I was in the doctor's office waiting room the other days reading one of those magazines you're likely to find there, and one article caught my eye. It was about the wife who discovered that her husband was coming to bed way after her because he was viewing porn on the internet. Naturally the wife was distressed, but the husband, and as I recall, some outside expert, a therapist or somebody, assured her that it was all innocent. In fact, the discovery prompted the husband and wife to have a frank conversation about the husband's lack of fulfillment in the bedroom. This prompted the wife to spice things up a bit, and now everybody's happy.
Call me skeptical. I'm skeptical that:
- Furtive "one-handed surfing" can be a good conversation starter, and
- The problem is a frigid wife and not a husband who's going outside the marriage looking for sexual gratification (we call that adultery).
Number two is a big problem. What happens when the husband's palate is sated with the increased dose of bedroom spice? Will he return to his laptop for the gratification which always seems to be eluding his grasp in real life?
If your definition of sex is little more than arousal and orgasm, the wife, of course, will never be able to compete with the online pornographic image. The image is always 19-23 years old. Surgically enhanced and airbrushed, she is immune to the ravages of time--saddle bags, gray hair, wrinkles. The image never gets tired, is never irritable, never wakes up with bad breath. The image is utterly at his disposal, 24/7.
But there's more to sex than arousal and orgasm. Sex reinforces and is in turn reinforced by the emotional and intellectual unions between the marriage partners. Sex is a good way to make up after a fight. It is the real "sacrament of reconciliation" for a lot of people. Sex also creates new human beings, and makes parents out of sexual partners. Porn can't really contribute anything to these important dimensions of sexuality, and in fact erodes them.
And we haven't even talked about how the porn industry is rife with drug use, pays people poorly, and subjects them to psychological and at times physical abuse. What could be innocent about that?
Still, even if porn actors and actresses weren't exploited, porn would not be a good or healthy thing. And the reticence to say so in a medical magazine is baffling.
I am aware that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. There's probably not a guy alive in this society who hasn't seen pornography at one time or another, yours truly included. I'm not judging anybody. It's more a matter of pity. I pity guys who treat sex like toothpaste--a product to be bought to satisfy a basic bodily need. And I pity people who make porn--people for whom sex is just a job.
In short, consuming porn is a way to treat people like things, which would seem to be utterly incompatible with the mutuality of a marriage covenant.
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