The Church Has A Point About Porn

It's a very interesting thing when the Catholic Church and various online sex and relationship coaches find themselves in agreement since the former preaches modesty and saving the sex act for marriage while the latter embraces hedonism and sexual experimentation. Yet in this instance, both camps warn against the dangers of pornography.

From the online coach's point of view, porn creates a warped view of sex because what is shown is not very realistic at all. Instead of tenderness and intimacy, sex in pornography is cold and mechanical. The act itself becomes purely self-serving and takes into account camera angles and lighting more than it does the woman's pleasure or well-being. These coaches warn men: If you try to emulate what's seen in porn, chances are you'll have a pretty unhealthy sex life. A married friend of mine confirmed this by telling me, “Sex in real life is not like porn at all.”

The other thing these online coaches warn about is pornography's addictive nature. Much like a drug, that exciting feeling you get from those initial viewings tends to wane over time so you keep having to raise the bar to prevent boredom from setting in. This usually means seeking out novelty and fetishism just to feel any kind of sexual excitement at all. Therein lies the trap. You're mentally conditioning yourself to find desire in sex that does very little to please a woman.

One of these online coaches put it this way: In the old days when men lived much of their lives without easy access to pornography, they'd be turned on by just seeing the bare shoulder of a woman. Compare that to the modern guy with a porn addiction who has seen just about every sex act imaginable and it's still not enough. Another online coach admitted porn destroyed his sex drive because he became too focused on one particular fetish and couldn't get turned on any other way. He has since stopped watching pornography and found that over time, his sex drive has recovered. I feel sorry for younger generations because they have instant access to so much while my generation had to settle for still photos every once in a great while. You could say both realities are bad but at least we used our imaginations instead of mindlessly staring at a screen.

In the previous blog entry, I mentioned recording some softcore Cinemax movies with my friend's VCR back in the 1990s. After their novelty wore off, I put these tapes in a box and never watched them again. Many years later, I thought about an actresses who appeared in one of these movies and decided to look her up. To my shock and sadness, she was dead. Her acting career had declined, she endured a string of marriages and a few months after giving birth to a daughter, she killed herself. The more details I discovered about this person's life, the more I realized what a troubled soul she was. Suddenly, that sex scene of hers could never be seen the same way ever again.

Part of the Church's reasoning behind its negative view of pornography is that it robs people of their basic human dignity. This actress was a real person with real hopes and dreams and problems. That movie dehumanized her by reducing her to nothing more than a sex object for men's desires. After looking up another actress from those movies, I learned she had been raped as a child. Some of these actresses are very broken people and the porn industry feeds on exploiting them. Is this the kind of thing good Christian men should be supporting?

A few years ago, my parish had a lecture on Catholic values and for one exercise, we were asked to turn to the person in the pew next to us and stare into their eyes for a minute. While doing this, some of us couldn't help but to crack a smile. If the eyes were the window to the soul, we chuckled at the joy of another human being. In that moment, the person next to me was no longer just a stranger. The lecture then continued by saying the Church believed each one of us had worth and value since we were all created in God's image.

As we live life, it's so easy to dehumanize our fellow man. I might have a few choice words for the guy who cut me off in traffic without ever knowing his motivations. I might make a threat assessment on a group of teenagers walking toward me in a dimly lit subway station. It's part of our “animal brain” way of thinking and sometimes we can't help it. Other times we can. Do we see the soul behind the face of that actress in the porn movie? She was someone's daughter. She might be someone's mother. How would we feel about her sex scene if that was our daughter in that movie?

While I do believe in having a healthy fantasy life and that we shouldn't be too hard on our young people who are still trying to figure life out, we must always be on guard that our fantasies aren't actually harming us in the long run or supporting an industry that is incredibly harmful to people. Most importantly, we must make sure to embrace the wisdom of the Church by trying to see the dignity of each and every one of us.

Running Into the Arms of Porn

           Howard Wolowitz                

I must have lived a very sheltered life because even in my early-20s, I had never seen pornographic videos before. Nude photos in an old magazine or a racy sex scene in a movie was all that I had ever known. I was so pathetic back then, I remember lusting after commercials for a pay-per-view program called The Bikini Open but since we didn't have cable television, there was no way I could have seen it. Yet, when my brother found a stash of “x-rated” videos hidden in the trunk of my dad's car, I refused to watch them because I felt it crossed a line.

As I entered my mid-20s, finding a girlfriend was still a very elusive thing. Not helping the situation were a few aspects of my life that seriously handicapped the odds of being successful at dating. I was out of college, underemployed, too shy to regularly go out to clubs and bars and somewhat of a geek. My hobbies were either dominated by grumpy old men or involved spending a lot of time alone. With very few quality friendships, I usually hung out with people who often annoyed me or weren't the best influence. One friend in particular tended to make morally questionable choices. We had grown up together since the second grade and loved playing army, watching science fiction, and riding our bikes back then but as we got older, he smoked pot, slept around and watched porn.

As a few more years passed with still with no girlfriend in sight, that friend now had a few premium channels on cable and out of curiosity, I watched some of those 1990s softcore Cinemax movies. I found it laughable that these programs actually had plots which were usually terrible because 99% of all guys watched these movies just for the women. These Cinemax movies aired late at night so with the help of my TV Guide, I'd have him program his VCR to record a few for me.

Perhaps I should not have done this but I liked to call these movies “junk food for the soul.” If you were a starving man and the only thing around to eat was an unhealthy candy bar, you'd eat the candy bar no matter how bad it was for you. Maybe you'd regret it later on but in that moment, you didn't want to starve to death. That's the way I thought about these videos. After feeling so lonely for so long, at least these Cinemax movies made me feel something other than emptiness. They reminded me that I was a sexual being filled with passions that I wanted to share with another. Like that candy bar, I often felt regret after watching these videos because I had wasted so much time and they were no substitute for a relationship with a real woman.

It would have been so nice to have a girlfriend in my mid-20s because all that wasted time could have been spent building a relationship with her, passing new milestones together and trying to figure out how to love another human being romantically. Even though well-meaning people would tell me, “There's someone for everyone.” and “You'll meet the right one soon.” none of their words seemed to ring true.

Now inching into my late-20s, that bad influence of a friend started watching hardcore porn and if he had it playing in the background, I didn't tell him to turn it off. (I was still pretty clueless about what actual sexual intercourse even looked like.)  Around this time, a friend of a friend who I saw occasionally was also starting to become a bad influence. He was a couch potato, totally unsuccessful with women and watched porn too. If the choice was to sit at home and do nothing or get together with these people, I'd usually hang out with them even though I prayed to God for better friends. Sadly, my prayers were never answered as I entered my 30s.

Years ago, a woman in an online Catholic chat room posted a video of a priest's sermon where he decried pornography by saying it was the number one cause of why men didn't want to enter the priesthood. I thought it was typical of what was wrong with our Church today. Firstly, this man of the cloth's primary concern was with men not becoming priests but he didn't seem to care about the single men who desired Holy Matrimony. There was also talk of how porn destroyed marriages and families. Again, he missed the mark when it came to singles.

Secondly, (and this is something many Catholic women do all the time) he underestimated how strong an average guy's sexual desires really were. If men don't get what they want out of life, they'll usually look for an outlet somewhere else even if it's detrimental to them in the long term. There's no way I ever wanted to hang out with loser friends in my 20s and watch porn yet here we were.

During this online chat, I brought up the character of Howard Wolowitz from the TV sitcom Big Bang Theory and explained how he was creepy and obsessed with porn because he was so lonely. When a good strong woman entered his life, he turned himself around, got rid of the porn, and became one of the most well-adjusted characters on the show. I made the case that yes, while there are inept creepers out there who will never change, many men would rather not embrace porn. We tend to see it as a last resort when the only other option is to feel dead inside.

I got slammed for sharing this opinion and one guy accused me of justifying the porn industry. I wasn't doing anything of the sort. I was merely saying that when Catholics complain about men like me but do nothing practical to help change such behaviors, they risk sending us running into the arms of porn.