I escaped from momdom for a couple hours this afternoon and found myself with a hour left on the baby-sitter-meter and nary an errand or appointment to occupy my remaining 60 minutes of freedom.
I have a deep seated weakness for the pedicure chair. Maybe it’s because I went into labor for the first time while seated in one. Or maybe I just like polished toes. But whichever the case may be, I found myself cozied up with a stack of Good Housekeeping magazines and a truly hideous shade of mauve that I swore up and down to myself was stone-cold Autumn in a bottle, but looks fairly corpse-like on my feet. C’est la pedi.
As I flipped through my extremely age-appropriate choice of magazines and relaxed into the pummeling of a massage chair set to “drunken kidney punches” I came upon a strange interview with Jennifer Garner, aka Mrs. Ben Affleck.
She had the weirdest reaction to one of the interviewer’s questions about pornography.
Just for reference, she has a new movie coming out about the internet, and her A-list husband reportedly flashed some serious skin in his latest blockbuster, so I was curious to see her answer.
It was … odd.
Basically she started by saying that she was afraid for the day her daughters might find something scary online, and that she really needed to be mindful, as a parent, of what they were exposed to. Okay, so far, so good.
But then…then she said that pornography between two adults was probably fine, and that there was “probably a time and a place for porn” if two people are on the same page and mature. Or something. But still, not for her daughters. Not now, anyway.
I can understand a mother’s heart wanting to protect her children from harm. What I can’t understand is ever not wanting that.
The truth is, there’s no such, this as “a little bit of porn between two consenting adults,” because first of all, the camera man makes three. And even with selfie-style contemporary amateur porn, the inevitable internet makes three…million.
Part of what makes porn so destructive is the intrusive nature of making something so intensely private as sex, public, and not only public, but actually intended and designed to be consumed by an other, an outsider, an observer.
Porn degrades sex into a transactional exchange, into an open invitation to use a human person as a tool, to consume them as a product.
Everyone involved, from the “actors” on the set to the producers behind the product to the consumer on the other side of the computer screen is participating in the use and abuse of a human person.
There’s no such thing as just a little bit of porn. And there’s no acceptable age at which it becomes “healthy” or “normal” to consume porn, or more accurately, to be consumed by it.
Because even if two consenting adults were to sit down with a completely digitally-acted movie and use it as a means to introduce a level of erotic excitement into their own sex life, it’s still an utterly self-centered means to arousal. When you’re watching porn with your partner, you’re not experiencing any kind of intimacy with them as you both get excited by the person on the screen in front of you.
It might be titilating and it might lead to sex in real life, but at what cost? You just used another person’s body (either actual or CGI, it really doesn’t matter) to bring yourself to sexual arousal so that you can, essentially, dump your feelings (and then some) into an available receptacle in the form of your partner.
Self, self, self.
But that’s not what sex was made for. Sex was designed to draw us to the other, to invite our small and selfish little hearts to open wide enough to let another person inside, and to pursue their happiness above our own, seeking to outdo one another in love.
That’s part of why St. John Paul II was so (and scandalously so, for his time) insistent that mutual climax be the goal of sexual union between spouses, so that husband and wife were continually seeking the good of the other, constantly trying to outdo each other in love.
Porn seeks the opposite. It wants immediate self gratification.
Forget delayed gratification, porn says ‘give me what I’m owed, and if you can’t deliver it, I’ll just click over to the next option.’
And even if it’s used alone, in the privacy of one’s own bedroom, with nary another flesh and blood participant to be found, it’s still deeply damaging. To the person consuming it, to the person performing it, to the spouse or boyfriend or daughter on the other side of the closed door, perhaps unaware but not unharmed by the transaction taking place on your screen.
There’s never a time or a place for it, and there’s no relationship on the planet that’s better off because of it.
The reason that a little porn never hurt anyone, is that there’s no such thing as a little porn. It’s a dark, insidious, addictive, and destructive force that feeds on human love. And God knows we’ve got too little of that to go around these days, anyway.
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