Pornographic Imagination

Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.

Camille Paglia

Pornography entered my life at a relatively late age (post-college), but I soon became transfixed by it. Porn’s anarchic depiction of sexuality resonated with me as I began to express my own sexuality in ways that departed from the narrow prescriptions of traditional Christian morality. (Porn also served as a crude but remedial form of sex ed, which I had been denied at my conservative school.) The word itself is transgressive. In Greek, πόρνη (pórnē) and γράφειν (gráphein) mean “writing about prostitutes.”

I’m not supposed to look at it. Officially my denomination states “pornography is sinful.” Consumption of pornography by one in lay ministry is considered a form of sexual misconduct by my synod and subjects the offender to church discipline. Even the threat of sanction doesn’t deter me from watching porn.

Porn exposes the base desires inherent in human sexuality. Watching men and women fuck with impunity on-screen has confirmed for me that sex is untethered to emotional commitment or any other value. It’s all about getting off.

“The selfish trajectories of sexual excitement have been problematic for Christian theology since the time of Augustine,” Arthur J. Mielke writes in Christians, Feminists, and the Culture of Pornography. Feminist literary critic Camille Paglia says that there’s a dark power at work in sexuality which pornography illuminates. Psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller concluded that sexual excitement was rarely generated by love and affection. For feminist theologians, the locus of reflection on sexuality is the relational bond between two people rather than traditional strictures on particular acts. This putatively progressive reimagining of sexual ethics takes a wayward trajectory if relational commitment turns out to be largely irrelevant to sexual desire. As Mielke puts it, pornography’s challenge to theology in both its traditional and feminist expressions lies in its transgressive exposure of raw sexual desire. Pornography “subverts the communicative possibilities of sex, reminding its users that desire is a profligate and faithless master.” The “pornographic imagination” is “an inescapable part of the sin that sex is, whether sanctified by marriage or not.” A “psychodynamically informed Christian theology” must grapple with this reality and recognize that pornography testifies to “deep longings for sexual satisfaction.”

In my encounters with “progressive” or “liberal” Christian sexual ethics, I’m struck by how fundamentally conservative they are. Even ethicists who challenge the traditional paradigm, such as Margaret Farley and James Nelson, emphasize commitment and mutuality as values by which to judge any form of sexual expression. The notion of “sex as gift” is espoused. Susan Sontag countered in her seminal essay on pornography that “sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness.” Sex can easily be experienced as curse. After being expelled from Eden, the first thing Adam and Eve are recorded as doing is fucking (Gen 4:1). One aspect of porn I find fascinating is how joyless it is. Most of it is an endless spasmic succession of cold animalistic motion. Therein lies its appeal. And its power.