Beauty, Eroticism, Sexuality, and Pornography
Michelangelo’s David courtesy of BBC Media
When I was young and in search of the facts of life, there was no discernible 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.
We’d heard on the playground that some issues of National Geographic portrayed bare-breasted natives, so we pawed through dozens of fading piles in a dusty corner of the attic looking for one. The women’s lingerie section of the Montgomery Ward catalog was a step up from National Geographic. Playboy magazines arrived in the mid-fifties, but they were inaccessible to us since they were 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 it would have been an enticing find in my own childhood, as a parent I was appalled.
Nowadays, 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.”
It’s unfortunate, because porn inures 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.
When television first came into our home in 1956, married couples retired to one bedroom but always with twin beds. One did not see a man and a woman in the same bed. Nor did husband and wife kiss on the lips, but “pecked” each other on the cheeks. The Catholic Legion of Decency rated, if not regulated, what we saw on TV and in movies until finally ceasing operations in 1980.
Sexuality is for all species a natural part of life on earth. But 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. 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 January 10th 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.”
Vermont’s own Child Lures Prevention has worked diligently since its founder, Ken Wooden founded the organization 38 years ago to help families and organizations with a practical curriculum to keep children safe from sexual predators. Today, his daughters, Jennifer Mitchell and Rosemary Webb, continue his transformative work which has been presented at the United Nations and implemented worldwide.
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 affection and mutual respect? The young will always experiment with sex. It’s a human rite of passage, but do we need to promote it in the media?
But 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 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 costs to ourselves and our children?
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.
Today, we will all benefit by being candid about sex. We must also be willing to regularize sex education in our schools and homes. This is fundamental to the physical and mental wellbeing of our children.
And, as our young people mature, sex, beauty, and eroticism emerge in their lives as they have for millennia in the arts, which memorialize them.
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 difference between eros, 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 work to preserve it.
Eroticism floats gracefully in between beauty and sexuality. We owe it to our children and ourselves to understand and appreciate all three in their uniqueness and their kinship.
