Page Summary
- Porn obscures the personhood of the one being viewed and rips a limited aspect out of the person out of its proper context.
- Pleasure accompanies the action early on, but it eventually gets replaced by a kind of habituation that steals freedom from the viewer.
- Unlike other service industries, where a person might deliver an object of consumption, in the sex industry the person itself is forced to be the object of consumption.
- Freedom from porn is possible.
Are solitary sexual actions ok?
No.
Ok, but what does that mean?
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Shawn had looked up to Will since they were kids. Even though Will had shown him porn when he was nine, he didn’t think anything was weird about it. It was just what guys did on their own when they got older. It felt great and it didn’t hurt anybody,1 so what could be the problem?
It did hurt somebody.
It also hurt Shawn, making him less free and more isolated. The act of masturbating and the porn that aided it served neither the unitive nor the procreative purpose of sex. How could they when they involved just him? Repeated instances conditioned Shawn to prioritize his own pleasure, disregarding the other person’s well-being.4 For either men or women, solitary sexual activity turns a person’s other-oriented faculty back on itself.
On top of that, the activity is doomed to failure even on its own terms.
Consider any activity that you discovered felt great. It could be as good as riding a rollercoaster or as bad as street racing. You might have returned to that activity hoping to get the same pleasure, and maybe it even surpassed the first time. But sooner or later, each return to that activity made it harder to feel the same level of pleasure. The more often an activity is sought for pleasure, the less pleasure it yields. The experience is so common that the discipline of economics depends on it as a basic law: diminishing marginal utility. Objective goodness doesn’t diminish that way.
What happens to the pleasure that goes missing in repeated activity like this? Instead of resulting in a positive feeling when the activity is present, repeated instances result in negative feelings when the activity is absent. This negative feeling that compels someone to return to the activity is a kind of habituation or, in more pronounced examples, addiction. When it comes to compulsive habits of sexual gratification, the individual loses the freedom to choose otherwise. Lustful habits promise us pleasure, but deliver imprisonment.5
You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you, everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5:27-28
1) Copious data show how seemingly harmless online pornography damages overall mental health, causes addiction, rewires human psychology to devalue members of the opposite sex (including a future spouse), supports child porn, and sustains human trafficking, but this page will focus chiefly on the intrinsic wrong of the activity itself.
2) Many who participate in the pornography industry are coerced into it, so even the assumption of consent is not guaranteed.
3) Even if she were to freely accept that cost, it wouldn’t change the fact that it is a cost for which no amount of transactional payment can adequately compensate.
4) This consideration is limited to cases where acts of genital stimulation are deliberately chosen. In cases of so-called “nocturnal emission” or “sleep orgasm”, there is no fault or sin, because the person hasn’t used the faculty of reason to choose the action. Similarly, if the person is already compelled by an existing habit, the lack of freedom to choose to avoid the action would at least partially diminish the fault for the sin committed. In that case, though, the person in question would have a responsibility to seek long-term help to heal from the habit. The resources on this page might be particularly helpful.
After all, waiters in restaurants use their bodies to deliver a pleasurable, biological necessity too. But in this analogy, the waiter isn’t comparable to a porn actor. The waiter delivers the object of consumption, but isn’t himself the object of consumption. The porn actor is comparable to the food.6
Why is it our business what adults do in the privacy of their own homes?
It isn’t. It’s up to each person to navigate the moral life with its ups and downs. But it’s much more difficult when you don’t know which way is up. This isn’t a case for any practice to be outlawed, just a demonstration of masturbation’s intrinsically inhumane character. People like Shawn need to recognize they’re in prison if they’re ever going to be freed. And freedom is possible.
5) Not only do porn and masturbation grow less pleasurable with repetition, but they significantly impact a person’s ability to engage in ordinary conjugal activity.
6) The same holds true for prostitution, which is why the guilt is usually greater for the one who pays for prostitution than for the one who supplies it. See Catechism of the Catholic Church 2355: “Prostitution does injury to the dignity of the person who engages in it, reducing the person to an instrument of sexual pleasure. The one who pays sins gravely against himself: he violates the chastity to which his Baptism pledged him and defiles his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit.”