The Harm of Porn & the Wound of Beauty
Below is an excerpt of a guest blog post I wrote for the Virtue Ministry blog, which is run by Stina Constantine. To read the full post, feel free to click here. You could also listen to the podcast to which this post is a follow up by clicking the link below.
I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Stina and Fr Sean in an episode of Living Fullness on the various dimensions of pornography.
In that interview, a significant portion of our discussion focused on a tendency within our culture to reduce human persons to abstract characteristics on a list. Long after our discussion was finished and the episode was aired, I am still finding myself thinking about this part of our exploration into pornography, and realised there is a point that I did not cover: the place of beauty in each.
For apart from the purveying of sex (or more accurately, a parody of it), I realised that pornography’s stock and trade is a parody of something else, something more fundamental, to our existence. This is the universal of Beauty.
The philosophers say that every one of us is driven by the search of Goodness, Beauty and Truth. These are the goods that are essential to the proper flourishing of every human person, regardless of race, nation, religion and station in life. Even when we engage in actions that work against our flourishing, we are (even if unconsciously) still doing so with the intention of pursuing one of these three universal goods. What is more, a Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe once suggested that the search for Beauty is what captivates humankind most of all. It is the most sensory of the universal goods, and thus the easiest to access. It also touches us at the deepest level, going to the core of our existence.
No wonder then, that we have such a deep seeded problem with pornography. More fundamentally than our sexuality, pornography intrudes into our search for Beauty, and winds up distorting it. The source of the distortion, I believe, is the fact that…(Read full post at Virtue Ministry)
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