships have non-sexual violence, and twenty percent of women in college experience completed or attempted rape.)
What is needed is a new story about sex and relationships, a counter story to the pornography one. Work has been done on this (Lauren Winter’s Real Sex, Donna Freitas in Sex and the Soul, and Christopher West’s work on the Theology of the Body), but so much more is needed. Anything that highlights the reality that love is something that is life giving, that builds people up and does not destroy them, that makes people joyful rather than unhappy. We need a story about loving relationships, one rooted in the Story of God who loves and cares for us.
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