Miscella/Fearless Views Miscella/Fearless ViewsWho hasn't visited an Internet porn site at least once? Thing is, inspite of the restrictions that are currently applied on or off the web, pornography still flourishes. And the reason it does is because no legal means will totally eradicate it for lack of a common definition. What is pornography, anyway? When "freedom of expression" is invoked, the term "pornography" becomes nothing more than a label for media publications that some prude has associated with something unacceptable to a respectable society.
Some scholar informs me that the word "pornography" derives from two Greek words -- pornh (pornê) and grafia (graphiâ) -- and etymologically refers to the "writing of prostitutes" The derivation may go back to a time when women of loose living would write letters to their patrons in such manner that these would look for every opportunity to renew a previous encounter. If this is correct, then we go back to the commercial origins of what is now called "pornography."
The Catholic Church describes as pornographic any publication of a very private and intimate act between males and females bound in holy matrimony. Of course, the Church looks at the sexual act as something that properly belongs to the marriage bed and not somewhere else. Those who deny this link between the sex act and marriage is just perverting the nature of God's gift.
The more serious thing about "pornography" -- so Catholic teaching states -- is that it also distorts the way the sex act is presented. The sex act is not only taken out of its matrimonial context, it also presents human beings as nothing more than animals in heat.
When I was a teen-ager, an old priest told me how to discern the difference between something pornographic and something that is not. "If you cannot bear to let your mother and sisters see it," I remember him telling me, "then it is pornographic." The old priest was appealing to my sense of delicacy. I also remember a judge who commented on the question:"What is pornography?" He said: "I may not know the definition of «pornography» but I recognize it when I see it."
A bishop once wrote that the proliferation of pornographic materials in a particular society is an indication that that society is sexually dysfunctional. He may be right. Could it be that both the consumers and producers of pornography and those that encourage them (whether positively or negatively) are sick?
Sex is beautiful. It was one of God's first thoughts (Chapter 1 and early part of 2 in Genesis!). But like all beautiful thoughts, it is bound to be distorted. Beauty is about order and proportion. Dis-order and dis-proportion creates ugliness. I am not thinking here of a Picasso! I am thinking rather of the ugliness that the human heart is capable of making: the dismembered limbs of a land mind explosion, the blood of a teen-ager spilled on the ground where he once played, the innocence of a maiden destroyed by the lust of an old man... Pornography is ugly not because it depicts sex but because of the way it depicts human beings.