Porn is Not About Sex
Photo by Fabian Bächli on Unsplash
I had the privilege of collaborating with Dr Justine Toh from the Centre for Public Christianity on the subject of pornography, which is now a podcast on their Life and Faith series.
In that episode, I built on my earlier work on the metaphysics of pornography (versions of this work have been published on the sites of Courage International in and the Humanum Review).
I wrote that the virtuality of pornography is not simply constituted by digitisation of sex. I argued that this form of pornography is the latest instalment of what John Milbank describes in his Beyond Secular Order as a “metaphysics of possibilism”, where what is possible (what may exist) is considered to be a superior reality than what actually is (what does exist).
This kind of metaphysics overturns a medieval priority favoured by the likes of Thomas Aquinas, where what actually does exist is a superior reality and thus a necessary condition for what is possible to emerge. Now, we live in a world where we are constantly told to ignore what exists and focus on what is possible, to keep looking to the future at the expense of the present, to favour the prospect at the expense of the here and now.
Flowing from this, I argued in the podcast that pornography embodies this metaphysics of possibility by presenting viewers not with sex per se, but the possibilities of sex as superior to actual sex. This comes in the menu of varieties of depictions of sexual activity. It is this variety of things that can be done with any number of bodies, rather than what is being done with a particular body - an abstraction of sex - that constitutes the product line of pornography.
Consequently, the body of the pornstar is not an object for the deepening of sexual desire. Instead, it is a placeholder. The body is to be beheld momentarily, then set aside for an abstracted universe of possibility in which that desire flits around aimlessly at the prospect of sex and from which no actual sexual fulfillment can ever be found.
In the end, the body of the consumer of porn becomes addicted, not to sex in itself, but to the possibilities of sex depicted in porn such that sex itself takes second place.
To listen to the podcast, just click here.
I have also collaborated with Justine on a previous occasion as a guest for her Spiritual Lifehack series with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, speaking on the vice of acedia.
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