Redeeming Technology, Part 4: Sexuality
What happens to a culture when pornography is one click away?
In our attempt to offer a Christian critique of our technological age, we are exploring the three areas most impacted by the technology of our making. Having explored the consequences upon community and mentality, we turn our attention to sexuality.
I want to examine the technological destruction of human sexuality in three ways: self, sex, and society.
Self
Proverbs 9 offers a fitting picture of the alluring nature of online pornography, "The woman of folly is loud, she sits at the door of her house calling out to all who pass by, 'Let all who are simple come in, stolen water is sweet, food eaten in secret is delicious…but little do they know that the dead are there, that her guests are in the depths of the grave."
This is the essence of sexual pleasure within the virtual world of technology. It is an enticing, hidden space of promised pleasure that ends in a symbolic grave. The temptation of pornography has always been much more than physical gratification of sexual urges. Pornography expertly exploits the unmet longings of the human heart.
It offers a world where the user is no longer insecure but gets to fantasize about being the dominant man or the desirous woman; the user is not lonely but vicariously feels wanted, even worshiped; the user is not bored and discontent with the demands of a mundane and frustrated life but is endlessly stimulated; the user is no longer ashamed because shame is normalized. Therein is the true power of pornography. Not merely the satisfaction of physical urges but the deeper longings of the soul. But this pornographic fantasy was once limited to the fringes of societal life. Now, technology has created a pornified virtual reality for endless over-indulgence.
But the cruelty of this virtual world is that though it promises to satisfy our shared longings, it only deepens them. In this way, pornography acts the same as any powerful drug. Empty promises, quick dopamine experience, but in the end, never fulfilling. Thus, the user returns to the drug's empty promises until trapped in the downward cycle of addiction, ending in a proverbial grave. That comparison is not an overstatement. Researchers have found striking similarities between the brains of both drug and porn addicts. Only this addiction is not a destruction of the body but the soul.
Sex
Ironically, the proliferation of virtual sex is leading to the degradation of actual sex. The pornography epidemic is parasitic. It feeds off the goodness of God's glorious gift of sex while twisting it into something unrecognizable from its original design.
In the early 2000s, feminist Naomi Wolf was ahead of her time in sounding the alarm on the rise of online pornography. She contended that the ubiquity of pornography, far from liberating sex, would eventually subjugate sex to an artificial screen. Contrary to fears that a pornified society would yield ravenous sexual appetites, Wolf argued the opposite. She predicted deadened libido and an increasingly impotent society, “After all, how can real people possibly compete with cyber visions of perfection utterly tailored to the consumer's specification? Real naked people are just bad porn."
When we consider the rise of early erectile dysfunction, oversexualized youth culture desperately trying to compete with pornographic insinuations, the sharp decline, not just in marriage but in actual sexual activity, it is obvious she is being proven true.
As an anecdotal account of this phenomenon, consider the example of John Mayer, a famous and wealthy musician who has dated many supermodels and even Taylor Swift. And yet, heed his haunting words from a vulnerable interview ironically (or fittingly) with Playboy magazine:
Internet pornography has absolutely changed my generations expectations. I have unbelievable orgasms alone. They are always the best. Once I have to deal with someone else's desires, I cut and run. When I'm with somebody, I'm in a situation I can't control, because another person's needs are involved.
The interviewer asks him to clarify, "Are you saying masturbation for you is as good as sex?" He replies:
Absolutely. During sex I'm just running a filmstrip of porn in my mind.
I'm still masturbating. That's what you do when you're a part of my generation. So rather than meet someone new, I would just rather go home and have my own amazing experience. I am more comfortable in my own imagination than I am in actual human discovery.
This is what technology is doing to sexuality. We are perverting God's design for sex as a self-sacrificial act of mutual pleasure into a twisted, narcissistic ritual. Real flesh and blood naked humans are losing their appeal because they are demanding, unlike the technological reality of pornography, which has no demands except that my needs are met.
Society
The ubiquity of pornography's public harm is difficult to quantify. There is much research we could point to—the rising market for human trafficking, sexualization of youth culture, degradation of marriage as an institution, the proven connection between pornography consumption and violence—however, let's consider the two major social issues that have dominated public discourse the past few years.
I applaud the #metoo movement along with our culture's newfound awareness of sexual predation, but it is shocking how little attention is given to online pornography's role in the abuse epidemic. Nearly every organization and institution has had its #metoo reckoning and exposure, except the very institution that is training us in the ways of sexual assault.
The percentage of online pornography that depicts sexual violence and aggression is staggering. Who is meeting the demand for this exploitative content? Odds are your neighbor, coworker, family, or perhaps, you. Then, with minds trained according to pornified liturgies, consumers enter the real world with debauched desires and demands. If we are serious about advocating for abuse survivors, then we should probably turn our ire toward the very industry profiting from and perpetuating sexual abuse.
The other social concern at the forefront of public discussion is, of course, racial justice. In the aftermath of George Floyd, every individual and institution underwent an important evaluation. But, again, the noticeable exception is the pornography industry. While the rest of society wrestles with complicity in hidden racist motives, structural and systemic racism, covert racial injustice, and so forth, pornographers continue to participate and profit in overt, undeniable, wicked racist fantasies. As Dr. Carolyn West, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Washington, notes, "Over the years, thanks in part to the civil rights activists, overt examples of racism that were once commonplace in mainstream media have become less acceptable. Yet, hidden behind the facade of fantasy and fun, porn delivers racist stereotypes that would be considered unacceptable were they in any form of mass-produced media."
The only part of social life immune from our country's racial reconning is pornography. It is an industry that turns racism into a sexual fetish, literally pornified white supremacy. And it is not fringe content, with 40% of searches on the internet's largest porn site including racially charged words. Then, alongside the evil of consuming the content itself, the consumer discipled by racist fantasies enters the real world to enact what they have consumed. If black lives truly matter, then we must take a stand against the only area of social life that is still allowed to participate in blatant racism.
I have just chosen the two areas of injustice receiving the most attention, but I could go on and on about the public harm. We are deceiving ourselves if we think the technological world of pornography only harms the user. It absolutely does harm the user, but then the harmed user harms society.
What has technology done to human sexuality? It is yielding unprecedented destruction to self, sex, and society.