Culture is Everything file

Hideously off-topic, but our good host will find this essay and its companion (just look to the link for Part 1) worthwhile reading: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/267

The Benedict Option isn't some radical break... it's fairly common practice... notice how the 50 percent of Americans who attended church in the 1950s is now below 25 percent... it's within that shrinking percentage... but there's no good defense at the cultural borders... as the data suggests that Desperate Housewives is as popular in the Bible Belt as anywhere else... perhaps most persons are satisfied with a life that excludes the worst obscenities... but partakes of that part that is personally appealing... so the Benedict Option is here and will continue... though smaller amounts of persons will be willing to make their community center around ancient Myths that are mismatches with Reality... there are still many persons of "goodwill" who help to hold our society together... and somehow many of these do so without the baggage of unreasonable ancient Myth...
faith hope love joy peace to all...

The Benedict option is impossible. Any community that tries to carve out a separate culture for itself will come under intense assault from all sorts of directions, and not necessarily intentionally or maliciously. Almost everyone has some overriding principle which they believe is more important than what some little community somewhere wants. And since there's no longer a social moral consensus, that means there are hundreds of competing principles. It's not a matter of left or right, it's about will to power. Everybody is determined to impose their view on everyone else. Monasteries are useless if the masses are willing to put the monks to the sword.

As a San Franciscan, I'm wondering what building Rod is talking about. I have no idea what any of these restrictive leather corsets might look like, but, as a sometime student of costume history, I wonder if they at all resemble the very restrictive whalebone corsets into which women were laced in the 19th and very early 20th century. Was yesterday's beauty style today's sado- masochistic porn in disguise? And in the same vein, when will today's sado-masochistic pornographers bring back Chinese footbinding?

From that UNRV book review Rod linked to: "Clarke tries to connect the West s recent sexual revolution with the one that occurred in imperial Rome. But, he admits, he can t Roman society and its ideas of sex are simply incongruous with what we Moderns have been conditioned to believe, sexual revolution notwithstanding. But that doesn't stop Rod from making the comparison anyway. Hilarious.

It's all about authority, and the aspects of a society (or culture) that impede or contradict authority. The sexual revolution had nothing to do with free sex, or sex without consequences; these results were symptomatic of the immaturity of the participants. The sexual revolution was in fact about rebelling against authority. Instead of complaining that there was (is) no "replacement" for what was "lost" to the sexual revolution, perhaps we could simply look at it on its own level: what is it about sex that causes authority to get its panties in a bunch? [All puns intended.] I think I know the answer. It's the same answer given by dogma through the ages: believe as (royal) we tell you, or be punished. No explanations, no rational discussion. Do it (or don't do it), or be damned to (fill in style of damnation). Some rules are necessary before the individual reaches maturity. Ignorance must be protected until the knowledge that remedies it can be imparted. Maturity, by definition, is when the individual has assimilated the rules, and can make reasoned decisions about those rules from then on. Some rules, then, can never be "expired" as I imply, because even adults will find reasons to break those rules that remain unacceptable. Thus do we define crime. Those things defined as crimes that shouldn't be, such as sexual behaviors (I do not, I hope it is assumed, include rape in this statement), then beg the question: who is being harmed (besides authority)? Pornography is an excellent example of that. Some pornography has victims. Some does not. Which type is outlawed can be a good clue as to who is in charge, and how much they love being in charge.

Nastiness certainly does reign. Wow. Thanks for the effort Rod.

Franklin, have you read Philip Rieff on the subject of sexuality and culture? He was one of the leading interpreters of Freud, and was mostly sympathetic to father of psychoanalysis. But Rieff also saw the sociological implications for throwing off restraints on human sexuality.
You don't have to be a religious believer (Rieff was not) to understand that civilization is only possible with chastity ("chastity" defined not as avoiding sex, but making right use of it). That is, if human sexuality were not governed by taboos, moral norms and positive laws, you'd have anarchy. You can't have total involuntary repression of the sex instinct -- that way lies madness. But you can't have complete freedom either. A practical example: I was a kid when the sexual revolution hit my small town in the 1970s. As a grammar school student, I was confronted with the first time by the social effect of sexual anarchy among the black population of my town (my town was half white, half black by population). A startling number of my black classmates didn't know who their fathers were, and had siblings by different fathers. They lived in relative or absolute poverty. As I moved toward adolescence, I noticed that some of my black female classmates got pregnant. I also noticed that there was no taboo against this in the local black community.
Interestingly, I don't much recall ever talking about it with my classmates. We just "knew" that white people didn't do that. Of course white people did do that, but sexual license was still frowned upon, and pregnancy outside of wedlock was really taboo. Anyway, the social attitudes toward sex and sexuality within the black community cannot be separated from their lack of economic progress, to say nothing of the social instability that results from widespread fatherlessness. I've observed too going back to visit my hometown over the past 30 years that the sexual taboos that used to govern the white community have significantly eroded, with predictable results for the (white) children of my generation. Another story: a friend of mine in Dallas used to be close to a black pastor who has become pretty well known here (he's not T.D. Jakes, but he's in that category). When that pastor and his wife started their Dallas church, they opened their home to schoolchildren from the community, so the kids would have a place to go after school and not get into trouble. The pastor and his wife thought they'd be able to provide a place for the kids to do their homework while supervised, but what they found was that the kids were coming over and ... sleeping. Turns out that these poor kids were getting little sleep at night. Their parents -- well, their mothers; their dads were absent -- were up partying all night with new boyfriends. The kids were living in seriously disordered social situations, in homes where the grown-up in charge paid more attention to her sex life than her children's needs.
The white middle-class version of this you often see with the children of divorce.
You're right, Franklin, to point out that rules governing sexuality are about authority. But humankind requires order to live. We have been able to tolerate sexual disorder in this middle-class society since the 1960s because of our relative prosperity, which shields us from the worst of the natural consequences of violating those taboos. But consequences there are, and we are diminishing ourselves and depleting our social capital by continuing to push the bounds of the sexual revolution by doing things like mainstreaming pornography, and throwing off all restraint.

http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/anonymous-christian-complaint.php?page=1

I'd also point out that apart from Rod's say-so, divorce & fatherless children in the black community and the wider availability of pornography have no neccessary connection with each other. But whatever.

The strength of Rieff's arguments, even if (like me) one falls short of agreement on aspects like Freud, is that he takes a gestalt perspective and attempts to describe the dynamic, not the picture. The mistake most people make, and I write this with much respect for the opinions expressed here and elsewhere -- because I think we should be cooperating in making our children happy and sane members of our society, not arguing about it -- is in focusing on the picture and projecting it much beyond that moment in time, whether past of future. For example: I was born in 1956. I grew up seeing and hearing all about the ubiquitous "free love" floating about for the taking, and with increasing frustration wondering if some nefarious source had huge fans surrounding me blowing it out of my reach. I got to college very much clueless amongst a more sophisticated group of peers. I also had the first love of my life there, and I don't mind saying that it was as rich and full a relationship as any older pair could have. We saw a vast amount more than a sexual partner when we looked at each other. Sorry for the ramble. My personal point is that we spend too much time cautioning/warning/frightening our children about sex, and not enough time demonstrating to them that sex is just one aspect of an enormous universe of relationships. I drag out the cliche, because I don't know of a better way of emphasizing the point: any parent of a teenager knows, the more you tell them "no", the more they want to try it at least once, and may continue it despite not liking it, just because we said "no". We don't give our adolescents anywhere near enough credit for intelligence and the capacity for rational thought. It's not abstinence that I find ridiculous, it's the notion that we can expect them to abstain whilst witholding information from them with which to come to the conclusion that abstinence is the best course. It's been too many years since I read anything by Rieff, so if he was the one who said this, forgive my lack of attribution: the only "cure" to instinct is knowledge. The rational mind needs all the help it can get in reining in the impulses; coercion and external authority have no chance on their own, unless backed up with tyrannical use of force. I don't know anyone (whose opinions about which I find anything to respect) who thinks that brute force is the right way to raise children. Why, then, think to resort to it even as an expedient measure in a specific area?

Culture, indeed, is everything.
My idea of the good society is one where few things are criminal and lots of things are strongly taboo. We badly need more shame in this society. It distresses me that Acworth is a Columbia PhD and that his marketing guy went to Harvard. In fact, it distressed me enough that I just gave some money to an organization called Christian Union, whose objective is to extend Christ's kingdom within the Ivy League. It's one of the most important and highly desirable ministries out there IMHO. http://involve.christian-union.org/site/PageServer

Conversely, isn't there damage and problems that arise by sexual repression? Tovart, of course. That isn't our problem currently, but it once was and will be again. Perfection is kind of out of reach, huh. Re commute, luckily we moved our offices from San Francisco to the East Bay where we live a few years ago, so if all else fails we can WALK, and how crunchy is that huh? Very wise observations, Franklin. Needless to say I completely agree. I was born in 1945, and I was a hippie back in the day, in the Haight, yadda yadda, and what they say is true: if you really remember what happened you probably weren't there. We went to an anniversary party for friends from back then this weekend, and they had a picture of me and my hippie husband at their wedding 40 years ago, and we stood astonished. (We beat them getting married by 6 months or something.) Honest, we look like we're 15 years old. Nevertheless, and in spite of behavior I won't even begin to describe, we're all still here, we're all grandparents now, and the world really didn't end. It won't this time around either.

I'm going to say this and call it a night: Susan. Franklin, I'm glad you turned out ok, and hope your kids do too. But an awful lot of that rebellion in the 1960s got us nothing but cltural heratburn. Free love turned into casual and meaningless sex. Questioning of authority turned into rejection of all authority and truth. Experimentation with drugs gave us a drug culture.
I don't see the world ending, here, folks, but there is a lot of cultural bankruptcy out there. How are my daughters supposed to reconcile a feminist message with a popular culture that tells her looks are the only thing that matters?
Culture is damaging because right now much of it is dehumanizing, period. And that is a judgement right and left can share. Some Ivy Leaguer is entitled to make all the porn he wants. It's not illegal, I don't know that we can (or should) make it so. We might have to tolerate it, but that does not mean we can't campaign against it.
Once our culture loses all sense of shame, what's left?

I can't understand the difference in people's attitudes between recreational sex and recreational drugs. Erin, I think casual sex is much more dangerous than most recreational drugs. However. Reality is reality, whether we like it or not.
My children will testify that I was a tireless crusader against casual sex, indeed, any sexual activity at all before marriage, in season and out of season.
At the same time I recognize that when people are adults (18 is now, unfortunately, regarded as adulthood) they will do as they think best, and very often they will do things we heartily wish they wouldn't.
I did things my parents certainly wished I hadn't done, and I came to agree with them, and to regret some of that. I was lucky, and no (or, not much) lasting harm came of it in my case. My kids too have been lucky if not always wise, at least so far, and they're all past the wacky age now.
Drugs, more of the same. If you think your kids aren't going to experiment with alcohol and marijuana, I don't know what planet you're living on, but it's not here on earth with the rest of us. A certain number of kids will die or be seriously injured because of alcohol; fewer, but not none, because of marijuana. Still, again, most kids are lucky if not wise, and survive this too. In fact weed won't hurt them much, and LSD won't either, probably. Possibly because I was kind of free and easy on this topic, illegal drugs never interested any of my kids particularly, though of course there was a little experimentation here and there.
Sex is more dangerous, of course, because even if you "get away" with it casual sex does damage to the personality. I'm not sure where we're going with this discussion. Does everyone here over the age of 25 (which I think is everyone) agree that young people (and older people too) would be better off without sexual sin and/or illegal drug usage? I think so. Does everyone here realize that sometimes you can't control what your children do? I hope so. I just don't think any of this is an indicator that The World Is Coming To An End. Most people survive these regrettable experiments, and almost all children who experience the love of their parents come very soon to appreciate and share their parents' values, especially the values we illustrate in our own lives.
I still don't see my way clear to running off and joining a monastery.

OK, Rod, but what community? Are you thinking, like the Amish? That's pretty insular, yes? And what happens to the kids as they grow up? Some Amish kids stay home, but some don't, and the ones who leave are ill suited for productive life in the larger society.
Smaller and newer groups have even more of this problem. Do the kids go to public schools? Then they're taking baths in the culture just like everyone else, and need protection from that. That's not withdrawal, that's life in the big city as we live it right now. Do they go to private schools? Private colleges? Do they ever go out and get jobs in the larger culture? I'm all for living the life of virtue, and I'm all for community, but withdrawal strikes me as unrealistic. Remember, Ben's monks could withdraw because they could (and did) grow their own food (the economy was in collapse anyhow, so they'd probably have had to do that in any case) and they didn't have children.

So how's Tom Monaghan's Catholic Never-never-land project coming along these days anyway?

Oh, and please don't tell me that things are so much worse now. They aren't.

That's Peter Kreeft, by the way, not me. Sorry for the omission.

Starrs, take a deep breath please. The following is about statistics, not about your passionate POV. Polls are, to borrow your word, bullshit. Surveys of actual events, numbers (per capita and actual) of crimes (for example), and attempts to measure the number of crime victims who did not report their crimes, tend to contradict such polls. I was in high school once. If you'd polled me in the early 70s, I'd have put my social life at the top of the problems list. I'd likely not have thought of the girl I liked who died of anorexia, or the girl I didn't like and helped trash both her personality and her "reputation" completely undeservedly. In those same 70s, I didn't just hear stories about kids bringing guns and knives to school. I saw them. We all knew why Susie (about 20 times per year, as I recall) "moved away", and that she wasn't just gaining weight. Boys boasted, and we knew they weren't lying when we saw the girl they boasted about break into tears and run away when she saw him. It hasn't changed at all, except for where it happens and how often it gets media attention. I can trot out an endless stream of people who can prove, with their own bodies, that things were not better then, not for them. Sixth grade girls were giving oral sex and fantasizing about sex just about forever... and I feel just as safe in saying that, Mr. Mills, as you do telling others whether they are "qualified" to speak about this subject. Things are, good, bad and in between. Those who claim they know the reasons for better or worse, please provide proof. Your anecdotal perspective does not qualify, sorry.

Some rules are necessary before the individual reaches maturity. Ignorance must be protected until the knowledge that remedies it can be imparted. This is an excellent statement.
How to protect that ignorance--or innocence--until the right moment, though? And at what point does one say that a child has achieved an appropriate level of maturity? 15 year old girls used to be considered marriageable once upon a time. It seems to me there has hardly ever existed a parent of a girl who didn't worry about what would happen when that innocence finally beaches itself on the dry sand of reality... So Rod, Medved is 100% right. It's worse with girls than with boys though. Already at the tender age of 5, they want to know why they can't have--and dress like--a Bratz doll. (For those unfamiliar with them, they're kinda like assistant-crack-wh*re Barbie...) Why are these so popular with kids this young??? Might just as well ask why they make thong underwear for young kids. Obviously, people buy them for their young daughters... So with porn, it's a chicken/egg question: does being inundated with it cause people to change their standards of what is acceptable, or has our insatiable consumerism created the void that porn and porn lite are more than happy to fill? Or both?

Starrs wrote: Things are a heck of a lot worse from almost any angle: a generation ago, the five most bothersome problems complained about in polled American high schools were: 1. disrespect for property 2. laziness; not doing homework 3. talking/no attentionin class 4. throwing spitballs 5. leaving doors/windows open Wrong. Urban Legend.
The Discipline List is an education statistic so compelling that it has taken on a life of its own. It's been cited by university presidents, politicians and religious leaders. The only problem is that it's not true. It's a mythical list of discipline problems teachers faced in schools during the 1940s. The biggest concerns at that time were said to include chewing gum in class, making noise and not putting paper in wastebaskets.
The 1980s brought a startling change. Last decade's problems were of a different sort: rape, robbery, assault and suicide, to name a few.
The list is said to be based on research, and its implication is obvious. Schools in our parent's days were idyllic and free from problems. Now they're battle zones.
Lots of citings
The list has been cited by people all over the political map, including the Rev. Billy Graham, former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, Barbara Bush and Rush Limbaugh. Former New York City education commissioner Joseph Fernandez cited the list as a reason for radically reforming schools.
Yale University management professor Barry O'Neill was also taken by the list when he first saw it posted on a faculty bulletin board. But when he tried to find its source, he got lost.
Many people who used the list said it came from the California education department. Others simply quoted articles where the list was mentioned. Portions of the list have appeared in Harpers Magazine, Reader's Digest and Dear Abby and Ann Landers, both of which appear in the Dallas Morning News.
Finding the author
Dr. O'Neill eventually tracked the supposed list of discipline problems to former Fort Worth businessman T. Cullen Davis. The multimillionaire was arrested in the 1976 slayings of his ex-wife's lover and daughter. After his acquittal, he became an evangelical Christian and began opposing sex education and the teaching of evolution in Fort Worth schools. He wrote the list in the early 1980s, not as a hoax, but as an argument for how schools have declined.
"He never intended it to be anything more than his opinion," said Dr. O'Neill, who has spoken to Mr. Davis. "It's really other people along the way who made up the scientific proof."
The associate professor said he doesn't think schools are any more dangerous than in the past, but he understands the appeal of the list. "Sometimes our emotions get disguised as facts," he said. "It's an anxiety not only about the state of our society, but an anxiety about how we've done with our children."
http://www.snopes.com/language/document/school.htm

Thank you Jaybird.

Ted, Only 20 years teaching? So you're what, 45? Ya don't know nothing. Wait a few years, you might wise up.

I'm a twenty year veteran teacher, so therefore I AM eminently more qualified to speak. Fascinating. I graduated from a Catholic high school in 1987. Sex, drugs and rock and roll were very well represented at my high school in the 1980s. If you'd bother to actually look at the relevant statistics, rates for drug use, pregnancy, and violence among teens are now actually below what they were 20 years ago. But why let the facts get in the way of your self-righteous fit of moral outrage? http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040716-112029-6751r.htm

I can't say I believe in sexual sin, but I do believe that sex is usually its own punishment.

Rod, what is sin? And then, what is sexual sin? If you intend to quote or cite Scripture, I strongly request that you couch it in contemporary and general terms. Despite my fully disclosed aversion to dogma, you may be surprised. My point is full circle to what I wrote about adolescents: talk about sin all you like, but the more arbitrary you sound and are about it, the less likely it will sink in where it can do the most good. I don't really mean for you to answer those questions for me, I (with admittedly some arrogance) intend you to answer it for your children. Don't tell, teach.

Rob, can you give an example or two of what you've observed regarding this concern/lack-of-concern dichotomy you describe? I confess to a low-grade "if he means me, them's fightin' words" feeling, and I know you too well to succumb to it. Maybe I'm just being extra dense this morning, I dunno.

No, Franklin, I certainly don't have you or your type of 'liberal' in mind. I was thinking more of the Hollywood types, who get their knickers in a twist about global warming and the environment, etc., but don't seem to care for a minute about, for instance, that cultural sewer which is the popular entertainment industry.

There is an excellent article over at salvomag.com called Porn in the USA: Examining our national addiction" " that details the extent of the problem. As sex becomes a commodity, and is disassociated from faith, commitment, and parenthood, it rips a hole in our communities - and when community fails, society fails, and the values that crunchycons hold dear fade as well.

Rob, The consistent comment from nearly every filmmaker and critic interviewed on-camera was: we get that sex needs to be monitored, but what we don't get is that sex is somehow going to be more damaging to our children than violence. JHudson, Sex is a "commodity" only in the explicit sex industry. Another consistent comment, especially when an actor in the movie was also on-camera (Mario Bello of "The Cooler" was quite erudite), was that sex between people who are obviously in love and in a committed relationship (and they also agreed: this is not in all the sex scenes) seemed to be more "objectionable" than rape scenes (the violence angle), and the "worst" sex scenes had some explicit, orgasmic expression by one or both participants. To be pithy: moans of pleasure are more obscene than bullets and blood, to the MPAA. How about violence as a commodity, ser Hudson? I offer you all the space you want to show your opinion of that, with the following example that opened my eyes watching the documentary: so long as there is no blood, hundreds of bullets and bodies falling everywhere is considered acceptable by the MPAA for children to watch. Cartoon violence is okay, but the very real consequences of violence are not okay. [general comment] Put that in your Columbine pipe and smoke it, because it was scenes of violence and not scenes of sex that inspired those murderers, and actual scientific studies by mental health professionals show a direct causal link between violent media and violent behavior. I need to do some personal research on that last one (as well as what follows) before I let it stand as an assertion. One thing I encourage in everyone: never take statistics for granted. Examine the citations, and dismiss the claims out of hand if the sources look suspicious, or as in the case of early claims that sex in the media prompts sex in real life, when there is in fact no such statistics to back it up.

Sex is a "commodity" only in the explicit sex industry. Another consistent comment, especially when an actor in the movie was also on-camera (Mario Bello of "The Cooler" was quite erudite), was that sex between people who are obviously in love and in a committed relationship (and they also agreed: this is not in all the sex scenes) seemed to be more "objectionable" than rape scenes (the violence angle), and the "worst" sex scenes had some explicit, orgasmic expression by one or both participants. To be pithy: moans of pleasure are more obscene than bullets and blood, to the MPAA. The sex industry wouldn't exist to the tune of several billion dollars unless someone was purchasing the materials, or was involved in its production. None of what you have said here diminishes the fact that it is a growing problem. How about violence as a commodity, ser Hudson? I offer you all the space you want to show your opinion of that, with the following example that opened my eyes watching the documentary: so long as there is no blood, hundreds of bullets and bodies falling everywhere is considered acceptable by the MPAA for children to watch. Cartoon violence is okay, but the very real consequences of violence are not okay. [general comment] Put that in your Columbine pipe and smoke it, because it was scenes of violence and not scenes of sex that inspired those murderers, and actual scientific studies by mental health professionals show a direct causal link between violent media and violent behavior. You have no idea how I feel about violence as a commodity, so I am not sure what you are talking about here. It's not a mutually exclusive consideration. In fact, I would contend they are related; disrespect of individuals to satisfy one's purient interests inspires the production of pornography as it does the violence that pervades our media. Indeed, if such scenes can inspire violence, why would not overtly sexualized media affect one's view of sexuality? Follow your own logic. I need to do some personal research on that last one (as well as what follows) before I let it stand as an assertion. One thing I encourage in everyone: never take statistics for granted. Examine the citations, and dismiss the claims out of hand if the sources look suspicious, or as in the case of early claims that sex in the media prompts sex in real life, when there is in fact no such statistics to back it up. Actually, it's not the actual sex that is of the greatest concern, but the effect on relationships.

The sex industry wouldn't exist to the tune of several billion dollars unless someone was purchasing the materials, or was involved in its production. None of what you have said here diminishes the fact that it is a growing problem. I'm asking for an acknowledgement that the "sex industry" consists of XXX porn, escort and "massage" services, and the like; it does not include the movies made by the independents and major studios... unless you'd like to dispute that, of course. As you note, I am ignorant of much of your opinions.

Liberals and conservatives both have a problem with porn. It s much too complicated for a brief post, but I ll try to make this as brief as I can. For liberals, the limiting factor on behavior is, as long as nobody is getting coerced or hurt. (And when I say hurt, I mean in their own estimation--not in the view of a paternalistic onlooker who would say ah, but I must save you from the harm you are doing to your soul even though you don t acknowledge it. ) However, even though liberal eyes may be open to the ways in which workers are coerced by economic necessity to consent to harmful labor conditions, they don t always see the ways in which society s constraints enforce women s consent to pornification against their will. And they re not necessarily willing to have that discussion, out of fear that they might end up having to agree with social conservatives in limiting some forms of what they now view as personal expression --such as porn. Conservatives also have a major problem in dealing with porn. For them, harm to another person is not necessarily a limiting factor. Many apparently will accept damage without limit to other people (e.g. torture, civilian deaths in war, the death penalty) as long as it can be justified by traditionalist moral theory. Pornography isn t justifiable on those terms--but traditional dominance hierarchies are, particularly as they relate to women s subordination to men and restriction of female access to public roles and public power. Conservatives decry pornography and open sexual expression because it threatens social control. (And they try to conflate the two, in order to discredit all openness to sexual expression as porn. ) Yet they tacitly support soft-pornification of women through advertising and fashion, and have traditionally scorned and resisted women s efforts to claim equality with men. The essay referenced by trotsky in the first comment above is highly relevant to this discussion. Dominance structures objectify everything. Employers objectify workers, treating them as headcount, resources to be exploited, used up, and then dumped. Producers objectify animals, treating them as walking food products. The introduction of a dominance and subordination structure into relationships between men and women inevitably results in objectification of women and eroticization of power. As long as this is the case, you ll never be able to get rid of pornography. Only re-defining erotic love as a mutual exchange between equal partners will eliminate the assumptions on which pornography is predicated. And this is a step conservatives aren t willing to take. So pornography remains a ubiquitous though unspoken presence--viewed with alarm when it becomes too visible for comfort, tacitly tolerated as long as it s conveniently out of public sight. Here s a quote from Adrienne Rich: Even so-called soft-core pornography and advertising depict women as objects of sexual appetite devoid of social context, without individual meaning or personality: essentially as a sexual commodity to be consumed by males. . . . The most pernicious message relayed by pornography is that women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. Pornography does not simply create a climate in which sex and violence are interchangeable, it widens the range of behavior considered acceptable from men in heterosexual intercourse--behavior that reiteratively strips women of their autonomy, dignity, and sexual potential . . . . One further thought: if men, or even the majority of men, wanted pornography to cease to exist, it would cease. This isn t some generalized problem of our society. It s something that men do to women for their own pleasure. Perhaps this is a conversation men need to be having with each other.

"Conservatives decry pornography and open sexual expression because it threatens social control. (And they try to conflate the two, in order to discredit all openness to sexual expression as porn. ) Yet they tacitly support soft-pornification of women through advertising and fashion, and have traditionally scorned and resisted women s efforts to claim equality with men." Not sure which conservatives you're speaking of here, Sig, but it certainly describes no one in my circles. I despise the fact that the advertising and fashion industries objectify women -- they know that "sex sells" and that's all that matters. To hell with society and the culture, their wallets are full, right? "Pornography isn t justifiable on those terms--but traditional dominance hierarchies are, particularly as they relate to women s subordination to men and restriction of female access to public roles and public power." Sorry, but this is feminist gobbledygook. Hierarchies do not necessarily imply dominance, for one thing. And Conservatives, in any case, don't reject the idea than men and women are equal; what we reject is the notion that they're interchangeable. That's a big difference.

Thanks for your comment, jhudson. When I said "without limit," I was thinking that killing someone is pretty much taking harm past all limits. I've heard conservatives known to me personally say things like "We should withdraw our troops and bomb the hell out of Baghdad!" Since this would result in indiscriminate mass casualties, I would think of it as not being limited. However, I do acknowledge that most conservatives try to maintain some limits to aggression and consider their traditions as imposing some limitations. So if you were reminding me of that, you were right in doing so! We could debate how much conservatives "drive" fashion and advertising. They don't run the ad agencies, but don't they run many of the corporations that pay for the ad campaigns? And if you take a look at high-end luxury ads targeted at people with a lot of money . . . well, you don't see wealthy conservatives threatening to boycott Forbes magazine because it uses sex to sell cars, liquor and jewelry. Conservatives relentlessly mock women who appear in public and don't live up to the standards of appearance of, say, Ann Coulter. Degrading women based on their lack of public sex appeal is certainly a by-product of porn culture. It reinforces the idea that women's primary function is to be sexually attractive, and if they balk at this, they must be punished into submission. These are the kinds of things I had in mind.

Focusing on porn is, if you'll excuse the expression, a waste of time. Sorry, Franklin, but I'm afraid I disagree with you about that. I see porn as something like the Gulf Stream--in flows in and under the media ocean, creating a massive though not always visible feedback system. I think there's a clear interaction between what goes on in the mainstream media and what's happening the porn underworld. Porn is billion-dollar business--how could the media possibly be ignoring what this tells them about their target audience? Minor case in point: I love the series "Heroes." In last night's episode, I wasn't too happy to find that one of the early scenes is set in a strip club where a main character is pole dancing. I'd nearly been put off the whole series when, in the first show, that character is portrayed as a single mom who makes money by doing soft-core web porn out of her garage--even though this made little sense logically. But it gave the producers a chance to exploit her body and titillate their target audience. In addition, how do you ignore the harm done to the women who work in the sex industry? They're part of society too.

We could debate how much conservatives "drive" fashion and advertising. They don't run the ad agencies, but don't they run many of the corporations that pay for the ad campaigns? And if you take a look at high-end luxury ads targeted at people with a lot of money . . . well, you don't see wealthy conservatives threatening to boycott Forbes magazine because it uses sex to sell cars, liquor and jewelry. Conservatives relentlessly mock women who appear in public and don't live up to the standards of appearance of, say, Ann Coulter. Degrading women based on their lack of public sex appeal is certainly a by-product of porn culture. It reinforces the idea that women's primary function is to be sexually attractive, and if they balk at this, they must be punished into submission. These are the kinds of things I had in mind. At best, the fashion industry can probably be considered apolitical; simply because their are rich people fueling it, it doesn't mean those wealthy people are 'conservative' (Paris Hilton anyone?) And though a conservative, it's beeen awhile since a perused the pages of Forbes; but I don't remember their ads as being particularly lurid (and I did a quick peek at their website to confirm this). Either way, I agree that women can be objectified sexually in ads, and that this is wrong; saying that it is wrong is neither a consevative nor liberal position.

In the end I think the disagreement boils down to fundamental differences in our views of sexuality - for us Catholics, at least, sex is a 'sacramental' act (little "s") that mirriors the life of the Holy Trinity. Sex is therefore a profoundly *religious act*. Messing with a religious act (sex outside of marriage, masturbation, etc.) is gravely wrong in itself. Even if one doesn't divorce or subject one's children to a broken family, therefore, the acts themselves hold grave consequences. In other words, you can't necessarily measure the effects from the outside.

I've watched this thread with interest. Mostly from the perspective that porn is all about other people's sex. Of course anti-porn is also about other people's sex. Is that silly or what?

Sig, I guess that my objection would be that I don't believe that 'authority' and 'dominance' are the same thing, especially Christianly speaking. A priest may have authority over his congregation but does he necessarily 'dominate' it? When a policeman pulls me over he may have authority, but does he have dominance? As Wendell Berry argues in 'Standing by Words,' hierarchies are inevitable, and the problem is not with hierarchy per se but with abusive or unjust hierarchy. In my opinion feminists overcorrect by attempting to discount the very idea of hierarchy instead of dealing with unjust manifestations of it. 'when I look at the different but equal version of men and women, I m afraid all the differences add up to something that seems to me indistinguishable from inequality.' Depends on what exactly one means by "equal," right? I'd say that the equality needed would entail equality before God and equality under the law. But I also believe that women and men are fitted for different tasks biologically, emotionallly and psychologically and that these differences should not be overlooked in discussions of equality.

Again I think you are attempting to posit mutual exclusivity where none exists. I held off on responding to this, and a good thing that was. Rob's contribution got me to concede this point. I thinking back on my motivations for writing on this thread, I believe we are looking for the same conclusion, albeit from very different starting points. My question next would be: are we seeing this "pornification" from the outside, or the inside? Is it because of demand, or because we are not being offered anything else (implying a form of coercion)? A very cynical thought hit me just now: those of us here debating the finer points of the issue are very much in the minority. The every-increasing tide of sex and violence in media is being consumed by the vast majority of our fellow citizens who don't seem to be bothered by either the phenomenon or the principles behind it. We may be disagreeing on details here, but we really are all members of a very small and exculsive choir. Maybe we should recognize the we are preaching to the wrong audience.

My question next would be: are we seeing this "pornification" from the outside, or the inside? Is it because of demand, or because we are not being offered anything else (implying a form of coercion)? This is a great question, Franklin. In fact, it's sort of the crux of the issue, isn't it? If you think Desperate Housewives is smut, you have the power to turn it off...in theory, anyway.
Part of the problem is that many of us are attached by an umbilical, as it were, to the ol' boob tube. (That is, when we're not attached by an umbilical to Rod's blog?) If we were to pull up our collective trousers and refuse to watch this mind-numbing garbage, who knows what effect it would have...

For the record, I found Desperate Housewives to be completely derivative under a thin veneer of titillation, a standard soap opera with better production values. I won't watch it if I were paid to do so. But then, commercial TV watching is less than 5% of my viewing time, a large part of which is DVD or VHS with the cable box turned off.

I like your answer, too, Rob. I think ratio, you and I should band together and open an advertising shop that offers culturally constructive marketing campaigns to company execs who would at least like to look like they have a social conscience.

Ratio, we are off to the races. I'll check in on your blog from time to time.