The Phenomenon of Porn
My sister linked me to the Ask Mormon Girl blogsite thinking it might be of interest to me. Dismayed at some of the problems wanting of advice from this kindly, knowledgeable young matron (a Neo-religious Ann Landers), I caught the post about Porn. I find myself vexed with ire over the misconceptions and misunderstandings of 90% of the responses. It is difficult when observing such heartache to adhere to my motto of minding my own business. At first I thought I could keep my response short and pointed, but in the midst of such ignorance, it is difficult. There were a few people posting who have sufficient grasp of the essential issues who will realize improved relationships. The rest I predict will continue in frustration, misunderstanding, rancor, and marital dissolution.
The first misconception is with the definition of “addiction.” My Sage dictionary is faithful to English: “1. Someone who is physiologically dependent on a substance; abrupt deprivation of the substance produces [physiological] withdrawal symptoms. 2. Someone who is so ardently devoted to something that it resembles an addiction.” Looking and acting like a duck does not necessarily mean the action is performed by a duck. There is a distinct, marked difference between addiction, and obsessive, or compulsive behaviors. Those people who cannot understand the fine distinctions will continue to have relational problems, especially with intimacy. An excellent book discussing addiction, behavior, and healing is The Codependency Conspiracy, written by forensic psychologist, Stan Katz. Dr Katz also illuminates the fundamental flaws in the 12 step program used by AA, and plagiarized into numerous recovery groups, a variation apparently adopted by LDS practitioners. Look for it in your local library system. It is well worth the read.
Sixty years ago as a child, I learned it was common knowledge in this country that psychiatry was quackery. Since then, the acceptance of its scientific validity has swept through our culture, in spite of the material published by their own researchers invalidating the efficacy of its techniques. The church leadership, finding increasing membership behavioral problems, as often provoked by local leaders as otherwise, incorporated psychotherapy into its administrative structure in order to get members help and attention diverted from those local priesthood officials who exacerbated these kinds of problems. During this same period, Donald Cameron, one time president of the APA, was investigated for civil liberty and psychological abuse violations in connection with his “psychic driving” research funded by the CIA, then classified as MK Ultra. For a brief period, some of these same techniques in diminutive form were employed by BYU officials on campus, in an attempt to heterosexualize homosexual church members with disastrous results, seriously damaging the lives of these “patients.” This psychic driving consisted of pornography, electroshock, and drugs. Its abysmal failure precipitated its discontinuance.
The second area of misunderstanding is the sexual chastity elephant being forced into the living rooms of church members. Obsession with sexual purity is one of the chief contributory causes of porn’s increasing usage among church members. I have two brothers who spent time incarcerated for their arson, all because our father’s obsession with certain behavioral issues of his kids. This obsession was driven by his own weaknesses in these same areas, unwittingly producing the same problems in us he had struggled with as a youth. It can be taken as a cardinal guide that those who are obsessed with the behavior of others are sufferers of the same weakness, and are propagating their dysfunctional relationship habits upon all those they have influence. This is precisely what Jesus had reference to with His Beam & Mote in the Eye parable.
This second area of misunderstanding is characterized by suppressing or medicating the symptom, which is porn, when the actual problem lies elsewhere. Western society has devolved into treating symptoms, while classifying them as disorders or diseases. This cancerous solution to symptomatic problems is spreading throughout the world and has caused me considerable alarm for the well being of my posterity. A few years ago I broke a tooth crown and went to a specialist to have it reworked. The doctor discovered an infection in the tooth so severe that he was nearly forced to remove the tooth to terminate the infection. Yet I felt no discomfort anywhere near it. But I had been suffering increasing nerve pain in my arm, to the point I could barely hold a spoon to feed myself. Once the tooth infection was cured, the nerve problems disappeared in my arm and my natural strength returned. When church officials pound the pulpit unceasingly over chastity they are effectively scratching at a skin lesion that cannot heal. The cause of the infection must be eliminated, not bandaided. Failure to address the underlying cause of behavioral problems is a clear sign of spiritual impotence in religious leaders and quackery in the behavioral modification professions. Now, what did I just say?
Those who have done their historical investigation on this subject know that the period when porn, whorehouses and legal regulations, and the incidence of venereal disease all spread like grass fire with the sexual suppression of the Victorian era. In America, we barely regained our senses with the passing of the 21st amendment, for corruption and drunkenness had spread to the center of the Federal government with the passing of the 18th amendment. One would think Americans learned something from that debacle.
In my professional career I encountered the concept of Root Cause Analysis. Because my career was in physical science, it was often a mistaken assumption by associates that product failure was a physical phenomenon. What I discovered early on was that RCA has to do with people, not physical impurities. All solutions to product failures focused on misunderstanding and procedural errors in people’s behavior. The same RCA principles apply to human social dysfunctions. The manifestation of porn is symptomatic of a systemic problem, and its treatment and elimination requires involvement of both men and women, because both are involved in its root cause in society. Women who do not go beyond the first step in their man’s ownership of porn obsession are destined to fail in their relationship until they perceive their interactive part in the overall development of intimacy substitutes.
The third misunderstanding is not realizing that porn usage (true of all other symptomatic behaviors), is a substitute for an underlying deficiency. Without attention to the underlying deficiency, substitutes will always be employed. Suppression or other behavior modification methods will always fail, with its attendant guilt and shame in a religious context, perpetuating the failure cycle. A large portion of this misunderstanding of overt sexual “misbehavior” is a failure at understanding human sexuality, its biological nature, and its successful socialization. Men have often been denigrated because they are inept at initiating sex with women. But it works both ways. My experience has been that very few women understand how to love, and “make love” (that is, understand how to implement sexual pleasure in males), to the men in their lives, becoming frustrated and hurt because their man begins looking for intimacy augmentation or substitutes elsewhere. What men are looking for is intimacy, overridden in their early adult years by sex hormones. Those women who are successful rarely are able to articulate exactly why how they treat their husband/lover keeps them returning and bonding with them. The sexualization process in American culture has few if any rituals, rites of passage, or socialization processes providing a vehicle for healthy sexual development and its perpetuation. Most of it is implanted by the mother before the child is aware of themselves.
Charles Moore, Santa Cruz District Attorney and Catholic priest, extemporized on the hormonal differences between men and women entering puberty. He declared that when women enter this transition, their hormones can increase at least three times that in childhood. But for men, that increase can peak at least fifteen times the previous level. A woman’s sexual nature will usually remain fairly constant within normal hormonal fluctuations until menopause where interest doesn’t decline, but shifts. For men, hormonal peaking takes place in early adulthood and can begin decline as early as thirty, or as late as seventy. This 5/1 disparity underscores the difficulties in women understanding male sexual behavior, male disappointment in female responses, and for men, completely overshadows their underlying needs for intimacy.
Without effective socialization from both mother and father, males can have considerable difficulty in expressing their intimate desires with women because their brains are suffused with testosterone, clouding their judgment. Such is common knowledge among men, and even depicted in the Epics with the island of Sirens. For every male who has difficulty expressing his sexuality in productive, meaningful hetero relationships, there will be a mother who did not, or was unable to, communicate to her son effective and appropriate methods of developing intimacy with a woman. Likewise, there will also exist a father who did not, or was unable to, instruct and model his son on appropriate methods and boundaries for releasing sexual energy. For those sports-minded males, that activity is a useful diversion, but does nothing for his need for feminine intimacy and expressing the creative force. Fortunately, most of this is communicated through parental interaction with children in an atmosphere free of guilt, shame, or berating, but rather laced with physical expressions of affection, open discussion (listening to the kid!), and building the child’s confidence in making their own analysis and solutions to problems.
Emotional isolation is likely to be at the root of every human social dysfunction. Obviously, if parents are not communicating freely and effectively on the emotional level, children will not learn effective techniques either. I am reminded of my 4 year old redhead daughter who, after having heard her mother frequently query her daughter: Do you need some loving and attention?, one day told her mother emphatically: Put the baby down, I want some loving and attention!
The female complainant who expressed frustration, disillusionment, repugnance, and disdain over males who engaged in pornographic media was forlorn that she would not find in today’s society a male who did not have the “problem.” What she was totally unaware of is that even if she had found someone that fit her bill of values, in time he likely would have developed the problem because her attitudes on the matter were invisible to herself. As Grandma Betty tells me; she’s missing a puzzle piece in her character. This woman does not realize that what she finds repugnant in men who indulge in porn is likely to be a reflection of herself in the same area and despises herself for it. Such people don’t like being reminded of their own deficiency. Mote and the Beam principle. As Eric Hoffer wrote:
“The awareness of their individual blemishes and short-comings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.”
This woman is attempting hypergamy (looking to “trade up”) and marry someone less defective than she perceives herself to be. Often this takes the form of looking for a man who appears to be the idealized image of her own father. The same can be said of women who point out the “degradation” of women in pornographic productions. It is quite often the fact that those who object to being exploited do it themselves and to others. Another respondent who expressed this disgust, does not realize that the “degradation” she believes exists in the photography is a projection of her own feelings of degradation, were she to be the person being photographed. There is no way she could possibly know what the feelings were of the woman who was in the photographed material. She is projecting her own feelings of inadequacy. Religious harpies, whether cloaked in black suits or white veils or ties, who focus on sexual “perversion” at the pulpit or in the press, are merely revealing the spiritual emptiness, depravity of soul, and bereft intimacy existing within themselves. This principle is true across the board for any vice humans use as a substitute for the missing “puzzle piece.”
The quest for intimacy runs deep and can be found in a human yearning. I have yet to find explored in public literature. It concerns the differences in the creative force, actualized by men and women.
The yearning a man has for intimacy is an expression of the creative, the need to find greater expression of self, and perpetuate the self beyond his own mortality. I expect the same is true for women. Women are so constructed that all of their reproductive organs for bearing offspring and sustaining them are also sexual organs that men are drawn to, who find deep satisfaction in observing, touching, and manipulating. Indeed, medical research recently has pointed to such action prior, during, and post delivery can significantly enhance a woman’s birthing process and recovery from its stress. The entire act of conceiving, gestating, and delivery is a sexual one—a symbol which they frequently are blind to. Men have no such organs. There is only one through which they can be creative, and use to perpetuate their identity immortally. In exceptional instances they may be able to nurse an infant. But that is the extent of the physical connection to their offspring. For women, having a baby is an act of fulfillment. For men it is the culmination of her sexuality; it is the power of her sex that he cannot do, and cannot participate in, unless she involves him in it all the way. The way men see it, symbolically women are having a sexual experience in the production and physical nurturing of a child. Men cannot have a similar sexual experience with their children, except vicariously through the woman’s inclusion. This is the crux of Kyle Pruett’s book, Father Need. The benefits of such maternal inclusion in her sexual expression Doctor Pruett covers in his book, The Nurturing Father.
Let me interject right here that it is precisely the absence of nurturance as a dominant male characteristic that makes the Proclamation on the Family a piece of trash. Women are not the primary nurturers. This view is ae perpetuation of a myth, begun post WWII. It is at the core of the war between the sexes. Likewise, making a living has nothing to do with men or women, but with parents. Virtually all of society’s ills can be traced to this single process of exclusion of males from the sexual aspect of creating and nurturing a replica of themselves.
Doctor Pruett has demonstrated that in those families where the father has been intimately included in the gestation and delivery process the incidence of all male forms of abuse are dramatically reduced. The more the father can be encouraged to nurture his child, the more fulfilled he becomes, the more fulfilled and developmentally sound the child is. When a child’s mother alienates its father from herself, she is alienating him from the child. A man’s connection to his children is the symbolic connection of his umbilical organ uniting through a woman’s sexual organs in an act of completeness and transcendence. If she does things that inhibits his natural bonding urges, she destroys those links that not only tie him to her, but generatively to their offspring. The day my first daughter was born I transformed from the identity of being male, to being a father. The entire concept of fatherhood in American culture has been denigrated and neglected to the point that virtually our entire society does not know what it means.
My first wife refused to allow me to touch her in any way during her delivery (and incidentally in many other natural ways otherwise), and that single act almost lost me. Had I been of a more impulsive nature, I would have walked out of the hospital at that moment, never to be seen or heard from again. But I waited, until being the last of the line of “attendants”, I could hold my newborn daughter in my arms and get acquainted with her. (Medical personnel just don’t get it. A newborn does not need immediate fussing over cleanliness and inspection. What they need is to be introduced to their father immediately—to be reassured by that man who created them they are and will be safe, and they are the central figure in his life.) Until that moment my daughter was in distress, refusing to be consoled by anyone, including her mother. When I took her in my arms she immediately ceased her crying, and we bonded. In that instant, I became a father. I felt the mantle of responsibility for her care in all its parameters descend upon me and I became transformed. It was magical. I was fortunate to have similar experiences with each successive child. But their mother continually refused to initiate, much less participate in those moments, to the detriment of our children and our ultimate divorcement. Each of the children today are bearing the scars of that schism between my first wife and I. While I have attempted to repair the breach and damage in my relations to my children from that lack of parental intimacy, their mother’s inability to initiate and sustain intimacy has produced similar difficulties in the children, of which the oldest is now the greatest of sufferers. In time, the children have become emotionally estranged from their mother, suffering feelings of isolation and sometimes rejection. It shows in their hetero relationships.
Women must come to this understanding: a man’s fullest expression of his sexuality can only be achieved through inclusion of a woman’s sexual power in his life. It is through not only his physical union with her, but with the emotional and spiritual union that he is empowered to define and obtain his highest creative self. He cannot do this alone, and if he must be alone, will often seek the substitute of imagination, stimulated by visual sexual artifacts. Males are visual, at least as far as sex is concerned. There isn’t a person alive that is capable of articulating why this is so. A large percentage of women do not understand the nuances of what stimulates a man. Those that do predominantly use it to manipulate men, rather than use it to exalt him. Only a few women become self-aware of their sexual power and its impact on the male psyche, and use it to improve both her well-being, and his. Visual imagery of a woman in various states of erotic ecstasy is the vehicle through which an isolated male obtains a modicum of sexual release. Men are quite well aware that it is lonely, that it is sterile, that it can be a symbol of objectification. But the alternative is no sexual release at all, and this is the ultimate state of loneliness and isolation. A man never feels more disconnected from life than at that moment he resorts to isolated sex. At least for those few moments spent with visual erotica they can experience the pleasure of self-love, even though the real thing is denied them. This is not a justification of porn, but an explanation of the human dynamic that creates it! The solution to its eradication is greater sensitivity to a man’s emotional state of being and the production in marriage and social settings; those rites, rituals, and activities that healthily facilitate the gratification of the male’s creative urge.
Karl Kraus journalist and satirist wrote during the rise of promiscuity in the Weimar Republic:
“When it comes to sex, the whole world is utterly stupid: it sees sexual life in terms either of a division between the sexes, or of decisions made on moral grounds.”
“Intercourse with a woman is sometimes a satisfactory substitute for masturbation. But it takes a lot of imagination to make it work.”
It should be a lot clearer at this point how women are involved in the phenomenon of porn (beyond exhibitionism, or debauching themselves for money) which requires a lot less imagination than real sex with a woman, and what they must do as their part in diminishing its presence. Far too many women are clueless to the signs of male isolation. Sometimes they remove themselves from female association for personal recharge. Other times it is an act of resignation. Developing those cues is part of the courtship process, which must be enhanced in marriage if it is to be productive of intimacy.
Women should also realize that celebration of the nude female form has always, and is always going to find public expression, and therefore learn ways to celebrate themselves wherever it exists, and also help their children to understand its healthy expression. When the sexual dynamic of men and women are fully understood, there is nothing to fear, no shame, no guilt, and no embarrassment. None of this crap like Spencer W. Kimball wrote about the first time he attended a nude female follies exhibition. That was his insecurity and character defect, and he should have kept it to himself, rather than shoving it in the livingrooms of members of the Church through his book The Miracle of Forgiveness. What a prude!
SethSmee
REFERENCES
The Codependency Conspiracy Stan Katz/Aimee Liu
The Myth of Neurosis Garth Wood
Sex by Prescription Thomas Szasz
The Myth of Psychotherapy Thomas Szasz
Lexicon of Lunacy Thomas Szasz
Anti Freud Thomas Szasz
Father Need Kyle Pruett
The Nurturing Father Kyle Pruett
