Pornography and Its Problems - Part II
Pletho vs Paglia: Pornography as Sacrilege
Pornography is sacrilegious, but not in a way the trad Christians would understand.
Before getting into Pletho, on whom I will rely on the sacrilege of pornography, I will briefly address Camille Paglia, famed modern intellectual gadfly and noted defender of pornography. I am generally a fan of Paglia; Paglia rocks, it really is as simple as that. If you dispute that, read her books, look up some interviews, and you will see what I mean. However, Paglia has a late 80s/early 90s view on pornography. For her, porn is sexy and barrier-breaking. It glorifies the female form, abstracts it totally from both the constrictive nagging energy femininity is prone to and the constrictive bonds male energy seeks to place on femininity, and makes it an object of worship. The female form dominates the male in a predominantly aesthetic manner; the male becomes an accessory to bring forth the most primal beauty the female is capable of. For her feminist goals, this view of porn serves as a very apt subject to defend. All this, however, is not true of pornography as it stands. I would challenge anyone, Paglia included, to defend the aesthetic import of pornography when it is more “yeah, lick my asshole you dirty whore” and less the well-lit body of a well-formed woman writhing artfully to a sultry jazzy tune. Facts as they stand are that pornography has little to no aesthetic value. While Paglia’s claim that pornography occupies the space of art is true of an idealised image of pornography (which may or may not have ever existed, that issue is only historically relevant), it is heavily cloaked in the airs of untruth when it comes to pornography as it is (and as it floods the Internet).
Paglia has, on the other hand, derided the trend of hypersexualised advertisement flooding social media—think Instathots posing with grotesquely protruding asses to promote themselves or something they are paid to promote. And yet pornography is what drives this. Pornography accustomed us to think a certain way, and that way of thinking spilled all over the Internet, infecting everything. Pornography is what first broke down the barriers of the sexual and threw a sacred sight exposed before the public eye. Seductive Instagram underboob is mere spillage.
Porn is not even sexy anymore. It is not liberating, it is not transgressive, and it is not in any way a useful corrective in a repressed society. I can see no reason Paglia is still defending it other than the fact that she is known for defending it and doesn’t want to contradict herself. That and not having a coherent understanding of what pornography is like now. Paglia is stuck defending Playboy and Hustler being displayed in the stores with their classy glossy sexiness, when pornography moved first to gaping assholes under blinding fluorescent light and now, even more sinisterly, to a generalised porn aesthetic internalised by all. More than anything, she is defending transgression, the anti-Christian power that a pair of plump tits possesses to crush all the middle-classless of the wagie male, and the benefits it confers to the woman who wields such power, transforming her from a member of modern society into some avatar of an ancient goddess. But porn is no longer transgressive. It is a series of playlists on the Internet, one more matter-of-fact and prosaic than the other. It does not break the barriers of males, it just feeds their neuroses; it does not unleash any ancient animality in women, it just trains them to think that showing their tits to the Internet is the easiest way they can make money.
What hasn’t been infantilised and made unsexy by porn? It’s all “big tits”, “big dicks”, “big asses”. Just look at all the “Mommy GF” talk and compare it to the output of the deranged fantasies about young men having sex with their stepmothers than appears to be the porn industry’s bread and butter. Is this insanity not porn’s doing? Now, I have my fetishes too. Where in the bulging and ever-growing porn catalogues will I find the category “ridiculously white long aristocratic necks”? Things being as they are, the closest thing I am liable to encounter is some corny vampire fetish shit. You can’t go around blaming everything but pornography for the great profaning of sexuality, when pornography is most at fault.
If a strip club is a pagan temple, as Paglia claims, then the porn of today is disgustingly profane. Its profanity is indeed the greatest problem with porn. And the best argument for this comes from the 15th century and the mind of Pletho, a Platonist pagan in late Byzantium, whose works are full of wisdom suited to correcting a degenerate age.
Pletho says that beauty is found in moderation because excess produces ugliness. This should suffice to expose the evils of promiscuity.
1Why we must legislate against incest is what he touches on next. He doesn’t make a detailed argument, being content to show that the universality of its rejection is proof enough that the gods despise it.
But his next argument, against having sex in public, is rather more detailed. He says this act is sacred and should be guarded against sacrilegious eyes much like an altar is by means of the sacred bounds. The ill effects on the society that he mentions should be familiar.
“The more important an action is, the more we must endeavour to do it well, and we cannot deny the importance of this act which in our mortal nature is the imitation of the immortality of the gods and of their manner of procreation.” In other words, sex is too important to make a mercenary spectacle of. It is divine and should never be reduced to what pornography reduces it to. And what pornography makes of sex is malicious and complex enough to require further elaboration, which will (probably) follow in the next part(s).
I am using the excellent translation of John Opsopaus, which seems to be the sole English translation available online. I have checked it against the original text in a few parts and, as far as my limited knowledge of Greek allows me to say, I think it can be rated as faithful.
http://opsopaus.com/OM/BA/PBOL.html