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The legitimacy of pornography is becoming a major topic in todays media. This essay will explain the implications and ramifications of the topic, what makes it a moral issue, the church's teaching and position and its development over time, as well as a personal response to the issue. Porn, like the poor, has always been with us. Evidence of graphic pornography can be found among the relics of many ancient civilizations. In Roman culture, for instance, erotic paintings dating from the 1 st century A. D.
cover walls in the ruins of volcano-engulfed Pompeii. Pornography was widespread in medieval Europe but found expression mainly in doggerel and satirical verses. The advent of printing in the 15 th century prompted a flood of pornographic literature; many of the texts were filled with the same graphic language, which litters modern-day skin magazines. Still, pornography remained largely limited to "an educated elite, " according to The Invention of Pornography (Zone Books, New York, 1993, edited by Lynn Hunt). (Smut Through the, pg. 27) One of the major problems that many people have with pornography is the accessibility of it.
In our age of mass media and the Internet, pornography is becoming increasingly easy to access. Even with government controls and regulations, pornography is still very accessible to children, using the Internet alone. Pornography takes human sexuality, including love, fidelity, family, and fulfillment, and turns it into a meaningless means for providing pleasure. Pornography displaces love with lust. The fundamental reason that lust is listed as one of the Seven Deadly Sins is precisely that it gives pleasure over the person.
This kind of inversion of proper values is at once unjust to the object who is regarded primarily as an instrument of pleasure. (DeMarco, 2001) Several psychologists, after spending two subsequent decades of research based on the increased production of more explicit and violent forms of pornography, have concluded that brief exposure to violent pornography can lead to anti-social attitudes and behaviour. They have showed that continued exposure to pornography had serious adverse effects on beliefs about sexuality in general and on attitudes towards women in particular. They also found that pornography desensitizes people to rape as a criminal offence. (The Documented Effects, net) With the immense amount of pornographic material that there is available today, it is only inevitable that it will have some social effects. Research has shown that pornography and its messages are involved in shaping attitudes and encouraging behaviour that can harm individual users and their families. In addition, pornography promotes the allure of adultery, prostitution and unreal expectations that can result in dangerous promiscuous behaviour. (The Effects of Pornography, net) Dr. Victor Cline, a clinical psychologist, whose speciality is the treatment of sexual deviancy, believes that the four progressive effects of pornography are: addiction, escalation (leads the person into progressively harder pornography), desensitization, and acting out (fantasizing becomes overt behaviour). (Wekesser, pg. 19) There is a growing debate over whether pornography causes men to hold negative attitudes towards women.
As is the case with soft-core pornography, men bring attitudes to pornography; pornography does not cause men to hold attitudes. There is very little corroborating evidence to suggest pornography, which is sadomasochistic in tone, causes men to view women in a negative light. (Peterson, net) What makes pornography a moral issue today, is that in most cases it brings the person down to a level where they are merely seen as a sexual object. It desensitizes the viewer of the material to basic human emotions such as love, and the viewer of the material is also more likely to lose respect for the human body in general and begin to view it simply as a tool for sexual gratification. The Church has always considered pornography a very immoral and unethical thing.
This is no surprise considering that the Catholic teaching about marriage is based on natural law theory, which makes procreation the primary end of marriage with sexual pleasure clearly secondary. (Cole, pg. 235) According to the church pornography is wrong because its purpose is to share the intimacy that is shared in sex and intended for married couples, to outside parties. Lust goes against all goals and purposes of sex (procreation and love) to achieve physical pleasure. Other offences against the church's stance on chastity that are present and are promoted by pornography are masturbation, fornication, and there are many who believe that it also endorses rape. (Catechism, 2348 - 2354) Since unbridled sex, according to Christianity, is destructive of virtue, and since virtue helps to integrate sex into a stable and loving pattern of human life, pornography thrives on the denial of Christianity, not on its affirmation. Christianity defeats pornography by drawing men and women into Gods plan for human relationships and future happiness in heaven. Erotic sexuality is healthy within marriage and, for Catholics, perfectly acceptable within its procreative context. (Cole, pg. 234) In his Theology of the Body, John Paul II states that lust depersonalizes man, making him an object for the other. Instead of being together with the other subject in unity, in fact, in the sacramental unity of the bogyman becomes an object for man: the female for the male and vice versa.
With lust, the subjectivity of the person gives way to the objectivity of the body. (DeMarco, 2001) The Church's stand on pornography is clear and obvious. The Catholic Church is adamantly against all pornography. Pornography .".. offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other.
It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. " The church's view is that .".. civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials. God has willed that the expression of sexual ideas be within the confines of marriage. No man has the right to violate the will of God, and pornography is a violation of this will. Pornography in the media can blind people to the divine images, the very likeness of God, in the human being. We are made in the image of God, and to portray that image in a perverse and corrupt way for the enjoyment of others is not only immoral, but goes against our human nature and purpose. (Social Issues, net) One well-known theologian, C.
S. Lewis, had this to say on the enslaving power of pornography. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us, because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales- resistance. In his work entitled Allegory of Love, Lewis comments on lust, lust seeks for some purely sexual, hence purely imaginary conjunction of an impossible maleness with an impossible femaleness. The well-known Cristian existentialist also commenting on the enslaving power of lust said, The enslaving of the other, is also the enslaving of the self. By objectification, the subject enslaves itself and creates the realm of determinism. (DeMarco, 2001) My opinion on the topic of pornography is that it is something that can, if it is done tastefully, be a means of artistic expression.
It can be a way of showing the beauty of the human body and as long as it does not portray the person as a sexual object, but merely shows them in a pure and natural state, I do not see a problem with it. I think that in the debate over pornography, people are forgetting that the human body is a beautiful thing and is something that as long as it is not patronized there should not be a problem with displaying it. I also think that the Pornography industry should be enforced and regulated, and that the accessibility of it by nearly everyone, should be reduced to protect children. One of the types of pornography that I simply do not agree with is child pornography.
This form of pornography is a disgrace to human sexuality, and people that produce and view child pornography are the lowest form of sexual deviants and should be punished to the full extent of the law. My opinion on the topic of pornography has not changed much from what it was prior to writing this essay. This is primarily because much of the facts other than the church's position, I had already been aware of and I personally do not base my opinions on that of the church.
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Research essay sample on Sexual Object Child Pornography
