We are always in the process of being formed and shaped by the things we focus on and spend our time doing. Our culture and society have many rival “liturgies” or practices that shape us and inform our vision of the good life. Many of us assume that we primarily worship God, but our practices and habits may suggest otherwise.
In the fantastic book, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit, James K.A. Smith unpacks how the modern shopping mall is a place of worship and goes through various underlying messages it communicates to us about who we are and how we should live. As I went through this, I couldn’t help but apply it to pornography and sexual fantasy, since this is an issue I spend my days helping clients attempt to break free from. I want to follow his rubric and lay out for you the vision of the good life that porn presents and how it is ultimately harming us. When we can unmask the illusion and see it for what it is, it loses much of its power. I’ll start each section with a relevant quote from Smith and then build on it and apply it to sexual issues.
I’m Broken, Therefore I Shop (Or View Porn)
Implicit in those visual icons of success, happiness, pleasure, and fulfillment is a stabbing albeit unarticulated recognition that that’s not me…these liturgies convey a stealthy message about my own brokenness, but they do so in a way that plays off the power of shame and embarrassment.
This is a complex idea, but is very important- these fantasies and visions of the good life pull us in because they are simultaneously attractive while also making us feel terrible about ourselves and the actual reality of our situation. Porn is so appealing because it shows perfect bodies engaging in levels of pleasure and experimentation that will never happen in reality. And if you are sexually frustrated in your marriage, or insecure about your attractiveness or sexual prowess, you are set up for this vision of the good life. You feel deficient and so you seek out the world of sexual fantasy to feel better for a time. But that’s the rub- it is only for a time and then you are left with increased shame for seeking this fantasy and not improving your actual situation, which only drives you back into the fantasy again, just like a person shopping for products to raise their social status or improve their mood.
Judgment and Competition
Because of the mall’s emphasis on ideals of image, and because we are immersed in such ideals almost everywhere, these slowly seep into our fundamental way of perceiving the world. As a result, we not only judge ourselves against that standard, but we fall into the habit of evaluating others by those same standards…we have turned others into artifiacts for observation and evaluation, things to be looked at- and by playing this game, we’ve also turned ourselves into similar sorts of objects…we have to unlearn the habits of consumerism in order to learn how to be friends.
This point is actually more obviously related to porn than it is to shopping! It should be clear to us that when we are viewing porn, we are blatantly objectifying the people in the scenes for our own pleasure. But what we might miss is how this breeds a mindset that is always comparing and judging. If you view porn, you are going to start comparing your partner to what you see, whether you do it consciously or not, and they are going to lose. You will start to become more irritable with them or sexually turned off as a result, and you will distance yourself. “Why can’t my partner be more sexy or willing to do x, y or z in bed or lose a little weight? This vision of the good life is willing and able to do all of these things, so why can’t they? Why do I have to miss out?” You will also again start to feel worse about yourself and your own attractiveness (probably below your awareness) and will start to assess your value and that of others solely on physical attractiveness and their ability to bring you pleasure as an object. And as reality continues to disappoint, you return ever more often to the fantasy, all the while becoming more judgmental and angry. Many clients tell me that even after stopping with porn, the habit of scanning for women out in public is incredibly hard to shake. This is in part because deep practices have been formed of seeing people as objects and so it is second nature to continue to scan in this way, whether online or out in public. It is only when we see what we have been doing to ourselves and others that we can step away from this mindset and form new habits.
I Shop (and shop and shop), therefore I Am
If these icons of the ideal subtly impress upon us what’s wrong with us and where we fail, then the market’s liturgies are really an invitation to rectify the problem…To shop is to seek and find: we come with a sense of need, and the mall promises something to address that…Its quasi redemption lives off of two ephemeral elements: the thrill of the unsustainable experience or event and the sheen of the novel and new. Both of these are subject to a law of diminishing returns, and neither can last.
Do you see that porn is offering a promise to fulfill the need it is creating around your brokenness and inadequacy? Just as a person enjoys the process of seeking goods and browsing in the mall, so does the porn consumer enjoy the ritual of browsing online for the perfect image. Many clients tell me it is more exciting to plan and seek the release than to actually achieve it. Brain science confirms this- anticipating pleasure releases more chemicals that create pleasure than the actual experience! Once you find the item in the mall or through porn, the “purchase” is made. There may be excitement or enjoyment for a period, but the items are quickly outdated or discarded. The clothes are out of style or no longer fit, the video game becomes boring. This happens even faster with sexual fantasy. The person’s body is discarded in the search for a new one. And now we are in a constant loop of consumerism. Always seeking but never satisfied for any length of time. My pastor once equated viewing pornography to “drinking saltwater” in the sense that it initially gives the sensation of quenching thirst, but only makes you more and more thirsty, dehydrating and ultimately killing you. Rather than quelling desire, porn seems to open up a bottomless chasm that can never be filled.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
The liturgies of consumption induce in us a learned ignorance. In particular, they don’t want us to ask, “Where does all this stuff come from?” Instead, they encourage us to accept a certain magic…this invisibility is not accidental; it is necessary for us not to see that this way of life is unsustainable and selfishly lives off the backs of those in the majority world. The liturgy of consumption births in us a desire for a way of life that is destructive of creation itself; moreover it births in us a desire for a way of life that we can’t feasibly extend to others, creating a system of privilege and exploitation.
Just as we enjoy cheap goods at the expense of those that produce them, our sexual fantasies come at the cost of an incredible human toll. Beneath the glitz and glamour and the self proclaimed sexual liberation and enjoyment of porn stars, a look beneath the surface tells a different story. A high percentage of women involved in porn are coming out of traumatic childhoods characterized by sexual abuse. The sex trafficking industry is fueled and funded by the porn industry. Many people that begin to seek out prostitutes do so in order to act out behaviors they have been viewing online. A disturbing number of porn stars die at young ages in strange and tragic ways, including suicide. Drug and alcohol abuse is rampant both on set and off it, as the individuals try to numb out in order to keep going through these experiences. I imagine there have been times you viewed something and could just tell that something was wrong- you briefly saw through the fantasy and it seemed ugly or like the woman was perhaps being harmed and not enjoying what was happening, and it made you uneasy- but you quickly pushed that aside in order to stay in the fantasy and the mindset of consumption. It’s better not to look too closely behind the curtain, that’s the point of fantasy after all and who wants to bring reality into that?
Conclusion
What are the things you do that do something to you? What are the secular liturgies in your life? What vision of the good life is carried in those liturgies? What story is embedded in those cultural practices? What kind of person do they want you to become? To what kingdom are these rituals aimed? What does this cultural institution want you to love?
Porn doesn’t care about you or the people involved in producing it. It cares about making money and keeping you hooked and it is very good at doing both. It wants you to love pleasure while also feeling worse and worse about yourself and your life. It wants you to judge others and find them wanting and to embrace ideals of physical beauty and sexual behavior. It doesn’t want you to look beneath the surface or to think about what it takes to create porn or keep the industry going.
As you read this I hope you find it disturbing and it worries you. This is meant to disrupt and shake us out of our stupor. I encourage you to see porn and sexual escape for what they are and to pursue a story and habits that will actually be fulfilling and bring you peace. God loves you and has something better if you are willing to do the hard work of re-shaping and re-forming your habits and rituals. Jesus promises if we drink from him we will never thirst again, and he offers himself as bread so that we will never go hungry. Porn offers saltwater and food that disintegrates while we are still chewing, offering no nourishment to our souls.
At Van Rheenen Counseling, we offer thoughtful Christian care to help you on this journey and want to help you understand the unique reasons why you may be pursuing visions of the good life that are ultimately harming you. Let’s talk soon. Reach out today for a free consultation.