Culture is Everything file

Michael Medved told me a while back, just after my first child was born, that I shouldn't be under the impression that my wife and I could create for our children an environment that would be sufficient to shape their character. He said (and I paraphrase): "You and Julie can do your very best to bring up your children in the right way, but if you don't share the same basic values as the parents of their playmates, a lot of your work will be undone."

So much of the external disorder we see about us today is only the outward manifestation of inward disorder. As Kirk taught, the material order rests upon a spiritual order. A people who are fit to govern themselves externally must first become masters of their personal lives. It is no coincidence that during the Roman Republic, sexual morality was relatively austere -- but during the Empire, especially toward the end, it was a freestyle burlesque. With inner disorder regnant, divorce became common, and social bonds weakened to the point of collapse. It would be inaccurate to say that sexual disorder caused the Roman Empire to collapse, but the personal and communal debilitation that pornography and its effect on the Roman moral imagination definitely played a role.

I mention these two things as a prelude to bringing up this incredible story from today's NYT Magazine. It's about Peter Acworth, a 36-year-old Ivy-educated entrepreneur who has become quite rich by making and marketing online pornography involving people giving and receiving torture for sexual pleasure. His company, Kink, just bought a big historic building in the middle of San Francisco, and makes porn there. The most important thing to note about this story is how porn has become so mainstream that it is no longer the province of Seventies-era greaseballs. It's the kind of thing that well-educated "respectable" careerists become involved in on the business side. Here's the key passage:

[Paul] Cambria, the attorney [for pornographers], says he sees pornographers of all stripes producing material now that they wouldn’t have touched eight or nine years ago. “Maybe many years with no consequences emboldened them,” he told me. “But it may very well have educated the public too, and that plays into the community-standard test.” The longer something is out in the open, and the more you see average people enjoying it, “the more you say, ‘Well, this is a part of America,’ ” he explained. “Familiarity leads to acceptance.”

The porn business, in short, has a community standard of its own. What starts on the fringes works its way to the center. And this affects all of us since, more and more, the center of porn culture has converged with the fringes of popular culture. But Kink’s purchase of the armory represents a quirky quantum leap in the process Cambria describes: taking a real-life fetish traditionally relegated to underground clubs and the ethereal back channels of the Web and moving it directly into a brick-and-mortar landmark in the middle of a city — unabashedly, with the conviction that both it and porn can belong there.

For those who feel that B.D.S.M. porn, or any porn, is toxic and reprehensible, the fact that at least some of it is being produced by thoughtful, educated young people might only be more troubling — a sign of how deep into respectable society it has reached. Then Cambria’s point would be more terrifying still: as such material stitches itself more tightly into the mainstream, through both its consumers and its producers, it strengthens its own legality. It makes itself unobscene.

But Acworth, for his part, seems to find hope in some of the developments of the last decade, signs that some unfortunate misunderstandings are being righted. I asked him what he would think if one day he could walk into Wal-Mart and find racks of constrictive leather corsets. “I think it would be great,” he said. Though at that point, he added, in a world so awash with kinkiness: “I’ll probably stop making money. But I won’t mind that. A life goal will have been completed.”

It makes itself unobscene. There is nothing in our law to prevent pornography -- even sadomasochistic pornography -- from making itself unobscene. Technology assures that. The "community standards" test is meaningless when a porn fiend in Waxahachie can download and view the exact same kinky garbage as a porn fiend in San Francisco, or anywhere else. Our culture of nonjudgmentalism acculturates us to tolerate what we ought to recoil from, even if we don't personally wish to partake. What happens when porn -- even sadomasochistic porn -- becomes unobscene? What happens to women? To men? To children? To the common good?

If history is our guide, at some point, men and women of goodwill will be left with only one course of action: The Benedict Option.