Real Men Don't Buy Porn |
||
Crisis |
||
A Journal of
Lay Catholic Opinion, Pornography's Threat to Men "Soft
Porn" Plays Hardball Something has gone wrong with the men in our Society. The problems range from the poignant—the pain and bewilderment of women approaching their forties wondering why they can't find husbands—to the tragic, gruesome, and evil—divorce, wife-battering, the feminization of poverty, and daily news reports of macabre sex crimes involving the torture and murder of children. The statistics are almost unprecedented in history. What happened? "Soft Porn" Plays Hardball lays much of the blame squarely at the feet of the so-called "Soft Porn" industry led by Hugh Hefner and his imitators. This book, published in 1991, has been a bit of a sleeper, but its message needs to be shouted from the housetops. Reisman's arguments are so clear, and obvious, that the reader is likely to pause and wonder, "How was this allowed to happen?" "How did we not see this before?" Hugh Hefner has enjoyed a peculiar immunity for the last 40 years. He is after all a "Playboy"—seen as a lovable rogue, and like his magazine, a bit naughty but harmless. Reisman calls the reader to take another look. She chronicles how the once-average-young-man Hefner was galvanized in the early 1950s by the fraudulent Kinsey Report (See Reisman's earlier work Kinsey, Sex and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People), and proceeded to single-handedly overturn the sexual mores of his time. Reisman quotes Hefner: "Playboy freed a generation from guilt about sex, changed some laws and helped launch a revolution or two . . . . Playboy is the magazine that changed America." Reisman's findings prove Hefner exactly right, but rather than deserving the applause Hefner expects, the results have been catastrophic. She shows that "soft-core" pornography, winked at by society, has emasculated men and bred in them selfishness and irresponsibility; similarly, it has victimized women and children by exposing them to ridicule, exploitation, abuse, violence, poverty, and death. Society uncritically accepted Hefner's pose as a philosopher while his magazine made inroads into America's bedrooms, coming between husband and wife and even, Reisman demonstrates, between men and their own masculinity. Playboy has also made inroads into the psyches of more than one generation of children. Thanks to Hefner's legacy, practically every American male under the age of 50 has had his sexuality formed in a pornographic culture. This, in turn, has produced in women an epidemic of fear and distrust of men. And worse. The greatest danger of "soft porn," and Playboy magazine in particular, lies in its alleged "innocence." Behind the wholesome good looks of the naked "girl next door" portrayed in its pages lies an agenda hidden only by society's mass denial. In a particularly fascinating chapter, "A Neuro-Chemical Addiction," Reisman shows how this agenda is focused on the realm a man enters when his normal fascination with women's appearance becomes an insatiable addiction. Addiction brings denial in its wake, and this has taken place on a culture-wide level. With impressive insight Reisman points out the key distinction between healthy sexual desire and the lust that enslaves the pornography addict. She says the addict has "an intoxicated, disoriented central nervous system. Pornography is media induced stress." The addict becomes addicted not to sex per se, but to the "rush" pornography produces. Drawing on the poet David Mura she says, "Underneath all the assertions of 'healthy fun' the casual user senses anxiety and shame. In the addict, fear, loneliness, and sadness fuel the endless consumption of magazines, prostitutes, strip shows, and X-rated films. In pornography, one often experiences a type of vertigo, a fearful exhilaration, a moment when ties to the outside world do indeed seem to be cut or numbed. That sense of endless falling, that rush, is what the addict seeks again and again." She demonstrates how the pornographers work through a juxtaposition of stimuli to have an effect:
To reach this "rush," the addict must turn to ever-more-sensational stimuli and novelty. To one who is moving more deeply into shame and anxiety, novelty lies in the direction of innocence. Thus, Reisman shows, in this world where all relations become sexualized, children become an obvious target. In addition, rather than the tenderness that marital love inspires, the stress of increasingly unnatural sex leads to violence fueled by shame and guilt. No wife can produce what the addict seeks because conjugal love is an entirely different act from indulging in pornography. Reisman shows the difference:
This chapter alone is worth the price of the book for its clear and concise explanation of the mysterious power that pornography—especially soft porn, with its alleged innocence—has over so many men, even men unwilling to be mastered by it who struggle with persistent and unwanted temptations. This chapter makes an excellent resource for pastors and confessors trying to help men break out of the cycle, and is perhaps the best treatment of this problem in the popular literature. The appendices of the book also give detailed instructions on what citizens can do to combat the spread of pornography in their communities. The reader comes away from this book with the feeling that Reisman has put her finger on the reason for the contemporary breakdown of the family and of masculinity and fatherhood in particular. And maybe she has. |
||
|
||
