Porn is Not: Erotic

A few years ago, I wrote a post about how porn is not about sex. That work built upon a podcast episode I did with Justine Toh in the Centre for Public Christianity (you can listen to that podcast here), and was built upon again in my interviews with Shane O’Neill at The Naked Gospel (which you can find here and here).

In that round of work, which is now in article form at the Australasian Catholic Review, I looked at how pornography worked upon a metaphysics of possibilism, such that we do not watch porn for actual sex on the screen, but for the types of sex that can be had by the viewer in front of the screen.

I was recently asked to build upon this work in a presentation for the Archdiocese of Hobart, and I brought out two other themes that I thought I should put in summary form on the blog.

One theme that I hung the presentation on was that not only is porn not about sex, but that it is also not erotic. This theme built on a line that Shane O’Neill mentioned in both our interviews, that we do not use porn because we are horny. Put another way, we do not use porn primarily because we wanted to have an erotic experience. The word primarily is important here, because I do not mean to deny that there is an erotic experience derived from the use of porn. My claim here, rather, was that we do not use porn simply because we want to have that experience.

I recently came across the work of the clinical psychologist Peter Kleponis, who is also part of the Integrity Restored project. In a book by the same title, Kleponis looked at some of the underlying causes of porn use. These include psychological maladies such as narcissism, and also social drivers such as family of origin wounds, peer or family rejection, loneliness, insecurity and anger, just to name a few. What emerges from that book is that virtually none of these drivers are in and of themselves erotic, but are rather avoided through erotic means. In other words, the erotic experience that generated by porn use is a form of anesthesia, to avoid having to sit with the uncomfortable feelings that are associated with some of these non-erotic drivers.

As such, it is more accurate to speak of porn use not as a means to feel something, but rather is a means to not feel something. Thus, insofar as we focus on the erotic aspects of porn, we are also missing the non-erotic underlying causes that drive people to use porn in the first place.

Another dimension to the argument that porn is not erotic is due to the fact that eros, as Plato put forward in his Symposium, finds its expression in a body. In the next post, we will consider how porn undermines even the very thing that it says it offers, namely the erotic, by parodying eros’ expression, namely the body.

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