I suppose when I was young I thought pornography was pictures of naked people, plain and simple. Then when I got older I realized that it was a bit more involved than that. I came to know that people disagreed about what porn is. Most said that nudity in paintings wasn’t porn. Many claimed that incidental nudity in feature films wasn’t porn. And some even said that magazines such as Playboy weren’t porn. Those pictures supposedly weren’t simply about sex but also the beauty of the female body.
Porn can be a little hard to figure out sometimes. But I think that even though we often disagree as to what should be considered porn, many of us have a basic understanding of the word. Porn has to be something made by human beings. For example, a tree, no matter how provocatively it grows, no matter how suggestive the limbs are intertwined, can’t be porn. Porn has to be a book, or a film, a poem…something that wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for a human maker. And I think most would agree that porn has to be something specifically designed to excite the passions of those who look at it. That isn’t to say everything made by humans that happens to turn us on is porn. A lot of things may turn us on--the lyrics of a song, the way an actress glances back over her shoulder in a scene in a movie--but if something is there for a reason other than to sexually excite us then it’s not porn.
Porn is meant to tap into our basic instincts, bypass rational thought, grab some primitive part of our being and remind us that deep down we have our desires, and we want those desires fulfilled, and it doesn’t matter what the neighbors think, or our families, or our friends. We want what we want, and we want it now. Porn holds a mirror up to the beast within.
For the longest time I thought the only kind of porn was sex porn. As I said, at first I thought it was about nudity. Then I thought it was all about pure lust and animal passions. Then I heard a comedian refer to those clips on the news that show reporters standing out in hurricanes as “weather porn.” Suddenly my understanding of porn grew exponentially. The reporters who stand outside on dark and stormy nights aren’t really relaying any useful information to us…at least not any information that we couldn’t get from the same reporters speaking to us from behind a desk inside a television studio. We don’t need to see someone’s hairpiece blown away as they scream into a microphone to know the storm is bad. But the visual is exciting. There’s something horrifyingly entertaining about it. Those images remind us that we’re animals living in a real world and that we face real dangers every day. At any moment something could fall on our heads and kill us. Remembering that now and then gets our blood up.
I’m sure I’m not the first to notice this, but I think much of what passes for religion could also be called porn. Participants are asked to click off their normal thought processes and go with the flow of their emotions. Some people sway back and forth while in church, cry uncontrollably, speak in tongues, scream out the name of Jesus as they thrash about in fits of religious ecstasy.
If it stopped there, many might say it’s just good, harmless fun. If it was all about being alive in the moment and not trying to understand with our brains, turning away from that urge to conceptualize everything for a few minutes and just live… But sometimes ministers whip their followers up and then lead them toward dark impulses. Human beings tend to be fearful of those who are different. They’re suspicious of the tribe that lives on the other side of the mountain. Outsiders are potential enemies until they have proven themselves to be friends. And many shamelessly tap into that fear in the name of their god.
I have always thought of The Salvation Army as a very sober organization. I’ve known for a long time that it was a Christian organization, but I never pictured their members dancing insanely as they were filled with the Holy Spirit. I thought they went about collecting alms for the poor in a very serious and down to earth way. Even when I learned they threw out toys that were related to the Harry Potter and Twilight books, I still imagined that they went about their business in a very stoic, humorless fashion. I pictured a fleshy, matronly woman dressed in an ample dark skirt, a big lumpy sweater and sensible shoes sorting through the donations and throwing out anything she thought may be too pagan. It would have been my guess that this woman hadn’t shown much enthusiasm for anything since voting for Nixon in 1972. So it came as quite a shock when I learned that a Salvation Army representative from Australia said that LGBT people should die. Even when he was repeatedly given the opportunity to clarify or mollify his position, he refused. LGBT people are other. They are not like the rest of us. They should die. Period. When those who were interviewing him tried to appeal to his humanity, he dug in his heels and said that was his belief and he was sticking to it. Now there is some really nasty, hardcore religion porn.
A lot of people are disturbed by sex porn, and some of it is more than a little scary. Most sex porn is about flashing body parts that are usually covered up and everyday sex acts, but some of it is about force and pain and the degradation of others. But it seems that most of the people who like watching the scary stuff now and then know it’s all pretend. They know it would be horrific to act out the scenarios you see in violent porn, and they know that even the vanilla porn is generally wildly unrealistic fantasy. And most of those who are glued to their TV sets when a big storm comes ashore would never think about deliberately driving into a storm. Most know that it’s foolish of reporters to risk life and limb by standing out in those storms. They get it, even as they indulge themselves.
But do religious fanatics get it? The mythology of the Christian religion contains many fantastic elements--a virgin birth, resurrections, the great flood--but some view it all as absolute fact, and on top of that some have this extreme hostility toward certain groups. A lot of ordinary people indulge their most primitive fears and wrap it up in their religion, people who think of themselves as good people. Some actually consider themselves morally superior because they indulge their fear and hate in the name of their god.
Imagine if sex porn worked that way. Imagine if you weren’t simply allowing yourself to fantasize about having that forbidden or unlikely sexual experience but that you were told to go out and make it happen because your god commands it, and your god will punish you if you don’t make it happen. Imagine if you thought it was your sacred duty to have the babysitter no matter if the babysitter was willing or not. The world would not be a safe place for any of us if it was common for people to think like that. And yet it is common for people to think that it’s okay to hate certain minority groups such as LGBT people so long as they claim it’s part of their religion. And it is common for others who don’t indulge their hate in that way to give a pass to others if they claim their hate is part of their religion.
Hey, those people who give turkeys and hams to poor families on Christmas can’t be all bad, right? Even if they have a few quirky beliefs, they’re doing some good in the world, right? Well, if you’re an LGBT person and they tell you they think you should die, it’s kind of hard to go on seeing them as warm and fuzzy. If you’re being told that you should die by people who call themselves Christian, and it's not a fantasy to them, not a game of make believe, it might be hard to understand why others don’t take that more seriously.
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By the way, there's even religion porn specifically designed for children.
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