(Since one of my favorite bloggers, retired professor Martin LaBar, linked to one of my posts and mentioned that it wasn’t about sex, I thought I’d better get with the program ;-) )
(Warning: frank language ahead)
Joe Carter links to Challies, who writes about Naomi Wolf’s article in New York Magazine, The Porn Myth, which first appeared in 2003. Wolf, a third-wave feminist,* explains how "The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women," and says this ultimately weakens the family. (No, this isn't Focus on the Family talking, this is a feminist!) Other cultures, Wolf says -- traditional cultures, even -- know this about sexual ubiquity. She even quotes from Proverbs 5:18-19: "Rejoice in the wife of your youth...let her breasts satisfy you at all times."
Wolf also says something rather modern about orgasm and Pavlovian response:
After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.
I wonder if she’s read Eros Defiled by John White, published in 1977. In it, he discusses Pavlov’s dogs and reward as a powerful operant conditioner, which I mentioned in Part II of my “Learning to speak the language” (of sex) series.
In Eros Defiled, John White suggests that our sexual attitudes and practices get “set” by the same mechanism that caused Pavlov’s dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell: habit, and association with pleasure (pp. 40-42). Orgasm, being a very intense physical, mental, and emotional pleasure, is no doubt a strong behavioral reinforcer that helps establish both healthy and unhealthy sexual patterns. Yet as Lauren Winner suggests in Real Sex, discipline of the body, mind, and heart can help guide the creation of healthy patterns and provide a positive kind of positive reinforcement.
While I believe, as does White, that human behavior is based upon more than mere physical conditioning such as that experienced by rats or dogs, at the same time, humans are clearly also conditioned via thought and (especially) emotion. There really is no escaping this. These features of human conditioning shape our disciplines and our habits, which in turn shape us. However, before that, it is our will, and our spiritual state, which shape our thoughts and emotions.
As for dilution (see end of Wolf quote above), I mentioned this in one of my pieces on masturbation at my old blog, Off the Top, a couple years ago:
Sexuality is a valuable treasure, a great gift. As Christians, we give our very best gifts – our figurative gold, frankincense, and myrrh – to God, and in so doing, give our sexual treasures to our spouse. We do not “spread the wealth” around; to do so is to cheapen its worth and dilute its significance as well as to make a mockery of the gift itself and the covenant of marriage. Adultery isn’t referred to as “cheating” for no reason; adultery cheats a spouse of what ought to be theirs and theirs alone. Autoerotism also cheats one’s spouse (current or future) out of a portion of one’s sexuality.
From her quote above, Wolf continues:
I am noting that the power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.Though I wouldn’t say that something on tap all the time can’t be sacred, I agree that the sacredness of sex involves high selectivity within a most exclusive and highly select context (a marriage). And I would say that control of the tap applies to any type of sexual gratification. For the single person desiring purity, there are obvious implications. For the married person, sexual charge may build naturally, yet if its sharing and release are tied to (associated with) the spouse, then said charge will build between husband and wife combined with that directly engendered by the relationship. One can see how interrupting or relieving this buildup via some other distraction or form of gratification dilutes (not to mention redirects) its power, in truth actually desecrates it, and weakens a marriage.
Wolf also underscores the importance of privacy, which relates to sacredness and selectivity:
I will never forget a visit I made to Ilana, an old friend who had become an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. When I saw her again, she had abandoned her jeans and T-shirts for long skirts and a head scarf. I could not get over it. Ilana has waist-length, wild and curly golden-blonde hair. “Can’t I even see your hair?” I asked, trying to find my old friend in there. “No,” she demurred quietly. “Only my husband,” she said with a calm sexual confidence, “ever gets to see my hair.”When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.
Whoa.
Some things to think about.
*(Judy Chicago, whose erotic art I discussed in another series -- see appropriate category in the sidebar, is a second-wave feminist.)
Afterthought: One of the downsides of the ubiquity of “goods” in our culture is that it makes us all comparison shoppers. Not that people aren’t naturally inclined to compare things, and not that comparison is always bad. But some things just shouldn’t be compared, and if we get used to comparing and contrasting in a purely consumer fashion, then we see things only in terms of how they suit us, which is to say in an entirely selfish way. We also tend to think that we are entitled to the "best," or to that which pleases us in whatever basically arbitrary way we’ve decided that said thing should please us. Obviously, then, we don’t appreciate whatever-it-is for its own value or the value it should have in the overall scope of things, but in a manner which can’t see beyond the self.
