More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
the moral status of pornography is irrelevant; the big question is whether it works for the individual, whether it enhances the individual’s understanding or experience of her own sexuality, whether it gives pleasure.
it is not bad because it contravenes traditional codes of sexual morality. It is bad because it may have a detrimental effect on some women’s inner sense of well-being with their physical appearance. It is bad as and when it fails the therapeutic test.
Fantasy worlds left unchecked have a habit of impinging on reality and remaking it in their own image.
Perhaps the most obvious point in this context is that pornography detaches sex from real bodily encounter.
sexual assault strikes deeply at who we are at the very core of our being. It denies our full selfhood and our identity. Yet pornography, too, strikes against all this. It detaches the observer’s sexual pleasure from bodily encounter and thus renders it a private, personal matter, and it trivializes the sexual act portrayed by making it significant only as a matter of third-party entertainment.
If freedom and happiness are epitomized in sexual satisfaction, then pornography becomes a medium, perhaps the obvious and certainly the easiest and least personally costly medium, of liberation and fulfillment.
The sexual encounters between a husband and wife find their deeper meaning not in the personal pleasure of the moment but in the way those encounters are intended to strengthen and reinforce the unique relationship that exists between the two partners, one shaped by a shared past and present and open to a shared future.
pornography, with its message that sex is about personal satisfaction, focuses on the pleasure of the present moment, without reference to past or future.
The pornification of culture inevitably involves the trivialization of sex.
sexual expectations,
Nothing is demanded of him, and he gives nothing in return. It is, to use Mark Regnerus’s term, very cheap sex.
Porn encourages immorality because it treats people as means, not ends—which is exactly what casual sex does.
Sexual release is commodified, packaged, and sold.
The right to pleasure may be assured, 24/7, but it carries with it the debasement of human beings.
pornography epitomizes the sexual revolution because it presents sex as merely a physical, pleasurable act that is divorced from any greater relational significance.
pornography is simply one manifestation of our contemporary world of therapy and expressive individualism,
if porn works for you, if it promotes that sense of inner well-being that is the basic moral imperative of the therapeutic age, then as long as nobody was harmed in its production, as long as everybody on the film set consented (and let us not worry overmuch about the problematic nature of defining and discerning consent), then all is good.
The advent of gay rights, and now transgender rights, has served only to intensify the pressure for such sex education earlier and earlier in a child’s life.
the plot is likely always to demand it because that is what the audience has come to expect as a sign of authenticity.
how something that “feels so right” can be wrong.
If the lyrics do not matter, why are so many of these songs preoccupied with sex? This reality surely indicates something of the way sex has come to be the dominant idiom for expressive individualism in our contemporary culture.
The erotic/pornographic has triumphed in our culture to the point that it is precisely the advocacy of traditional sexual mores that has come to be regarded at best as ridiculous, at worst as downright immoral and oppressive.
The triumph of pornography is both evidence of the death of God and one means by which he is killed.
Expressed in other Rieffian terminology, it embodies the death of first and second worlds, built on sacred order, and the rise of a third world, built on the rejection of any sacred order whatsoever. It is not that third worlds build on second worlds; they repudiate them and demolish them.
it promotes a view of history that plays precisely to the kind of narrative that grips the popular imagination—the past is a land of sexual repression and therefore oppression.
it seeks not simply to expand traditional moral categories but to demonize and destroy them.
Debating skirt lengths or the acceptability of bikinis assumes a concept of modesty
Pornography seeks to make the very concept of modesty a laughable, unrealistic notion in its entirety.
modesty is immoral, and modest people are repressed, incomplete, and less fulfilled than they could or should be.
No one can deny that sex has been a powerful cultural force. But the detachment of sex from any larger metaphysical narrative and its placement at the center of how we think of ourselves is new—and, one might add, lethal to cultures of the first and second worlds.
Sex is identity, sex is politics, sex is culture.
And central to this thinking is the notion that traditional sexual codes that value celibacy and chastity actually militate against authenticity, something that is now intuitive.
nobody has to have seen the film The 40-Year-Old Virgin to know that it is a comedy, for the idea of a middle-aged virgi...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
To reach forty without being sexually active is indicative of a failed life.
The inanity and vulgarity that has been undermining culture has also damaged in some way one of democratic society’s most important achievements in our day and age: sexual liberation, the disappearance of many taboos and prejudices surrounding erotic life. Because, as in art and literature, the disappearance of the idea of form in matters of sex is not progress but rather a backward movement that denatures freedom and impoverishes sex, reducing it to something purely instinctive and animalistic.
Indeed, an essential element of surrealism’s coming into being was precisely the recognition that Enlightenment individualism had ceased to be a tool of human emancipation and was displaying increasingly oppressive aspects.”
Surrealism proclaims the omnipotence of desire, and the legitimacy of its realization.
“The moment I treat physical sex as something complete in itself and take no account of its profoundest function, namely, in wedded love, I falsify its ultimate significance and become blind to the mystery it contains. Physical sex is certainly something distinct from love, but, nevertheless, between it and wedded love there subsists a preestablished harmony. Its true significance as an experience is inseparable from its character as the expression and flower of a specific kind of love.”
Gay marriage did not make gay marriage plausible; the Supreme Court did not make gay marriage plausible. Gay marriage is plausible because of the wider transformation of the social imaginary that we have noted in earlier chapters, and the background to and justification offered by the majority for the Obergefell decision demonstrate this fact.
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
This is a concise articulation of the expressive individualism and psychological subjectivity regarding the self
Serial killers and child molesters still (thankfully) do not have the right to “define their own concept of existence” in twenty-first-century America.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the two men and thus overthrew a previous judgment in the 1986 case of Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), in which the court had upheld a Georgia law forbidding oral and anal sex between consenting adults.
result-oriented expedient
If society needs abortion rights to keep women happy, then the law must be made to yield such results. If society requires the affirmation of certain sexual activities and identities to affirm certain classes of individuals, then the law must be made to yield those results—even
Under DOMA, every individual enjoyed the same rights and labored under the same restrictions as everyone else.
It would seem that such a judgment can be understood only in a situation in which equality is defined as the ability of every individual to redefine marriage in the manner in which he or she chooses.
Polygamy and (even more so) bestiality still stand outside the current framework of what is socially acceptable. And it is that framework that ultimately determines what is rational judgment and what is irrational animus.
The ruling that gay marriage is constitutional and therefore to be recognized by the states rests on four particular principles as stated in the majority opinion:
A first premise
