Is Porn the Soul of America?

Pornography is a multibillion dollar industry in America. And since the 1970s it has become increasingly more abusive, exploitative, and demeaning toward women.

This trend, and the fact that more and more men are becoming addicted to porn's dehumanizing and violent content, is a key thermometer about what is happening to the American moral imagination.

Is porn the soul of America?
As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of unlimited male power, but today it also involves the expression of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq or Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill out on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and superpatriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.

--Chris Hedges, from Empire of Illusion

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18 thoughts on “Is Porn the Soul of America?”

  1. Thank you for sharing this powerful excerpt. Based on it, and others I saw after reading this one, I've ordered the book.

    One request, if I might: that we keep in mind the ways in which a framework which presents men as only the perpetrators, and women as the only victims, of sexual violence and exploitation can unwittingly work to further marginalize male victims.

    I say this not to minimize the harm suffered by any victim or group of victims, and not out of ignorance for the awful statistics demonstrating that it is women who are far more often the victims of such violation and exploitation, but, rather, in hopes of minimizing some of the isolation a male victim/former male victim can experience even when reading/hearing ideas as otherwise vital, concerned, and helpful as the above.

    Richard: thanks for starting yet another powerful discussion. I have just started reading The Powers that Be. This excerpt shines light on even more systems of oppression and domination.

  2. This is a discussion worth having, however I would rather hear your thoughts over someone like Chris Hedges. To me, he is as fringe as Rush Limbaugh.

  3. Thanks, Richard. This crystallized for me the truth that ethics and values concerning porn and sex are not distinct from those concerning other parts of life. As a parent of young kids, I need not fear that my kids being exposed to violent, dehumanizing porn will "turn them into bad people," but instead I can be confident that the empathy that I cultivate in them today for the playground and classroom will be a safeguard against sexual othering in the future.

  4. The availability of the VCR and the internet removed the embarrassment of walking into a porn theater, and made it a more private matter; thus, "more private, less harm", a way of thinking that has beguiled us all at one time or another.


    With the easy availability of porn, I sometimes think that the teens and young adults of today don't have a chance. I am in my mid-sixties and remember that it took effort for young people of my generation to obtain what was considered real pornography. However, I do remember my first experience with it when I was around 10 years old . It came while my parents were visiting with church friends, the husband being a deacon of our church. In my exploring I found myself in our friend's bedroom closet where I found their stash of porn that, as I found out later, had to be obtained by mail order. So, as we all know, it is certainly not a new problem.


    The question remains, how do we help one another to be more responsible regarding something that is so easily obtainable? Maybe one answer is we appeal to each other's since of dignity, helping one another to remember that being a human being means striving to be more than human. I am reminded of the wisdom of Abraham Joshua Heschel: "Self respect is the fruit of discipline; the sense of dignity grows with the ability to say no to oneself".

  5. There is no doubt that porn has (de)evolved considerably from the 1970s movie-house "skin flicks" that had musical scores and actual plots, to the seemingly endless array of dehumanized and violent clips available on the web today. The film "Boogie Nights" told this very story back in 1997.

    I wonder, however, how far to connect the dehumanizing effects of the current porn offerings with the "soul" of America. This seems to be another case of correlating certain 'evils' in the present while ignoring or whitewashing history. It is true that pornography has been around in one form or another for a very long time, but not in the degree of cruelty and dehumanization seen today. But has America's moral vision really been all that clean? Was it porn around to reflect a society that endorsed the enslavement of millions of Africans and the abuse, slaughter, and near annihilation of Native American society in the 1800s? Was it porn that reflected the soul of a society that in the 1940s that treated Japanese Americans as suspect citizens and criminals? America had a culture that was puritanical enough to impose prohibition while keeping Dred Scott laws and segregation alive and well during the 1920s and was as deeply divided economically and socially as it is today. We slaughtered untold thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians during the 1960s and 70s in a war that mirrors the conflicts today. America fire-bombed Tokyo and Dresden during WWII, killing hundreds of thousands, and most Americans defend those practices even today because it was a "just war." Millions lived in abject poverty during the Depression and the mentally ill were confined in sanitariums under horrific conditions until the 1970s. Women and minorities had few rights during most of this period and were often treated as second-class citizens at best. This is just a small sample. One could make a legitimate argument that American has been just as cruel and lacking in empathy during almost any other period of our history, well before the current iterations of porn were available.

    I say this not to defend porn - not at all. It has clearly taken a much more dehumanizing turn over the last 20 years as the internet has made production and distribution so easy and demand has risen. This is just to push back a little and to suggest that America's soul was never that pure and the current sins of society are not worse, and perhaps not that different from those of our predecessors. To throw porn into the mix and suggest that it's causative or even trending with a greater degree of cruelty seems to ignore history. We've simply traded one form of degradation for another.

  6. As a gay male, it seems useful to point out that there's a substantial gay male porn industry, too, that while not demeaning to women certainly can be demeaning to those who participate in it. Is porn the soul of America? Certainly not. But it does seem that as the sense of shame regarding our bodies has dissipated, the tendency to glorify and objectify the body beautiful has increased and sex now is looked upon as a form of entertainment as well as procreation and gratification. And sex workers, as entertainers. We need more musicians.

  7. JR, just a little response to your comparison. Chris Hedges may be fringe, which is, in my opinion, sometimes necessary; but he's not mean.

  8. I like your Howard Zinn-like description! He said - “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.” Porns pervasive and unrestrained growth has only been made possible in the deep soil of a feculent culture already saturated with self-gratification. Porn finds a home in the mind of the disconnected and dysfunctional. Parading itself as being liberating and sexually satisfying when in fact, it’s really a tapeworm in your soul!

  9. John, I tried to take back my comment soon after posting it because that wasn't a good comparison. All that I was trying to say is that I view Hedges' political beliefs to be fringe and in my opinion, the fringe control too much of our political conversations.

    After, re-reading this quote I would be interested to her where Hedges believes this natural cruelty comes from.

  10. JR, I can relate to that. There has been more than couple of times when something I wrote didn't come across as clear as I had hoped.

  11. I see Chris Hedges as a sort of canary in a coal mine. He can observe the worst that humanity is capable of with an unflinching gaze. As a war correspondent, he placed himself in life-threatening situations. I highly recommend his book "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." Last year he was ordained a Presbyterian minister. To me is a prophet trying to warn us away from the cliff...

  12. Here I go entering into a comment thread to defend something both popular and popularly reviled.

    I think you're onto something with the idea that America's relationship with porn is relevant to the state of her soul. There's a lot there worth unpacking, our sexual puritanism, misogyny, the tendency of repressed desires to be expressed in extreme ways, heteronormativity... on and on and on. But the idea that porn is now more violent or dehumanizing than before is a statement that needs support.

    #1 - Porn is a bigger business now, and more easily accessible now (those things are probably related), but it's far from new or novel. I will refrain from posting links, but google "Those Naughty Victorians" to find archives and archives of images from the earliest days of photography exhibiting pretty much all the variety available in contemporary porn, and some inventive things no one here has probably thought of. Look at the hand-drawn erotica of Greece or India or Japan from even earlier eras to learn the same lesson. Or read the 19th century stories or poetry. The point is that the basic configurations of human sexuality had been explored long before VHS came around. I'm generally skeptical of claims that our era is worse than others without data to back it up.

    #2 - Which brings me to an important question: what does the data say? Is porn quantitatively speaking more full of violent images now than in previous periods? This ought to be verifiable. Without data this sort of judgment is too likely to be swayed by proximity bias and selection bias. Violent crime has been going down steadily for a long time, but most people still think that our society is more violent than ever. We can't rely on intuition for this kind of stuff.

    #3 - What standards are we using to decide what is degrading and what is sexy? One person's lewd and immoral behavior is another person's consensual kink. Or as a wise person once said, "promiscuity is a word which means having more sex than me". I'm in no way arguing for an "anything goes" sexual ethic, I'm just saying that our language around pornography is freighted. I hesitated to write this comment, for example, because I know that it is going to make some people who read it assume things about me, and judge me negatively on that basis.

    #4 - I wish there was a modicum as much public opprobrium of our warring as there is of pornography. American Sniper is playing in thousands of theaters right now to widespread acclaim. Can you even imagine the public outcry if a pornographic film received a similar wide release?

  13. You've already made every point I was already thinking, but better.

    But here's one possible wrinkle to it- I've heard it argued that the problem with the porn industry is just that: it's an industry, which means it is a product produced under the rules of modern American capitalism. Which means that porn producers are in competition with other producers for the attention and dollars of porn consumers. Thus the incentives are always to be *more*: More extreme expressions of whatever kink is being catered to, more outlandish gimmicks, etc. And thus to stay competitive in that marketplace, the actors and actresses are essentially economically pressured into participating, and consent starts to be a fuzzier concept.


    I guess the point I am making is... maybe the problem with our souls isn't porn, it's capitalism and the way it taints all kinds of interactions, including the sexual ones.

  14. Hi Richard Beck,
    I appreciate this topic and I am currently reconsidering Christian guidelines for the general concept of erotica, which includes porn. Please allow me to explain myself in the case of erotica in movies. Erotica in movies currently could get a rating or PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17. In my case, I had previous purity leanings and believed that topless love scenes in movies were wrong for both the audience and the respective entertainers. I currently do not watch anything that would offend my wife, but my categorical values have loosened. You also mentioned problems with the mixture of erotica and violence, which has huge problems beyond general erotica.


    I want to bring in another article of yours. I recall that you participated in a group forum about Christianity and the related concept of masturbation. I appreciated hearing your view and the views about six or so other Christians on the subject. I bring this up because I am interested in hearing you and others suggest Christian guidelines for the limits of erotica for Christians who are the audience or the entertainers. I mention this because the definition of porn is sometimes unclear in the cases of movies ranging from PG to R. Thank you for your consideration.
    Peace,
    Jim

  15. Sex, money, and power. I don't know that one desire defines a soul, but there is probably a good case that love of those three define the nation because while we oppose these forces in principle in practice I think we often aid and albeit because our greed is only outdone by our laziness. This is something I recognize in myself at least.

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