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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 20, 2012
In defence of sex
As a notorious pro-lifer, I cannot possibly be against sex.Nor, more generally, as one of those "social conservatives," can I be unaware that sexual intercourse outside marriage has become a social norm. For a change, I will not blame the Nanny State for this. The suggestion of imminent, nearly public copulation is brazened on billboards, and throughout contemporary media. Across the Internet, the most innocent pictorial search will harvest a rich field of pornography. The flap over the current offering in the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa - "SEX: A Tell-all Exhibition" - is risible at one level. Defenders of the exhibition claim that the approach it takes is somehow "refreshing." This implies new or unusual; yet there is nothing new or unusual. The standard, glib, materialist, amoral, happyface approach to sex - just something people do for pleasure, and to develop their (narcissistic) identities - repeats what we find everywhere else. I have not visited the exhibition, for verily, I try to insulate myself from such displays, out of a consciously Catholic impulse to avoid the occasion of sin, whenever possible. (In this case more likely Wrath, than Lust.) But I have read a fairly thorough first-hand account, and I was not born yesterday. The very title of the exhibition implies pornographic promise. The speed with which museum authorities raised the age of unaccompanied admission to 16, and removed a particular display that showed animation of children masturbating, is an indication that blowback was anticipated. The defensive propaganda against supposedly puritanical attitudes to sex they had no need to prepare. It is a Pavlovian response, throughout our progressive chattering classes. Not against sex, but I am most certainly against pornography, because it degrades people morally, materially, spiritually, and intellectually. One need not be a puritan to despise it. The erotic dimension of life may be apparent even in the most abstract art, and to war against it would be to war against God's own Creation. But eros and pornography do not overlap. We have lost our hold on that fine Greek word, "erotic"; for eros is much larger than sex, and usually excludes it. It is a force present in all relations between persons; it is atmospheric; it is mysteriously aloof; it is an aspect of Love. Even among animals, eros does not reduce to sex; and sex itself is not necessarily erotic. Pornography, contrary to what is currently taught in our schools, is quite easy to distinguish. It makes sexual suggestion the central aim; it hits you over the head by making every detail of a composition subordinate to that aim, reversing, as it were, the lines of polarity. The difference between "mild" and "hard" pornography is not, as is taught, a difference of degree. It is a difference of tactic. Soft pornography works better for some purposes, and on some people; hard is required for others. Pornography is barbaric. It is a form of sexual assault, to which the sexual revolution has blinded most of us. Short of direct physical force, it is perhaps the cheapest and crassest device of human manipulation, trumping cash. It impinges on the consciousness; it is a purposeful invasion of human serenity. On the billboards, the purpose is to move goods that cannot be sold on their own merits. In this museum exhibition the purpose, beyond boosting museum admissions, is to advance an ideology that is inimical to religious faith and chastity. The museum in question is funded almost entirely by Canadian taxpayers, so that the use of my impounded money to finance something that directly insults my values involves real tyranny. Yet that is a commonplace of government, today. While I agree entirely with parents and others who are outraged by the assault on morality - by this latest attempt to divorce sex from its moral consequences - there is a subtlety many of them have missed. They are defending morality, and more power to them. But I should also like to defend sex. Contrary, again, to what is commonly believed, sex has been in decline in our society, both in quantity and in quality, for some time. And this has everything to do with the sexual revolution, launched in the 1960s. A glance at the demographic statistics would make my case with a sledgehammer, but to comprehend it requires more thought. The key point was brought home to me while travelling on a Toronto trolley, a few years ago. I became the involuntary auditor of a loud, very frank discussion among a feral herd of young women, about their respective boyfriends. The issue was that these guys hardly ever made love to them any more because, having become addicted to pornography, they preferred masturbation. I was impressed with their analysis, if not with their discretion. At so many levels of our society, thanks to the amoral, irreligious, technological view of life, the glossy and the virtual have defeated the real; the machine method has defeated the human. I suppose this is what the Canada Science and Technology Museum is celebrating. The sexual revolution was itself a victory for technology. It killed the interpersonal. It subtracted the genuinely erotic. Far from enhancing sex, pornography has replaced it. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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