In the America I grew up in, the essence of the standards had to do with restraint in the depiction of sexuality. I would propose that what is more to the point is the spirit with which this sexuality expresses itself.
We could ask ourselves of any actions depicted on the screen, would I feel good if this is how things were between my spouse and me? Would I feel good if he/she felt with me that way, if he/she looked at me that way, if he/she touched me that way? Is the sexual experience being shown one that we’d wish for ourselves or for those we care about?
If the answer is yes, then I say this can be a life-serving thing. To awaken sexuality and to reveal it expressing itself in a good spirit is, I would argue, a good thing.
So there are lines to be drawn: no violence or cruelty. But plenty of eagerness to give pleasure and plenty of being comfortable with one’s sexuality and plenty of excitement and enjoyment and plenty of love and care. (These latter elements are not so rare in today’s pornography.) It would seem that the line between love and cruelty, between the kind and the unkind, is no harder to draw than in human affairs generally.
Would you approve a pornographic –sexually arousing—film that stayed on the right side of that line? Would you agree that seeing two people treating each other in a way that one would hope for, that one would wish for others, helps open us up to a part of the sacred?
The Whole and the Unwhole
Taken as a whole, the pornography we see in our society today has its sickness. But so also does that sexual morality that condemns it. They are both part right and part wrong. That’s the nature of splits. That’s the cost of polarization.
Our culture is very split –unwhole-- in its relation to sexuality, being both lecherous and repressive. It’s a dialogue of unwhole parts: the partial unwholeness that we see in most porno materials is a mirror of sorts reflecting the unwholeness that we have in the realm of sexual morality.
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