I read an article during lunch about the experience of a man who discovered that his long-absent sister had become a part of the porn industry. The story is heartbreaking, a chronicle of abuse, alienation and later addiction. But what is most illuminating about it is the sense of shame that permeates the depiction, most strongly in the author’s emotions and those demonstrated by the sister in question.
The article is in Marie Claire (no, I don’t read it regularly, it was linked on a social bookmarking site) and makes no reference at all to religion. But the sense that what was happening was wrong, and how it impacted the brother - who found his sister’s secret when looking through a porn magazine in the first place - is significant. It’s the connection that men who tend to look at women as objects need to make - that they are someone’s sister, mother or daughter. Describing the awkwardness of his sister’s attendance at his wedding, the writer relates:
Toward the end of the night, we danced. She seemed surprised when I came to her table and took her hand and led her onto the floor. The DJ was playing a slow song by Otis Redding. As I held my arm around her waist, I could feel her shaking. Then she started to cry.
“What’s wrong?” I said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Look at me,” I said.She looked at me, and for a moment it seemed like she thought I might actually have the answer, the words that would make everything right.
When my sister and I were kids, we played a game we called “Make Me Laugh.” We’d go into the bathroom, and she’d sit in the bathtub and be the audience while I stood in front of the vanity and played the comedian. If I made her laugh, then we had to trade places. I’d usually open with some kind of shtick — an impersonation or a corny joke that would fall flat. After a few minutes I would resort to the one thing I knew would get her: I’d flare my nostrils. She’d kill herself laughing every time.
And so that night, dancing with my sister at my wedding, at a loss for words, I did the only thing I could think of to do. I flared my nostrils. And just like old times, she broke down laughing.
I haven’t seen my sister since that night 10 years ago. I still have the porn magazine with the picture of her inside it. I don’t look at it, not just because of her, but because of every other woman in there. I know that each one of them has a story similar to my sister’s.
What is saddest of all about this story is that there is a definitive lack of hope or resolution. There is no redemption, only sorrow, introspection, and the inevitably lingering question of what went wrong?
It’s the kind of story that terrifies a father. I saw another in a UK news outlet today about a young woman who was brilliant enough to be admitted to Oxford at age 13, but ran away from home and became a high-priced prostitute instead. There are many forces at work in stories like these, but what it ultimately boils down to is the family.
What happens in the family makes all the difference. As a sinful man, this responsibility scares the hell out of me. I know my failings as a husband and father - I’m too easily angered, I am overly critical, I lack patience and at times compassion - and I can only pray that I will not lead my children astray or drive them away. I’ve watched it happen in families where the parents do care, where they adhere to the faith and try to teach the right things. Parenting is an awesome responsibility, and fathers of course hold an integral role. I can’t help but feel like our daughters - especially the very pretty ones - are targets of a sex-hungry culture that wants to commodify and destroy them.
God grant us the grace to preserve them from this fate.
Any proof that pornography and prostitution leads ipso facto to the attendant miseries you describe here? I think it’s equally as plausible that overly repressive morality leads to the shame these women feel, which in turn leads to the drugs and self-destruction. You could say the same thing about the drug war - the artificial, man-made costs of drug use are held up as inevitable outcomes of doing drugs, when in fact they are a product not of drugs but of the drug war itself.
I’ve never been able to understand why people view pornography as, in and of itself, immoral. You talk about the commodification of sex…are tall people “commodified” when they get picked first in a pickup basketball game? Or when they’re asked to reach the top shelf to get a can of Spaghettios by that old lady in the Giant? Of course not.
Capitalism demands the commodification of everything. So while LeBron James gets paid big bucks because he’s tall, can run fast, and shoot a basketball, Jenna Jameson gets paid the same big bucks for looking good naked. The very subject of porn might produce a visceral reaction from some but logically the two jobs are the same - both are rewarded for in-demand traits they were either born with or developed (or surgically received, in both cases).
I guess you’re drawing a red line around sexuality, and I suppose that’s your right. But no mere force of will will ever stop the world’s oldest profession.
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My experiences observing over the years have left a few impressions, which space constrains me to state without the benefit of substantiation:
- Doubtlessly there is much in contemporary culture that a conscientious Catholic cannot endorse or condone. Yet, the more a family feels the need to differentiate itself from and oppose the prevailing culture, the more of a potentially tense situation its children are put in when they do have interactions with their secular peers.
- How they’ll respond in those interactions depends far more on their emotional dispositions towards their parents than any recognition they may have of the truth behind their family’s stand. The things you say of yourself in candor are exactly the kinds of adverse qualities that are apt to negate the good you’re trying to do.
Parents, in the name of principle and culture, being critical to the point of abusiveness and lacking in compassion … this is a path that will lead their children to the Dark Side. You are right to be concerned … but do not make the mistake that I’ve seen others do, only concentrating on upholding the principles but being unmindful about the negativity and harshness with which they do it.
I dare say, from where I find myself now, that children are more apt to be receptive to grace in the long term if raised lovingly with some degree of error in principle than if raised in the truth unlovingly.
Somerset ‘76:
That’s a good point overall–the danger is in emphasizing the negative. What my wife and I try to do is to show something like pr0n as a distortion of a God-given good–in this case, the beauty of the human body and sexuality. But both are to be reserved to a loving relationship between husband and wife.
At least that’s how we explained it when we passed by a topless bar that is near the local post office.