Pope and Porn

Pope Leo's new encyclical worries about porn trivializing the body. But the Church did too.

In Pope Leo’s new encyclical on AI and human dignity, he worries about pornography “trivializ(ing) the body and emotions” (Magnifica Humanitas §141).

Image from Crux

He is right to worry about this trivialization.

However, the Church is responsible for building another kind of trivialization of the body and emotions.

The Church did not cause pornography. But it created the theological conditions pornography needs to exist. The split between body and soul, desire and love, spirit and flesh, and the theology of the body as dangerous and sinful, is the architecture shared by both purity culture and pornography. Purity culture suppresses the body in service of the sacred and colonizes it as an object of shame. Pornography commodifies the body divorced from the sacred and exploits it as an object of gratification. Both require the split. Neither can tolerate the integration.

The integration, as Audre Lorde describes in her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” is the integration of sensation and meaning in the erotic, where the body’s experience is received as knowledge, as communication. The Church commodified the Erotic image of integration in the Incarnation, where sensation (flesh) and meaning (Word) meet, placed it on the altar, and threatened your dignity to exile it out of your bedroom in the name of protection. Shame-based formations like confessions and purity pledges have only driven the erotic into the shadows and produced sexed bodies that consume sexuality as commodity and discipline their own wanting.

Donna Freitas, in her book, “Sex and the Soul,” studied sexuality and religion on college campuses and found that students who came from strong purity culture backgrounds either shut sexuality down or swung to completely disembodied sexual encounters with no relational meaning.

I have experienced the live demonstration of the mechanism producing its intended effects in real time. Earlier this month, I posted a video in lingerie making the argument that the God who created the clitoris is not afraid of what God made. I was refusing the split in form and content. In one day, I lost 1,700 followers and the post was saved 1,700 times. The split runs in real time: 1,700 desires were driven underground. They may not be the same people but the architecture produces exactly this: a person divided against themselves, wanting what they have been taught to penalize. Closing the incognito window you opened does not discard the part of you that you cannot bear to integrate.

Where do we go from here? How do we integrate when what has been modeled seems to be either 1) the porn industry presenting a particular vision of what sex looks like, who it is for, what bodies are acceptable, and what responses are expected, or 2) the Church enforcing desire to appear contained, procreative, marital, disciplined, and always suspect? We build the capacity to inhabit ourselves without external authorities telling us what it means. We start asking what neither porn nor the Church asked: what does the person inside the body actually know?

This is what I have been building toward.

The course I am developing, God and Sex, explores a theology of the body that takes desire seriously as a site of encounter with God. God does not worry about being dirty. God came to be dirty, so we might not trivialize the body.

God is dirty.

And if we can make our way out of the clean, we might find out what God has always known about us.

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