Anthony Esolen has begun a series on Catholic Thing that dovetails nicely with our series on marriage. In his first article, he describes the people he refers to as ‘nice fornicators’:
Nice Fornicators do not find themselves in bed with someone they do not know. They have moral standards. Nice Fornicators will only go to bed with someone they love. What this means is never entirely clear…
Had they been born a century ago, Nice Fornicators would most likely have approached the altar as virgins – man and woman both. They believe in the Ten Commandments, but they have been taught that one of those commandments no longer applies in the modern world, at least not in the way it used to…
Nice Fornicators are respectable people.
Esolen makes the comparison with the decent married man of Victorian times, who kept a mistress and treated both wife and mistress with the respect and courtesy due their respective positions. Nice fornicators follow the rules.
Esolen suggests that if nice fornicators are doing wrong, then the whole sexual revolution fails. He promises:
I will show, in further installments: first, that it is wrong in itself; then, that it hurts the people who engage in it, and finally that it hurts others. It rends the fabric of society, and any Catholic who actually knows what the Church’s social teachings are must reject it.
I’ll link to the other installments as they appear.
Nice Fornicators will only go to bed with someone they love. What this means is never entirely clear…
I doubt making their meaning clear to Anthony Esolen is a priority for many couples. Most of whom have never heard of him I presume. This may explain the confusion he feels.
Given what comes next, he does, indeed, mean ‘is never entirely clear to me, Anthony Esolen’ since he goes on to say in the same paragraph:
So he isn’t saying that it isn’t clear to the people involved. Perhaps he’d have been better to have said: ‘is different for different people’ and left it at that.
He’s written abook on child rearing as well. It gets high praise indeed:
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child takes square aim at these accelerating trends, in a bitingly witty style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis
.
…in a bitingly witty style reminiscent of C. S. Lewis
Toad can’t wait!
.
…And even other NFs mean, “I will only sleep with someone who can stand sleeping with me, without me putting a paper bag over my head.”
Most idiotic “thread” for quite a while, Toad suspects. Still, it is the silly season.
The term “Nice fornicators” is so utterly daft that just reading it clears the cobwebs out of your head. No mainstream outlet would even carry a headline that would be deemed so offensive by most.
He promises us that he may show that the whole sexual revolution fails. Next month, the industrial revolution.
A real “sexual revolution” would restore the status quo, as it would describe a full 360 degrees. The SR appears to involve turning only 180 degrees; so it should be called “the sexual hemisphere”, or even the “sexual hemicycle”.
Why “so offensive”?
Nice=agreeable, pleasant; fornicator=someone who is not married but is having sexual relations.
The behaviour has become so socially acceptable in barely two generations that my own age peers argue that living together before marriage is responsible behaviour – a kind of try before you buy policy – and even those who think virginal marriage is preferable will say, ‘but that’s not how it’s done these days’.
How can the forensic description still be offensive?
How can the forensic description still be offensive?
well,
To say that Stephen Fry is a sodomite, and Barbra Streisand is a Jewess, and the guy on the train in a wheelchair is a cripple
is to use technically accurate terms, — but people would be offended by the underlying agenda revealed by the choice of term. — That’s how a forensic description can be offensive.
So it is not the term, but the assumption that he is against the behaviour that you find offensive?
“Sodomite” implies:
1. Dodgy – if long-familiar – exegesis of Gen.19 & Romans 1. The sins attributed to Sodom in Isaiah 1 are notable as values of the “far right” in the US. Certain preachers and talk show hosts may be of impeccable sexual morality, but that is no bar to being a Sodomite or a Gomorrhan in Isaiah’s sense. Or Ezekiel’s. There are a lot of queers around – & most of them are not members of the LGBT community.
2. Knowledge that Mr. F. is active in that highly specific manner; rather than that he bats for that team.
3. that the S-word can be applied with the same denotation regardless of the culture in which the activity in question is said to have occurred. Conversely, the word “sodomy” has often described activity by people of different sexes.
That said, when did “Jewess” become offensive – & what agenda ? The termination “-ess” functions:
1. as a marker denoting that an ethnic descriptor to which it is postfixed indicates a female member of the ethnic group indicated by the descriptor;
2. as a postfix used as a marker denoting a female form of the entity of which the descriptor is the common name.
If it not insulting to describe someone claiming descent from the Tribes of Israel as a Jew, why is it insulting to call women of that description by that name, in a form that accords with the fact that women are not, on the whole, men ?
STM we are not far from Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”.
.
Toad was brooding on this while dogwalking. What the man Esolen is doing here is judging – judging like mad. Fair enough, we all do it on here all the time. In fact, we do nothing else.
But, for Christians, isn’t there a command/warning, “Judge not, lest ye be judged?”
Doesn’t apply to lucky old Toad, though, because he’s not a Christian. Not a proper one, anyway.
So, Joyful, if you knew someone was living with a partner while not married, when you were chatting you would have no problem forensically saying, “Are you and Barry still fornicating?”
As it happens, Toad, I don’t generally question or comment on people’s sexual habits when chatting. Do you? It must make for some interesting conversations!
But in an article on a clearly Catholic site?
It seems to me that fornication is a term that can logically only be applied to someone who accepts – at least in theory – the moral code that says sexual relations outside of marriage are wrong, and then does it anyway. It implies – in other words – acceptance of Christian beliefs and a Christian moral code. Someone who doesn’t hold (at least officially, by virtue of being – say – a Catholic) that sexual relations are exclusively for marriage – in my view – can’t be a fornicator. It comes down to the meaning of the word ‘marriage’ in the definition. Which, of course, we’ve already discussed.
On the other hand, what of someone who is a Catholic, active in their parish, receiving the sacraments, intent on witnessing right living? Are they fornicators and hypocrites? Or is the moral code wrong?
Christianity is not meant to be based on a code – it should be an encounter with a Person. Jesus told his disciples to love one another – not to be orthodox or conservative or anti-conservative, or to follow a code. Far from relaxing the Mosaic Law, He made it apply to attitudes, which is much more exacting than applying it to external acts.
To follow a code is relatively easy. The problem, as St. Paul saw so brilliantly, was that a code can feed the ego of the religious man: not only does that bring about attitudes every bit as damaging as wrong actions; it makes impossible the relation with God the Law is meant to foster & nourish, & it makes a means the substitute for the End. And it can easily imprison those who try very hard to live by it, in the prison of their own self-righteousness, so that they, not “sinners”, become unreachable; they don’t need to be saved from anything, so they go to a worse place than this; while the sinners, who knew they were sinners (the righteous make that clear enough) inherit the Kingdom of God.
To follow a code is (relatively) straightforward – at least in principle, you just get on and do it. There is no paradox involved. But the Christian message is one paradox upon another. Jesus doesn’t spend all His time with the righteous & God-fearing – He spends it with the wrong people: with women, Gentiles, Samaritans, lepers, tax-collectors, the trash of society. It must have been beyond belief for a pious Jew to come across the message that a crucified – therefore unclean and accursed – gallows-bird was the Messiah; like telling a member of the KKK that a lynched negro was his Saviour & Lord, only worse. It’s a very offensive message, because it trashes everything people have have brought been brought up to respect as good and godly. And codes exclude – there are always people who can’t satisfy the regulations, sometimes on technicalities. The solution ? Make up further rules, to get around the law as it stands, leading in time to a forest of commentary; or, keep the laws as they stand, complete with the technicalities. The beneficiaries are the professionals in such matters; the problem there is that the law ceases to be intelligible to the average person. So intricate a law is a terror to the scrupulous, & makes religion a Hell on earth to them; not a means of grace and happiness and inner strength & love of neighbour as a result of knowing one is loved by God.
Jesus OTOH came not to give us a code, but to give us Himself. He gives us, not graces, but Himself, Who is Grace. And because there is no standard encounter with Him (because the initiative always remains His), it’s not possible for us to compare our respective saintliness charts. He sets impossibly high standards that leave us all equal in needing Him – so the kind of thing implied by splitting Catholics into “devout” & “bad”, “orthodox” & “liberal”, is undercut & ruled out. The spirit of factionalism is good at quoting codes to buttress sectarian self-righteousness – the Spirit of Christ is too exacting to allow such things. The Christian standard is Christ Himself – He “fits all” of us, because He comes in His way and not as we say He should.
Sorry to waffle.
John 7:24 “24Stop judging by mere appearances, and make a right judgment.”” .
Also:
Luke 17:3 “If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him.”
The passage you quote, Toad, is from Matthew. In context, it is saying that if you will be judged by the standards you set for others. It is not so much a commandment not to judge, as a warning not to be a hypocrite.
But, for Christians, isn’t there a command/warning, “Judge not, lest ye be judged?”
## Here is the context:
Matthew 6:34-7:6
34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
1 “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
6 “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206.34-7.6&version=NIV
The passage is like “Thou shalt not kill” – both are endlessly quoted as though they had no context, and so, as though they were absolutes, not modified by anything else in the Bible. The clue to meaning of 7.1 is in 7.5 – judging is not absolutely forbidden. What is forbidden, is un-self-critical judgement, that looks only at the sins of others, and not, first of all, at one’s own. If we are to criticise, it is so that we can help others; our sins own may be far greater than those we see in others, and must be dealt with first. To do otherwise is to imply that we are what we are not.
It does make a difference, as you say, whether or not they are communicant Catholics. The word is ultimately descended from a term for the cellars where Roman prostitutes worked, it has never lost its explicitly negative connotation. — It may well be used of a “Catholic” couple. But for Jane and Joe westerner who’ve been together for ten years — they have every right to tell someone who says they are “fornicating” to go jump in a lake, they’re not violating any norm that they or society subscribe to.
My reason for bringing this up is that the term used by Esolen shows just how outside any kind of public debate he is. He is talking exclusively to a readership who he confidently expects will nod along with him, and experience all the enjoyment that comes from being just a bit better than others. And nice, damning with faint praise. — Can’t stand it.
That’s fair. I took it that he was quite explicitly talking to a Catholic audience about Catholic norms. As I said, using such language to a wider audience would not make sense.
I’m not convinced that there are many readers who will be able to confidently enjoy being ‘just a bit better than others’. In three years of co-ordinating marriage preparation classes for the Archdioce of Wellington – eight classes in all, with around twenty couples in each, we occasionally had a single couple in a class who were not already living together. We had several classes with none. We had no classes with more than one. And we didn’t have any couples where both partners were non-Catholic.
I think the ‘damning with faint praise’ is a deliberate reaction to the culture in which I have myself participated – where the prevailing social mores are accepted as normal and the Church gives such couples no reason why it (in principle, but not in practice) holds their living together to be damaging to their own lives and to society as a whole.
Yes, fair enough, of course it can be a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea. After all since marriage is the greatest good, it is a positive step that the couple living together come forward to be married. However this stifles criticism of their lifetstyle for fear that they may simply stay away from “The Church” for fear of getting grief from it. So I imagine it is tricky for people jsuch as yourself who have to tread that line.
My response, and perhaps Toads, is more distaste for his tone and style, than the good point lurking behind it all.
Yes. One of the reasons I’m interested in following this series is that I want to know if he can build a convincing argument, by which I mean an argument that I would feel comfortable putting before cohabiting Catholic couples. At the moment, what I have is a conviction that overall the situation is not good for society, and even then the statistics are only convincing if you compare the married with the casually living together who later marry. In other words, on average those couples who move in together intending to get married have similar marital outcomes to those who marry and then move in together, but both groups have – on average – better marital outcomes than those who decide to marry after living together for a period of time.
Presumably it is perfectly Catholic to say “you’re married? That’s a shame, it would be better to be single, but, ah well, some are not strong enough.” Perfectly solid New Testament teaching. — Never seems to happen however.
Quite the contrary, from your experience. But you’re right, of course.
Quite the contrary, from your experience.
Exactly!! 🙂
.
“As it happens, Toad, I don’t generally question or comment on people’s sexual habits when chatting. Do you? It must make for some interesting conversations!” says Joyful (with a hint of envy?).
As it happens (whatever that means) Toad quite often questions and comments on people’s sexual habits when chatting.
And, yes, it does make for some interesting conversations, or else he wouldn’t do it.
Give it a try, Joyful. Live dangerously!
So, only Catholics can fornicate, it would seem. Lucky old fornicators!
“Esolen suggests that if nice fornicators are doing wrong, then the whole sexual revolution fails.”
A very questionable concept. Revolutions don’t fail. If they don’t succeed, they become ‘attempted revolutions’ They can then fail to sustain themselves though.
Still, we must wait and see what Esolen has to offer on this.
‘Attempted revolutions’ – very true!
“Esolen” – a name to conjure with. It looks as though it should be spelled E-S-A-L-E-N:
“About Esalen Institute
Esalen. The word itself summons up tantalizing visions of adventure, of unexplored frontiers, of human possibilities yet to be realized.”
http://www.esalen.org/
As Homer Simpson would say, “Mmmmmm….Esalen”. ILTM like the name of a prohibited substance, distilled no doubt from the leaves of the phenylketonuria plant.
The failure of the whole sexual revolution? Baby and bathwater? I don’t want that. Bet Elosen does though.
sexual revolution = drastic relaxation in the standards of sexual behaviour; the liberalisation of established social and moral attitudes toward sex resulting in greater experimentation with sex outside of marriage; a change in sexual mores based on the ideas of three men: Sigmund Freud, Alfred Kinsey, and Hugh Hefner.
I’d be happy to get rid of that. Also the previous one; the Victorian change in attitudes that gave us a rigid set of moral standards and a prurient attitude on the surface, and hypocrisy and adultery under the surface.
For my part, I’d like the medieval relaxed approach to talking about sex and enjoying sex in its place, combined with a strong set of standards that sees sex as appropriate to marriage and inappropriate for teenage recreation.
Yes, and the industrial revolution can be summed up as an increase in the popularity of soot.
Any sensible dating of the change in mores would begin before Freud, who reacted as well as acted.
But the world of “bastard children” — read Tom Jones, — heavens read anything by Dickens — the world dead marriages from which there could be be no escape, the grinding and shame ridden life of the spinster who missed out, the miserable and destructive sexual ignorance with which children grew to maturity, the contempt and coldness with which society greeted the offspring of harlots, — the misery of a society that drove women to prostitution then damned them for it. — The sexual revolution that has changed western society since the late 19th century can’t be dismissed glibbly.
And if it is all so bleak, so much change for the worst, as Christian writers tell us, — why? why is their less domestic violence in 2011 than in 1850 London? Why does 21st century secular society care for children that the christian governments of the Victorian era let starve?
For my part, I’d like the medieval relaxed approach to talking about sex and enjoying sex in its place, combined with a strong set of standards that sees sex as appropriate to marriage and inappropriate for teenage recreation.
The Middle ages doesn’t give you a humane model. Maybe the middle ages that Chesteron imagined. But not the real one.
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I don’t see the Middle Ages as offering more than just a relatively relaxed approach to sex. The ‘combined with’ introduced a wish, not a further description.
But for all of that, the records of Church courts, the stewardship accounts of great houses, and other everyday records show a very different – and more benign – Middle Ages than the twisted image that I was taught in history.
The real Middle Ages was good for some all of the time, and for others some of the time, and for some not at all. Much like the real 21st Century, but without those most wonderful of inventions, dental anaesthesia, modern sewage and plumbing systems, and medical asepsis.
I’ve just said that I don’t want to go back to Victorianism. Yes, the 19th Century view of sex was seriously warped. The greater openness in the past 50 years has been helpful. But I see that openness as a return to the kind of more natural approach that informed Chaucer’s poetry, rather than something new and different. Other changes in the last 50 years have damaged women, men, and children.
Is there less domestic violence in 2011 than in 1850 London? I don’t know of reliable statistics. But it may be so. The Victorian mindset was itself the result of a sexual revolution fueled over a couple of hundred years by Protestant reformers who held bleak views about predistination and the wickedness of all flesh.
But have things improved? American sources suggest 25 percent of women will experience abuse at the hands of an inimate partner in their lifetime. And that’s just physical abuse. Then there is emotional abuse.
When you talk about the care secular society has for children, does that include the child abuse statistics? Longitudinal studies suggest that 4-10% of New Zealand children experience physical abuse and 11-20% experience sexual abuse during childhood. And that doesn’t include the child deaths in the abortion epidemic.
This article talks about the change between the mid-18th Century and the beginning of the 19th http://www.loyno.edu/~history/journal/1989-0/haller.htm
.
“Other changes in the last 50 years have damaged women, men, and children. “
Well, sure. Nothing’s perfect.
But if, as Toad suspects, Badger is saying that sexual mores today are less considerably worse than they’ve ever been, Toad agrees.
And from reading “The Age of Pilgrimage” by Jonathan Sumption,
(¡Highly recommended!) Toad gets the impression that women were generally regarded as vessels of sin and to be avoided rather like the plague (which was hard to avoid, to be sure.)
Are you treating sexual mores and the treatment of women as the same thing, Toad? If not, I’m not sure of the relevance of your last paragraph.
But I was not talking about sexual mores, anyway, when I praised the Middle Ages; just about acceptance of sexuality as a normal part of life. And that was simply by comparison with Victorianism.
I think we’ve made some gains – but we’ve also made many losses – in the last 50 years. On the whole, having been a teenage girl in the 1960s, raised four teenage girls in the 1990s (and also worked as a support person for troubled teenagers), and looking to a new generation of teenage girls in our family starting two years from now, I think it has become harder for girls to find a relationship in which they are respected; harder for them to find someone who will commit and with whom they can raise a family; but easier for them to take up a non-traditional career. Not a fair, nor a necessary, trade.
.
Make that, “considerably less worse,” and, of course, Toad is referring to the Middle Ages thereafter.
Toad is right about Badger of course.
It is tricky to discuss these issues because people don’t normally agree in advance what the timescale involved is.
The consensus view in Catholic circles is that Western society is in a very bad way, morally speaking. In the introduction to his recent interview with the Pope Peter Seewald has a great deal to say about a society which has lost its bearings and its values.
As I’ve mentioned here before — it is salient— Reagan once said he wanted a return to the “values of the America I grew up in”. The retort came back; “no negroes sitting down on the bus huh?”
In my view a lot of Christians have a distorted view of the present, which is reinforced by their distorted view of the past. — Especially now that Belloc is back in fashion (I saw him cited heavily on NZ conservative recently). — Belloc, satirised by troops on the western front as “Belary Helloc”, the quintessential ‘kept correspondent’ filing endless King and country nonsense with no bearing on reality.
But I digress, the thing is this — if secularisation is so terrible, why isn’t this reflected in the last several centuries of western history?
I can of course hear certain reponses…. NAZIS, STALINISTS, didn’t you know they were ATHEISTS? —— Yes, well I’ll leave the terminally dim to illuminate themselves.
Next point would be, isn’t the modern west pretty rotten? Of course it is, it’s rife with injustice and inhumanity. But that is the human condition, the discussion must be comparative. — The west began slowly decoupling itself from Christianity about 500 years ago (if you agree, as I do, with the common Catholic claim that the reformation was a step towards the breakdown of traditional religion, and ultimately towards atheism). You could move the date up to 300 years ago and the enlightenment if you like.
So in the 300 years that the west has been increasingly steering by a non-Christian moral compass, what has the vector been??? Towards better or worse?
Speaking of the enlightenment, so unpopular in some circles, Thomas Aikenhead makes a nice dividing line. The last Briton to be executed for blasphemy, aged 20.
He had said That the Holy Scriptures were stuffed with such madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that he admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them. That was as late as 1697.
Thinking of earlier times, if one wants to understand what Europe was, look at what much of the middle east and central Asia is
.
Amen.
.
Still, Belloc’s verses are funny.
“…I praised the Middle Ages; just about acceptance of sexuality as a normal part of life.
One or two things, here, Joyful. Surely, a great many Middle Age notables – clerics, mostly – were far from keen about accepting sexuality as a ‘normal’ part of life, quite the reverse, in fact? You would know better than Toad.
Anyway, surely again, sexuality has never been more accepted as a normal part of life than it is today?
Even Toad, who is about as tolerant and liberal as an amphibion can be – is sometimes a little disturbed by stuff like blatant pornography popping up out of nowhere onto his screen.
Bit old fashioned, he is.
Still, he supposes it’s better than pretending sex doesn’t happen to nice people.
And he can’t expect the lines to be drawn with him in mind, can he?
And..while he’s ranting on, Toad regards the entire Middle East as the undisputed and unspeakable utter hell-hole of the planet, stuffed to bursting with the most horrible people imaginable.
He would not set foot in the place on a bet.
If ever a region could do with a force 15 earthquake, it’s not Christchurch, but The Holy Land, he believes.
Better to flatten the entire place, and give it back to the camels, before it’s too late, he suspects.
But it’s almost certainly too late already.
Pornography is by no stretch of the imagination treating sex as a normal part of life.
I will desist from joining Toad in calling down natural disasters on the Holy Land. He’s starting to sound a bit like Isaiah 🙂
My point is that the moral decay and parlous moral state of the west is largely a myth. — Stemming from confusion in the face of social change, and a romanticised view of the past. This fact is neutral with respect to Christianity, but tells against much current apologetics.
It strikes me as noteworthy that in the same period that Chesterton cheerfully wrote Orthodoxy, a man was sentenced to nine months hard labour after declaring– among other similar things– that Jesus would have looked silly riding into Jerusalem on two donkeys, as mixed up Matthew has it. — That’s in 1921. The hard labour broke his health of course. Just like it broke Oscar wilde.
we’ve escaped the decrepid world of such blasphemy laws, and many other cruelties, I simply don’t accept that the narrative about loss of values and moral standards is much more than hogwash.
I think that any such narrative, when applied to a broad social grouping, is necessarily hogwash.
But I also think that there have been occasional backwaters where some level and subset of moral standards have been a taken-for-granted part of the local community. Bede claims that – in Anglo Saxon Christian England – a woman could travel alone across the country with a purse full of gold in perfect safety. In suburban Auckland in the mid-1960s, teenage girls could walk to school on their own, and walk alone through parks and along beaches. My back-country relatives talk of years gone by when they would leave their doors unlocked and go up into the hills, trusting in the honesty of random passers by.
Has Western society lost its moral compass? I wouldn’t make a claim that large. Such a claim would assume that it had a moral compass in the first place, and demonstably it didn’t. Are there more people with shaky or shonky morals than there used to be? It’s hard to say. Certainly, the practices of Wall Street and its ilk seem to have more in common with 17th century pirates than with early 20th century banking, but that’s more a case of what is tolerated than what is believed.
And spending money and people on fruitless, stupid wars has been a perpetual theme of human government throughout time.
But sexual morals? I certainly wouldn’t take Fielding or (for that matter) Austen as my guide to how people actually lived at the time, any more than I’d take Sex in the City or the Simpson as true guides to current Western society. Which leaves me precisely nowhere, or with my own experience.
And my experience, is that some things are worse and some better than they were 50 years ago (when I was old enough to start taking notice).
But what I think we have is not so much moral decay as a broader range of socially acceptable views about what is, and isn’t, moral.
But it’s almost certainly too late already.
Well the combination of monotheism, special revelation, inspired texts, and looming judgement, is a cultural gift of the middle east. — certainly makes a potent combination, for good or ill.
Setting aside the differences between Christianity and Islam, its been an incredible two thousand years, with that combination of ideas sweeping across Europe, and now finally ebbing, and another version of the same thing sweeping east and south, and now finally cresting?
.
Toad believes the Simpsons comes as near as anything can do to being a reflection of current Western society, albeit a bit on the altruistic side.
A guide to it, no.
Bede might be right, (though Toad is inclined to doubt it) but during the Middle Ages, when all Europe was Catholic – pilgrims were being regularly robbed and murdered on the Camino Frances. That is for sure.
And most people lived in walled cities if possible, There was a reason for that.
(An unusually hesitant and uncertain comment here from Joyful, thinks Toad. Almost Montaigne-like. Refreshing to read.)
Toad, most of the time you invest me with more certainty than I claim for myself.
.
“Pornography is by no stretch of the imagination treating sex as a normal part of life.” says Joyful, flatly.
Very debatable. Pornographers would no doubt argue that images of couples, well, coupling, is just about as “normal” as life can get. And they would have a point.
It’s only convention that demands (or did demand) that this activity must not be displayed.
Toad believes there are, or have been, societies where the sight of people eating was abhorrant.
Relativism, here, he thinks. The Pope won’t like this.
They may, indeed, so argue.
But I’d like to see some evidence that sex is intended as a spectator sport.
And, as ever, we come down to definitions. Pornography, in my view, is not just images of couples coupling – which may be art (even religious art in some times and places). Pornography is any image – still or moving – in which one or more people are intended to be used as objects for the sexual gratification of the viewer.
That being said, perhaps you’re right. Treating people as objects for sexual gratification is at least a very common part of life. If that’s what you mean by normal.
.
“But I’d like to see some evidence that sex is intended as a spectator sport.”
Says Joyful. GKC would have enjoyed that comment:
“To those who say sex is a spectator sport, let them ask themselves why, in that case, don’t we ever see it at the Olympic Games?”
he might have written.
Or, on the other hand, not.