It's interesting (and maddening) to me that so many churches see sex as The Thing That Must Not Be Named. Purity culture has created this idea that sex must remain this mysterious thing that you're not allowed to know about, talk about, or even think about until you get married, and then you're free to engage. It's no wonder that I end up seeing so much sexual abuse, addiction, and dysfunction in my counseling office, and it's a big reason why I'm such a huge advocate in my own church for open dialogue about what biblical sexuality really is (hint: it's not puritanism but it's also not promiscuity). In fact, once you understand it as intended, it makes your argument for you when it comes to porn in all its forms.
Song of Solomon isn't erotica per se, and it's not a parable in the classic sense. It IS meant to depict what marriage is supposed to be. God created it, and God created sex, and both things are beautiful and meant to be joyous. That, however, doesn't mean that people should enter into it with some kind of ethereal, mystical idea about it, or that they shouldn't be aware of what it is and what it does.
Sex is designed to be the culmination of two people being emotionally and spiritually connected. The physical manifestation of a choice made to love and cherish each other. It's not a fringe benefit of putting up with them, or a duty for one of them to endure because the other says they want it. When engaged in as intended, it's emotionally bonding and fulfilling as well as comforting (and fun, of course). It's a way for a couple to truly delight in each other. Sex within the confines of marriage (and engaged with the proper attitude) is a safe, glorious thing.
Now, however, consider the alternative. Warping the model can result in grave damage to someone across all spheres of their being. It's where you get abuse, even within a marriage. You get porn and promiscuity and STIs and all sorts of jacked up stuff. By far, the biggest number of identity issues that I see are somehow related to beliefs, activities, and perpetrated acts related to sex.
There's an argument to be made that the generalized human trait of seeking things that are easy, pleasurable, and require little to no investment factors in. The kind of sex that you have after an evening at the bar or a quick swipe session on a dating app cannot even remotely compare to sex with someone who you have chosen to know completely and be known by, who you have cared for when they're sick, listened to them when they are breaking, and sat down to work through something you'd rather run away from. It cannot touch the kind where the person knows you at a soul level. Really good sex comes from WORK, and we don't like that. So we settle for the shadow version, the fake facsimile, and think we've achieved some kind of empowerment.
Sex is like fire. It can be something amazing, and yet it can also be life-destroying depending on how we engage with it and what we use it for. To get back to my original point, however, it's definitely not shied away from in the Bible, and that's by design.
The way I explain how the church taught me about sex was:
Loudly: “Sex is Evil, Sex is Dirty, Sex is Bad.”
Whispered: “until your married and then it’s AMAZING!”
No wonder there’s such a twisted mess here.
And I agree about the song of soloman, which is why that style of potetry was read at marriage rituals in that region. It’s just interesting watching so many Christians glitch all over it.
I think that twisted mess is also why there is so much sexual abuse in marriage. If you're not allowed to talk about it, you're also not allowed to talk about how to engage in it in a healthy way.
I'm looking forward to a more modern, cosmopolitan, sort of literary fantasy: Powerful beta male runs a large non-profit organization, for which he successfully solicits hundreds of millions of dollars from kind-hearted donors for Important Social Causes. He also recruits dozens of young female sycophants from ivy league humanities departments, who surround him like a chorus of adulant nymphs, willing to work into the wee hours of the night on Important Social Causes. He finally chooses one shy newcomer to be his beau; but of course there is side drama with his trans lover, whom he keeps captive in his basement playing World of Warcraft all day. ¡Escandalo! Do you think I could get a publishing deal? There's more to the story, of course, but not too much: She falls in love; he agrees to only visit the gimp in the basement once a week; eventually she discovers he is embezzling funds earmarked for Important Social Causes; threatens to expose him unless he leaves the gimp; so they steal the rest of the money from the charity fund and abscond to Belgium, where they become glamorous communist socialites. And they have sex, which involves awkward beta-male role-playing while watching Stalingrad. The end.
Brilliant script. It is a really interesting phenomenon… liberal women who hate masculinity in the real world, but fantasize about it in private with their play toys. It is so weird to be human.
Then there seems to be a glitch between the biology and the psychology, and maybe that’s why there is so much anxiety and depression? I know there’s a lot of asshole men out there, but there’s also a lot of crazy bitches. We need a man/woman intervention where we can all figure each other out and come to a better understanding instead of this culture of “owning” the other side.
Here's a funny thing: Israeli women are "badass" in the way Western liberal women claim to be, except that in the latter case, being "badass" generally means being able to pronounce expensive items on a restaurant menu and get a man to pay for your meal. Interestingly, it seems that when women are encouraged to go through combat training and military service along with men, not only are they actually capable of doing many things that men normally do, but they are also more respectful of their men, not less. Sort of like how bigmouth bullies who have to learn how to fight alongside more capable peers usually get humble pretty quick. Not always, but mostly. It's worth asking why women who have man skills are not as arrogant as those who have overpaid corporate jobs but can't change a tire.
That’s a great point. Typically people have more respect for one another once they understand each other’s lived experience. In the case of women entering the men’s occupations…. Maybe there is a sense that women can do anything a man can because they entered into an office building with air-conditioning instead of starting at the ground floor, experiencing the trades, construction work, and all the effort that goes into holding up the structure.
I think that's also why some companies only hire low-level workers, and train & promote from within. or why some co-op businesses are successful despite what looks like socialism on the surface. It's not always possible to have everyone take turns doing everyone else's job in the modern world, but it tends to establish an esprit de corps, as well as rooting out people who don't like to work hard.
I really, really, *really* don't get the chimeric manimal trend popular in dark/fantasy romance novels. I've heard of the Milking book and it strikes me as deeply weird. Bill Maher thought so too and covered it in one of his New Rules awhile back.
I've thought about this quite a bit, and I think the thing is that there is an organized feminist movement that has significant cultural influence, but no organized masculist movement. So of course porn is a problem, erotica is excellent.
There’s an under-current here as well that the women/matriarchy have always maintained the strings of morality. They write the rules for it and they enforce it. It’s a control and policiing mechanism. It uses shame and reputation. So getting caught with a Playboy is shameful, getting caught with a romance novel is not.
On the other hand, pornography can be seen as the noonday demon arriving when one is most bored at whatever task is being performed, wrenching us away to what is more stimulating than what we are doing: "Pay close attention to when the urge [to leave] gets loud. If it peaks in the featureless stretch, the plateau where nothing is being rewarded and nothing visible is happening and you are simply doing the work without applause, treat it with enormous suspicion. That is the demon's favorite hour."
So pornography can be seen as the acedia of an undisciplined soul, taking an easy way out rather than holding to the veracity of one's intentions, which later can be due to all kinds of otherwise marginalizing, handicapping, socially disfunctional woundedness psychologically and socially sourced.
The fact than women and men attend to porn differently is another matter altogether, which Jung has gone into great detail to differentiate. The reading of porn by women would be due to their contrasexual animus, which pertains to discursive logos. For men their contrasexual side is anima that correlates to the visually embodied god, eros.
The incidence of pornography itself is a symptom of our civilized lives doing everyday tasks which often have a direct link to the immediacy of our survival, missing. So porn subs in for the vitality of our life. And where our civilized world has cut us off from one another leaves us prone to the noonday demon's counterfeit arguments, to alleviate the effort to connect, imaginally to one's deeper sources and outwardly to all our relations.
All this time I thought men were visual creatures and women were into physical sensations. So, I watsted all that time softly touching her body thinking foreplay was half the fun for her?
Did you know that when a man falls deeply in love with his woman, that he always "sees" her when she was in her prime? Even when she's very old, body's broken, time put wrinkles on her face and dying on her death bed, he still "sees" her when she was in her prime, when they first met. That's a man's weakness for being a visual creature.
I definitly notice that view. A friend of mine recently lost his wife to cancer and, as he’s tried dating, he only sees his wife as the 20 year old he knew and these 60 years olds he sees are not quite up to snuff.
If women knew about that weakness in men, harping that we are shallow for being visual creatures, maybe they would lightened up? Women I talked to had no idea that a man in love with a woman, he burns that first image of her when they first met, in his memory for the rest of his life. She becomes forever young in his mind.
OMG Michael I laughed out loud at some parts of this post. And you've totally nailed it on chick porn. I haven't ready too many romance novels; I find them laughable at best and offensive at worst, often both at the same time. I probably would find it less laughable now as an ex-twenties-year-old because I see in hindsight how they presented poor role models for women.
Interesting that female (written) porn may be as critical to the changing nature of relationships as male (visual) porn is. I would like to know more about this.
Good to hear. I do need to probe further into the relationship nature element. The problem is the research literature is skimpy! As I discovered writing this one, male porn = pathology, female porn = empowerment. This is one where both the conservative and progressives agree (at least on the male side, conservatives just glitch over the female side)
One thing that convoluted this is, typically, women who binge romance have partners who watch their porn so the negative weight of ‘changing relationship nature’ still tilts toward the men.
The issue of pornography as you have analyzed and historically recapitulated so well here, is about "the soul's desperate attempt to connect in a culture of isolated individualism." To make sense of prurient hypersexuality whether typographical or pictoral, we need to take the perspective of soul, as in Jung and Hillman's view from depth psychology where the gods which inhabit our psyche's and are embodied in our behaviors are brought into play, like the archetype Aphrodite, the Satrys, and Priapus. These are soulful imperatives beyond mere biological drives.
Sexual fantasies are psychic realities in this view, sexualizing the soul into the imaginal depth of desire, unleashing Eros trapped in the literal to see the emotional and spiritual hunger disguised as physical craving, and thereby transforming the raw lust into one's experience of soul-making.
Trying to differientiate the cultural values between women's typological porn and men's pictoral porn from the perspective of soul is highly secondary and that should tell us how off-base we are from a culture with an animating imaginal depth which still has gods in its forests and fields, waters and airs, and that is not stripped bare of the living image by the Christian monotheism, that has forlorned the soul on the altar of an otherworldly spirit.
You said it. :) And we all could use the access it provides to help keep connected to the foundation of our soul, every once in a long while, and which dreams also work to do. And then, like Huxley, have the choice to take psychedelics when we are about to die, to trip into the next world!
Are you familiar with the streaming service PassionFlix? They describe themselves as "saucier than Hallmark but much tamer than porn, tamer even than some R-rated movies." I've only recently found out about them but it seems appropriate for the topic at hand. Supposedly they will create movies and TV shows based on erotic thrillers and romance novels, with some nudity.
Totally get that. I only heard about them because I was looking up some actors from main stream Hollywood stuff I haven't heard from in a while. That's apparently what they're up to. Which I find interesting because in the age of everything being available on the internet, they're attempting to find a middle ground.
Also, apparently a family member of Elon Musk is a major funder of them.
It's interesting (and maddening) to me that so many churches see sex as The Thing That Must Not Be Named. Purity culture has created this idea that sex must remain this mysterious thing that you're not allowed to know about, talk about, or even think about until you get married, and then you're free to engage. It's no wonder that I end up seeing so much sexual abuse, addiction, and dysfunction in my counseling office, and it's a big reason why I'm such a huge advocate in my own church for open dialogue about what biblical sexuality really is (hint: it's not puritanism but it's also not promiscuity). In fact, once you understand it as intended, it makes your argument for you when it comes to porn in all its forms.
Song of Solomon isn't erotica per se, and it's not a parable in the classic sense. It IS meant to depict what marriage is supposed to be. God created it, and God created sex, and both things are beautiful and meant to be joyous. That, however, doesn't mean that people should enter into it with some kind of ethereal, mystical idea about it, or that they shouldn't be aware of what it is and what it does.
Sex is designed to be the culmination of two people being emotionally and spiritually connected. The physical manifestation of a choice made to love and cherish each other. It's not a fringe benefit of putting up with them, or a duty for one of them to endure because the other says they want it. When engaged in as intended, it's emotionally bonding and fulfilling as well as comforting (and fun, of course). It's a way for a couple to truly delight in each other. Sex within the confines of marriage (and engaged with the proper attitude) is a safe, glorious thing.
Now, however, consider the alternative. Warping the model can result in grave damage to someone across all spheres of their being. It's where you get abuse, even within a marriage. You get porn and promiscuity and STIs and all sorts of jacked up stuff. By far, the biggest number of identity issues that I see are somehow related to beliefs, activities, and perpetrated acts related to sex.
There's an argument to be made that the generalized human trait of seeking things that are easy, pleasurable, and require little to no investment factors in. The kind of sex that you have after an evening at the bar or a quick swipe session on a dating app cannot even remotely compare to sex with someone who you have chosen to know completely and be known by, who you have cared for when they're sick, listened to them when they are breaking, and sat down to work through something you'd rather run away from. It cannot touch the kind where the person knows you at a soul level. Really good sex comes from WORK, and we don't like that. So we settle for the shadow version, the fake facsimile, and think we've achieved some kind of empowerment.
Sex is like fire. It can be something amazing, and yet it can also be life-destroying depending on how we engage with it and what we use it for. To get back to my original point, however, it's definitely not shied away from in the Bible, and that's by design.
The way I explain how the church taught me about sex was:
Loudly: “Sex is Evil, Sex is Dirty, Sex is Bad.”
Whispered: “until your married and then it’s AMAZING!”
No wonder there’s such a twisted mess here.
And I agree about the song of soloman, which is why that style of potetry was read at marriage rituals in that region. It’s just interesting watching so many Christians glitch all over it.
I think that twisted mess is also why there is so much sexual abuse in marriage. If you're not allowed to talk about it, you're also not allowed to talk about how to engage in it in a healthy way.
100% Abuse from all sides from demands to denials to weaponization to looking elsewhere.
My childhood lesson, as well. This is an excellent article, Michael. Tough subject to broach, but absolutely vital for us to discuss.
Thanks! It is a challenge to get into many of these topics, but, when we do, it’s eye opening!
I'm looking forward to a more modern, cosmopolitan, sort of literary fantasy: Powerful beta male runs a large non-profit organization, for which he successfully solicits hundreds of millions of dollars from kind-hearted donors for Important Social Causes. He also recruits dozens of young female sycophants from ivy league humanities departments, who surround him like a chorus of adulant nymphs, willing to work into the wee hours of the night on Important Social Causes. He finally chooses one shy newcomer to be his beau; but of course there is side drama with his trans lover, whom he keeps captive in his basement playing World of Warcraft all day. ¡Escandalo! Do you think I could get a publishing deal? There's more to the story, of course, but not too much: She falls in love; he agrees to only visit the gimp in the basement once a week; eventually she discovers he is embezzling funds earmarked for Important Social Causes; threatens to expose him unless he leaves the gimp; so they steal the rest of the money from the charity fund and abscond to Belgium, where they become glamorous communist socialites. And they have sex, which involves awkward beta-male role-playing while watching Stalingrad. The end.
Brilliant script. It is a really interesting phenomenon… liberal women who hate masculinity in the real world, but fantasize about it in private with their play toys. It is so weird to be human.
Yes. And the fantasies are quite shocking when you actually read them! But, it makes sense biologically… if you really want to peel back the layers.
Then there seems to be a glitch between the biology and the psychology, and maybe that’s why there is so much anxiety and depression? I know there’s a lot of asshole men out there, but there’s also a lot of crazy bitches. We need a man/woman intervention where we can all figure each other out and come to a better understanding instead of this culture of “owning” the other side.
There's a huge issue with that. I've touched on elements outside of sex because so many things are out of balance.
Here's a funny thing: Israeli women are "badass" in the way Western liberal women claim to be, except that in the latter case, being "badass" generally means being able to pronounce expensive items on a restaurant menu and get a man to pay for your meal. Interestingly, it seems that when women are encouraged to go through combat training and military service along with men, not only are they actually capable of doing many things that men normally do, but they are also more respectful of their men, not less. Sort of like how bigmouth bullies who have to learn how to fight alongside more capable peers usually get humble pretty quick. Not always, but mostly. It's worth asking why women who have man skills are not as arrogant as those who have overpaid corporate jobs but can't change a tire.
And then there is a stay at home dad‘s, which I don’t hear a lot of complaining from, lol.
That’s a great point. Typically people have more respect for one another once they understand each other’s lived experience. In the case of women entering the men’s occupations…. Maybe there is a sense that women can do anything a man can because they entered into an office building with air-conditioning instead of starting at the ground floor, experiencing the trades, construction work, and all the effort that goes into holding up the structure.
I think that's also why some companies only hire low-level workers, and train & promote from within. or why some co-op businesses are successful despite what looks like socialism on the surface. It's not always possible to have everyone take turns doing everyone else's job in the modern world, but it tends to establish an esprit de corps, as well as rooting out people who don't like to work hard.
I really, really, *really* don't get the chimeric manimal trend popular in dark/fantasy romance novels. I've heard of the Milking book and it strikes me as deeply weird. Bill Maher thought so too and covered it in one of his New Rules awhile back.
I just peeked under the covers on that one and didn't stick around.
Wow — that’s a really interesting etymology — great stuff
Thanks for your own writing! It really helped me nail the point home. (pun intended)
I've thought about this quite a bit, and I think the thing is that there is an organized feminist movement that has significant cultural influence, but no organized masculist movement. So of course porn is a problem, erotica is excellent.
There’s an under-current here as well that the women/matriarchy have always maintained the strings of morality. They write the rules for it and they enforce it. It’s a control and policiing mechanism. It uses shame and reputation. So getting caught with a Playboy is shameful, getting caught with a romance novel is not.
I have not idea what to make of it either, but I just want to applaud your amazingly horrible double-entendre puns.
Lol. Thanks! I figured I had to keep it lighter insteading of ramming the point home from the start.
On the other hand, pornography can be seen as the noonday demon arriving when one is most bored at whatever task is being performed, wrenching us away to what is more stimulating than what we are doing: "Pay close attention to when the urge [to leave] gets loud. If it peaks in the featureless stretch, the plateau where nothing is being rewarded and nothing visible is happening and you are simply doing the work without applause, treat it with enormous suspicion. That is the demon's favorite hour."
So pornography can be seen as the acedia of an undisciplined soul, taking an easy way out rather than holding to the veracity of one's intentions, which later can be due to all kinds of otherwise marginalizing, handicapping, socially disfunctional woundedness psychologically and socially sourced.
The fact than women and men attend to porn differently is another matter altogether, which Jung has gone into great detail to differentiate. The reading of porn by women would be due to their contrasexual animus, which pertains to discursive logos. For men their contrasexual side is anima that correlates to the visually embodied god, eros.
The incidence of pornography itself is a symptom of our civilized lives doing everyday tasks which often have a direct link to the immediacy of our survival, missing. So porn subs in for the vitality of our life. And where our civilized world has cut us off from one another leaves us prone to the noonday demon's counterfeit arguments, to alleviate the effort to connect, imaginally to one's deeper sources and outwardly to all our relations.
All the layers.
Comments as interesting in the post. Thoughtful, well-researched, and overall great post as always brother.
All this time I thought men were visual creatures and women were into physical sensations. So, I watsted all that time softly touching her body thinking foreplay was half the fun for her?
Did you know that when a man falls deeply in love with his woman, that he always "sees" her when she was in her prime? Even when she's very old, body's broken, time put wrinkles on her face and dying on her death bed, he still "sees" her when she was in her prime, when they first met. That's a man's weakness for being a visual creature.
I definitly notice that view. A friend of mine recently lost his wife to cancer and, as he’s tried dating, he only sees his wife as the 20 year old he knew and these 60 years olds he sees are not quite up to snuff.
If women knew about that weakness in men, harping that we are shallow for being visual creatures, maybe they would lightened up? Women I talked to had no idea that a man in love with a woman, he burns that first image of her when they first met, in his memory for the rest of his life. She becomes forever young in his mind.
OMG Michael I laughed out loud at some parts of this post. And you've totally nailed it on chick porn. I haven't ready too many romance novels; I find them laughable at best and offensive at worst, often both at the same time. I probably would find it less laughable now as an ex-twenties-year-old because I see in hindsight how they presented poor role models for women.
Interesting that female (written) porn may be as critical to the changing nature of relationships as male (visual) porn is. I would like to know more about this.
Good to hear. I do need to probe further into the relationship nature element. The problem is the research literature is skimpy! As I discovered writing this one, male porn = pathology, female porn = empowerment. This is one where both the conservative and progressives agree (at least on the male side, conservatives just glitch over the female side)
One thing that convoluted this is, typically, women who binge romance have partners who watch their porn so the negative weight of ‘changing relationship nature’ still tilts toward the men.
The issue of pornography as you have analyzed and historically recapitulated so well here, is about "the soul's desperate attempt to connect in a culture of isolated individualism." To make sense of prurient hypersexuality whether typographical or pictoral, we need to take the perspective of soul, as in Jung and Hillman's view from depth psychology where the gods which inhabit our psyche's and are embodied in our behaviors are brought into play, like the archetype Aphrodite, the Satrys, and Priapus. These are soulful imperatives beyond mere biological drives.
Sexual fantasies are psychic realities in this view, sexualizing the soul into the imaginal depth of desire, unleashing Eros trapped in the literal to see the emotional and spiritual hunger disguised as physical craving, and thereby transforming the raw lust into one's experience of soul-making.
Trying to differientiate the cultural values between women's typological porn and men's pictoral porn from the perspective of soul is highly secondary and that should tell us how off-base we are from a culture with an animating imaginal depth which still has gods in its forests and fields, waters and airs, and that is not stripped bare of the living image by the Christian monotheism, that has forlorned the soul on the altar of an otherworldly spirit.
Excellent points. I need to dig deeper.
Try psychedelics for a short-cut route to the imaginal realm per se, where gods roam! :)
Ooofff. That couldn’t be trippy.
You said it. :) And we all could use the access it provides to help keep connected to the foundation of our soul, every once in a long while, and which dreams also work to do. And then, like Huxley, have the choice to take psychedelics when we are about to die, to trip into the next world!
Are you familiar with the streaming service PassionFlix? They describe themselves as "saucier than Hallmark but much tamer than porn, tamer even than some R-rated movies." I've only recently found out about them but it seems appropriate for the topic at hand. Supposedly they will create movies and TV shows based on erotic thrillers and romance novels, with some nudity.
I have not. Not sure I’m keen to watch either though. 🤣
Totally get that. I only heard about them because I was looking up some actors from main stream Hollywood stuff I haven't heard from in a while. That's apparently what they're up to. Which I find interesting because in the age of everything being available on the internet, they're attempting to find a middle ground.
Also, apparently a family member of Elon Musk is a major funder of them.
That’s really itneresting.
Many thanks for your today's post !!!
{...I’ve also heard that men love with their eyes and women love with their ears...}
B I N G O !!! 👍👍👍 🎯🎯🎯
EXACTLY this is why women apply make-up and men lie !!! 🤣🤣🤣
Awesome and that last point is epic!
2 things I should be doing but I’m not, and I have my reasons.
1) voting.
2) finding someone to marry.
Someone needs their binky and medication?