Beauty, Eroticism and Porn

Michelangelo’s David courtesy of BBC Media

When I was young and in search of the facts of life, there was no evident pornography. The closest we ever got was a book we found hidden in our parents’ bedroom closet called “The Physiology of Love,” that offered up textbook how-to drawings.

When television first came into our home in 1956, we were only allowed to watch The Mickey Mouse Club and I Love Lucy. Lucy and Desi would retire to one bedroom but always in twin beds. Nor did married couples kiss on the lips, but “pecked” each other on the cheeks. I remember asking Dad why Lucy and Desi didn’t sleep in the same bed as he and mom did. He explained that the Catholic Legion of Decency would not approve any TV show for broadcast that showed a man and woman in the same bed. The League rated, if not regulated, what we saw on TV and in movies until finally ceasing operations in 1980.

The only prurient TV I remember from our childhood was when my siblings and I tuned into The Mickey Mouse Club every day, watching with fascination as Annette Funicello, the most alluring of the Mouseketeers, grew breasts in front of our curious eyes, well before our schoolmates.

We’d heard on the playground that some issues of National Geographic portrayed bare-breasted natives, so in a dusty attic corner, we pawed through dozens of fading piles looking for one. The women’s lingerie section of the Montgomery Ward catalog was a step up from National Geographic but was jealously guarded by our mother. Playboy magazine arrived in the late-fifties, but was kept hidden behind the counter at the local Texaco station.

Fast forward 30 years… My daughter was doing a homework assignment on the White House. The Internet was new to us and she did a search on “The White House,” which brought her to a then-infamous porn site. Though I had to admit that I would have found it enticing in my own childhood, as a parent I was appalled.

Today, we routinely watch streaming series where people have casual sex in restaurant bathrooms, cars, back alleys and anywhere they happen to be. Porn permeates our marketing, culture, networks, and even language. And the warning “You must be 18-years old to enter” is like saying, “Don’t eat these cookies.”

Sadly, porn desensitizes us to both beauty and eroticism, the naturally occurring graces of sexual arousal. Eroticism catches us off-guard and demeans no one. It’s never clinical in word or image but offers us a sensual resonance that calls on our imagination like a haiku… a come-hither smile, the gentle rise of breasts beneath a blouse at the intake of breath;  neither posed nor affected, it may even occur in nature, as in Baudelaire’s poem Correspondences – a clearing, riverbank, or birdsong that recalls a former tryst or desire.

Whereas pornography is lonely, insular, clinical, and narcissistic and has nothing to do with either affection or love. It’s a man-made blunt instrument   ̶   fetishistic and exploitive, even lethal   ̶   and blinds us to the delights of Venus’s unexpected smile.

Although sexuality is for all species a natural part of life on earth, many religions have demonized it, usually to the benefit of their male adherents. I was raised a Catholic and the shibboleths around any form of sexual practice other than between a married man and woman were expressly sinful, including masturbation and birth control. Though drawn to it naturally, I and many of my friends grew up believing that sex was dirty and necessary only for the continuation of the species.

Common Sense Media is quoted in a 2023 New York Times piece  reporting that three-quarters of all teenagers today have seen pornography by the age of 17, with their first exposure likely by age 12. Jim Steyer, founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, says, “Pornography is a huge part of the lives of children who have digital access like never before, and we need to have a national conversation about it.”

The “hook-up” culture portrayed today on conventional television and the graphic display of groping and sex on TV still astonishes this lapsed Catholic 60 years later. What does the media “hook-up” culture say to our young about love, romance, affection, and mutual respect? The young will always experiment with sex. It’s a human rite of passage. This interest in intimacy doesn’t necessarily disappear with age. A significant percentage of adults aged 65-80 remain sexually active.  But as to porn, the personal and societal costs of, and money to be made from, pornography are hardly the type of discussion lawmakers are anxious to have, especially in this divisive time when even teaching about safe and appropriate sex in our schools is under attack by conservatives and the religious right. And politicians are anxious to woo conservative voters.

When Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart was asked to describe his test for obscenity in 1964, he responded: “I know it when I see it.” But do we? Are we willing to face the real societal costs of ubiquitous porn?

And how can we not understand that it’s critical to teach safe sexual practice, hygiene, and ethics (“’No’ means no”) at the appropriate age levels in our public schools? According to the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, there has been a 91.7% increase in teen births to unmarried females since 1955. Every sexually transmitted infection (STI) is on the rise, with 2.5 million cases reported last year according to the CDC.

As their own bodies mature and they begin to hear stories on the playground about sex, children’s natural curiosity is piqued. As parents and responsible adults, we have a choice: We can let children learn from other children or from Pornhub about sex, or we can have candid conversations about it at home and normalize sex education in our schools.

We all benefit by being candid about sex. We must accept and promote age-appropriate sex education in our schools and homes. We must teach that sexual attraction and love are intrinsically different but together can create life-long relationships. Such understanding is fundamental to the physical and mental wellbeing of our children. To pretend it doesn’t exist merely creates confusion, distrust, and potentiates traumatic encounters with sex. As our young people mature, sex, beauty, and eroticism can then emerge in their lives as they have for millennia in the arts, which memorialize all three.

A friend and photography editor for a famous travel magazine, who also independently produced art books, once hired leading porn stars to pose in what they considered their most flattering conventional attire. On the opposite page, they’d been photographed naked, in un-seductive “body shots.” He gave us a copy that my children somehow discovered – and since it was now too late to spare them this propulsion into adult matters, I asked them what they thought of it. When they expressed a strong preference for the images of people fully and beautifully dressed, I knew they instinctively understood the author’s purpose and meaning and the intrinsic differences between beauty and pornography.

Human beauty transcends sexual attraction. Some of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen were well into their 90s. I sat next to Jessica Swift one evening in Middlebury who was then 104. I was struck by her extraordinary beauty. My great aunt by marriage, Georgia O’Keeffe, was transcendent in her beauty well into her 70s. Beauty is indeed “in the eye of the beholder,” but it is also a deep human bond, as we know from the work of our greatest artists who eternalize it.

Eroticism floats gracefully in between beauty and romance. We owe it to our children and ourselves to understand and appreciate all three in their uniqueness and their kinship.

• Bill Schubart