Symposium: Pornography, the Internet, and Today’s Gnostics

This article is in response to “What Can Pornography Teach Us About Love?” by Michael Bradley and is part of the symposium, “Sex and the Polis: Perspectives on Marriage, Family, and Sexual Ethics.”

Michael Bradley’s article about the ignored problem of pornography focuses in a compelling way upon the destructive effects of what was once called “smut.” Pornography is a poison permeating our culture. The 97 billion dollar industry pulls in more than either Google or Apple;  it has been estimated at least 35% of internet websites are dedicated to pornography, and yet both politicians and bloggers alike have been curiously silent on this issue.

John Paul II’s ‘theology of the body’ beautifully and intelligently explains the self giving nature of  our sexuality and its relation not only to our physical nature, but also to our spiritual, emotional, psychological, and relational dimensions. In his book Theology of the Body, he brilliantly stated, “There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.”

The impersonal way people behave on the internet fosters a reductionist view of the human person. Looking at the bright computer screen, severed from a specific, three dimensional place, we forget that a person we interact with is a real person, with a real hometown, friends, and family to care for.

Professor at Duke, Jason Byassee tells a thought provoking story that relates to how the anonymous nature of internet connections severs us from the way community is supposed to be: human beings living together and knowing each other’s stories.

Back in college a friend of mine was at his fraternity house one night, partying with his friends while they waited for a stripper to arrive. And arrive she did, beginning her performance—only to catch my friend’s eye. She froze. So did he. They had been in high school together. She gathered up her things and fled.

There’s something almost quaint about this story..It involved a live sex performance with real flesh-and-blood human beings. And when their gazes met, she and he suddenly knew the same thing: This was a woman with parents, and siblings, and maybe children, and certainly friends, and a history, which presumably once included dreams that had gone horribly wrong.

Something different, I think, lives in our more recent Internet-based pornography…The providers of pornography have so mastered the art of marketing their wares according to the three A’s—accessibility, affordability, and anonymity—that no one ever has to know. The Internet is an essentially Gnostic, disembodied medium: You can dispense ideas through it, but not sacraments, community, or ­embodiment.

How right he is. Online we allow ourselves to de-personalize people in a way that we are less likely to do when we see this person in all the dimensions of reality: physical, psychological, spiritual.

When we respond to people who may criticize us online it is always important to remember a human being, imago Dei, worthy of both respect and dignity sits on the other side of the screen.