In part two of this two-part look at the dangers of pornography, I wanted to gather some thoughts about sexuality in general, about control and shame, and about how we as humans can get so very damn good at lying to ourselves.
Much of what you are about to read comes from various talks given by Drs. John Bradshaw and Jordan Peterson, and what they had to say about shame and addiction in general.
Let’s begin …
With regard to porn, it’s a good question to ask yourself, “who’s really in control?”
Well, yeah, that’s the question, isn’t it? If you’re masturbating to pornography, and the consequence of that is an immediate influx of guilt, then you do indeed have to ask yourself, “who’s in control?”
It’s an important question. It can be terrifying, certainly to the extent it’s about developing some psychoanalytic acumen. Why? Because once you realize that you’re in a house (your mind) where many spirits reside, and that many of them aren’t you, and that many of them aren’t working towards the purposes you might want yourself to be working toward, then you are one step on the road out.
Such “spirits” are perhaps at the root of any number of mythical examinations of the human psyche. Take for example the very fundamental human myth of Cain versus Abel from the Old Testament. It also appears in the Quran (5:27-31). Here’s a recap:
Abel became a herder of sheep while Cain was a tiller of the soil. And it happened in the course of time that Cain brought from the fruit of the soil an offering to the Lord. And Abel too had brought from the choice firstlings of his flock, and the Lord regarded Abel and his offering but did not regard Cain and his offering. Cain was very incensed, and his face fell.
Whereupon, Cain said to Abel his brother, “Let us go out to the field,” and when they were in the field Cain rose against Abel his brother and killed him. And the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother? And he said, “I do not know: am I my brother’s keeper?”
God said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil. And so, cursed shall you be by the soil that gaped with its mouth to take your brother’s blood from your hand. If you till the soil, it will no longer give you strength. A restless wanderer shall you be on the earth.” And Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to bear. Now that You have driven me this day from the soil I must hide from Your presence, I shall be a restless wanderer on the earth and whoever finds me will kill me.” And the Lord said to him, “Therefore whoever kills Cain shall suffer sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord set a mark upon Cain so that whoever found him would not slay him.
I am no biblical scholar, but it seems to me that what we are led to believe is that the Devil got ahold of Cain by means of Cain’s jealousy, one of those pesky sins we are told to avoid. In the case of Cain, murder ensued. In today’s world, I believe that jealousy and resentment, coveting and lust, have gotten the best of us and actually murdered civil discourse and healthy living.
Which Are You? Cain or Abel?
So, we may ask ourselves at any given time, “has jealousy and resentment, coveting and lust, gotten the best of me?”
Alright, then, who are you? Are you Cain or are you Abel?
The answer is that you’re both.
We all suffer from jealousy from time to time and want what someone else has. We may see how a parent favored our sister rather than ourselves; or, perhaps, how God seems to have shone the light on someone else (another reason to quit Facebook). Perhaps at that moment you are left to wonder, “Who have I become?” There’s an element of embarrassment in that question, isn’t there?
And then the question becomes, “well, who’s got the upper hand?”
Followed by, “Who do you want to have the upper hand?”
Is it God and Abel or is it Satan and Cain?
And that question is just as germane to believers as it is to non-believers. Isn’t that remarkable and appalling and overwhelming and terrifying all at the same time?
So, if your behavior is embarrassing you, well, there’s only two possibilities:
- That you shouldn’t be so embarrassed. We may suppose that that’s the voice that says yes to all your proclivities, to any and all manner of sexual expression. You might then rationalize, somehow, that your guilt and shame are merely the detrimental hangovers of an oppressive rules-based society that is judgmental in its attitudes towards sexuality.
I don’t think that argument goes anywhere. You can only rationalize so much before you realize that it’s a weak argument, or that you’re lying to yourself.
That leaves us with Number 2:
- That you to consult your own conscience; that you sit back and wonder for those feelings of guilt and shame and where they may come from. Without question, you will pause and wonder for how the conscience has become the oppressive force on its own – an indwelling of some great tyrant.
Freud made much of that, what he called a “too oppressive superego.” He conceived of the superego as the angel on your shoulder, so to speak. And I’ve certainly seen clients whose expression of healthy sexuality was inhibited by a too-rigid superego, which can certainly happen to anyone. But that does not mean that all guilt about all forms of sexual expression constitute a superego run amok.
Speaking of “Run Amok”
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that there was some relationship between the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the hygienic revolution of the previous six decades; “hygienic” insofar as it enabled us to reduce the impact, at least in the West, of infectious diseases.
It followed that because we were much less prone to the transmission and receipt of infectious diseases, and of course with the birth control pill, much less prone to pregnancy, we could afford to be more liberal by the 1960s.
Ok, so we got more sexually liberal, and what happened?
AIDS … that’s what happened. And we can say that without prejudice.
We can also say that the most effective means of facilitating the reproduction of a deadly virulent agent and its propagation through the population is … unrestrained sexual behavior.
Freud made much of that as well. It was the Id – what he conceived of as the location of the so-called pleasure principle – run amok. We might see it as the “Devil on the Other Shoulder,” who suggests that “if it feels good, do it.”
You know, sexual shame is there for a reason, and it’s not a trivial reason. It isn’t going to go away just because we may wave the magic wand and make the proverbial rules-based societal tyrant vanish. The Id and the Superego require balance.
It is the Shame? Or is it the Behavior?
Alright, so if you’re ashamed about your sexual behavior, then you have to ask yourself, “is the shame wrong or is the sexual behavior wrong?”
And this isn’t about judgment of right versus wrong. Because, after all, what the hell do I know about you? I have enough trouble with my own behavior. So, this is on you.
Is your shame what you should be dispensing with, or is it the behavior?
And it might just be a little of column A and a little of column B because life is never so simple as presenting only one choice.
If you don’t feel ennobled by your behavior, by your porn-related masturbation, then perhaps that means it’s of questionable utility. It certainly isn’t a stabilizing social force. It isn’t something people do in public and brag about (unless you’re Jeffrey Toobin on CNN).
On the other hand, it may be that you are sitting in a prison cell with perhaps only one hour outside every day and no access to any sort of human interaction. Well, to that I might say, “shame be damned. You need a release now and then.”
I doubt I have any prisoners reading this Blog, with most of my readers capable (at least in theory) of engaging intimately with another human being.
Remember to Never to Lie to Oneself
The thing is this: People shouldn’t lie, especially to themselves. And repeatedly engaging in a behavior that you yourself judge to be morally reprehensible is a form of “performative contradiction,” which is defined as the acting out of a lie. I suspect you know that, or you wouldn’t be asking the question.
So, then, what should you do with pornography? Well, you know the answer to that too and so does everybody else. Everyone knows it’s not “good.” It’s not good for those who produce it, it’s not good for those who participate wittingly, or unwittingly, and there’s plenty of them, it its production, and it’s not good for its consumers … certainly not the highest good.
And what’s the highest good? For this topic, it’s sexual expression incorporated within a functional, intimate relationship bound by vows of monogamy. And we all know that, too (or at least, sense it). It stabilizes our families, it stabilizes our societies, it stabilizes our psyches.
So, anything you do that isn’t in service of that goal is likely to be counterproductive. And I suspect it’s your own psyche, your own soul telling you that. If your sexual behavior isn’t an expression of your highest being, then it isn’t serving you in the deepest sense. You are serving it. That’s what your shame indicates.
So, get out there and find a partner and commit to her or him.
The less porn the better. That’s good advice, but let’s make that more specific. To the degree that use of porn and masturbation is undermining your sense of self and providing you with a dearth of motivational reasons to get out there and engage with a real partner, then it’s definitely not in your best interest, and THAT’S what your conscience is telling you.
To quote Dr. Peterson, “it’s the expedient at the expense of the meaningful.”
Right? There isn’t any more obvious manifestation of the expedient at the expense of the meaningful, than pornography and masturbation, and that’s hardly a heroic path.
So, maybe the less of it, the better.
I’m aware, by the way, of the statistic showing that the introduction of pornography into a community doesn’t raise but lowers rape probability. The problem with those studies, the ones that yielded those results, is their one-dimensionality. They did not (and likely could not) consider any number of other contributing factors. Remember: Correlation is NOT causation.
One thing to consider is the presence of “drives” within the human – the drive to eat, sleep, have sex, perform, etc. And for a harmonious existence to occur, those drives must be in balance, so to speak. But from time to time, whenever any given drive predominates to the exclusion of all else, we are “out of balance.”
Out of balance: Too-dominant a superego and you find yourself unattractively rule-bound. Too dominant an Id and you’ll find yourself excised from society or, worse, in jail.
Sexuality is best handled within the confines of a relationship. That’s the classical ethical solution to the problem, simply because sexuality brings with it a tremendous amount of responsibility. Of course, people don’t like to think that, especially people who I would say are low in conscientiousness and high in impulsivity. It’s easy for them to believe in, say, casual sex, which is not something that I think exists, because you cannot divorce sex from its sociological or political or economic or (most importantly), its psychological consequences.
To that end, therefore, we can say that there is no such thing as casual sex. And the reason for that is the consequences of sex are too dramatic. It’s just not pregnancy and disease, let’s say, which are both as dramatic as consequences can be in life, but also the fact that there’s no disentangling sexual behavior from emotional behavior. Or worse … if you try to disentangle your sexual behavior from your emotional behavior, then I think what happens is that you end up cold and cynical.
Take for example, the person who has a lot of one-night-stands and a lot of casual partners; notches in the headboard, so to speak.
First of all, there’s not much discrimination between one partner and the other and so in some sense, that person is in a loop repeating the same act over and over. There’s nothing “deep” about it. There isn’t anything about it that enables you to establish a relationship with another person. Could we not say that that corrupts your soul? That you hurt yourself across time? (One example would be the conflation of sex with love, which are two very different things).
And you would be hurting the other people, as well.
Fundamentally, casual sex could be said to be a demented adolescent fantasy. It just doesn’t work out in the real world (and somehow, deep down inside, those people know that; that having it “work out” in the real world would mean a corruption of society).
Healthy self-restraint with regard to sexuality is the same with everything else: There’s the necessity to forego immediate gratification for the purpose of medium- to long-term thriving.
Therefore, if your sexuality is integrated in an ethic that encompasses the rest of your life and if it serves that ethic, then I would say it is properly restrained.
Which is not to say that if it’s unhealthily repressed, you’re in a good place either. In fact, unhealthy repression will leave you angry and bitter and resentful and cursing the opposite sex, or perhaps the same sex.
Resentment and anger are good indications that there’s something wrong with the manner in which your sexuality is restrained.
Concluding Remarks
This was a long post, I know, but I hope it meant something to you. And I hope that with both parts of these posts on masturbation and pornography, I have conveyed some semblance of hierarchy. To wit,
- there’s masturbation to pornography (really not good)
- masturbation to an enhanced imagination (not good and only slightly better than the first)
- casual sex with several partners (not good at all and even damaging)
- casual sex with one partner, a so-called “friend with benefits” (an improvement on all the above, but unsustainable in the long run)
- sex with an intimate, committed partner (better)
- sex with a marital spouse (the best)
- celibacy (a choice many people make and on which we cannot make a value judgment)
And do not forget that love and sex are not the same thing. If I have learned anything in my life and in my clinical practice, it is that the sex eventually runs out. There better be love to sustain the relationship beyond that.
Commit yourself to building the life you want. Start now.
