No, pornography is imagery which is designed to incite lust. That is the objective definition.
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Get rid of contraception and the demand for pornography and abortion all but dries up within one or two generations. Yea, there will always be a demand, but it will be severely impacted. Contraception is the root cause. The OP has asked a vitally important question.
-Tim-
Grace & Peace!
Timothy, there is a lot in your post with which I whole-heartedly agree, but there are other things in it which I think need to be treated with more nuance.
Pornography does not create in us desires that are not already there. What pornography does, which is so insidious, is to claim to represent the good desire we do have most fully and completely. The moment that we claim this representation of our desire to be our desire is the moment we are alienated us from our own good desire in such a way that what we desire and how we desire it both become objects to be consumed.
And let’s be clear, eros is not evil. Classically defined, it is the love of the low for the high, a love which moves us outside of ourselves and towards a goodness which we gratuitously desire, which gratuitously gifts itself to us and which we joyfully receive as a good gift. Our love of the good, the true, the beautiful is necessarily erotic. Our love for Christ is necessarily erotic (read the poetry of John of the Cross, or the Song of Solomon for proof of this Holy Eros). Our desire for intimacy with what is good, true, and beautiful is a good desire. Our desire for intimacy with Christ is a good desire–the best desire.
But an eros which ceases to move us outside of ourselves is an eros that ceases to recognize the gratuitous gift of goodness and refuses to receive it
as a gift, seeking instead to appropriate the good to itself not as a gift freely given, but as a thing to be consumed. Our good desire becomes disordered thereby. Our eros becomes self- and not other-oriented. It becomes a kind of narcissism. It becomes in us a root of sin.
In short, the difference between a Holy Eros and an unholy lust is in whether or not the desire moves us outside of ourselves and purely for the sake of the gratuitous goodness, truth and beauty of what is good, true and beautiful. That is Holy Eros. Lust is purely appropriative, self-centered and alienating.
Ending the availability of contraception will not make pornography go away. These days, our culture is profoundly pornographic, and perhaps not only in the way you might expect. If I remember correctly, the Greek word porneia carried with it a sense of the commercializing of desire: desire that you pay for. Which is to say: a desire that appropriates is porneia. You don’t need websites, magazines and DVDs to be deeply involved in porneia, nor does a lack of contraception mean that sexual desire will cease to be appropriative or self-centered. Our consumer culture is fundamentally pornographic. The way we consume world events (the number of news outlets which speak of “my news” is incredibly troubling) is fundamentally pornographic. A lack of contraception will not suddenly rectify the disastrous relationship we have to ourselves and to our world which is at the root of our pornographic, acquisitive and poisonous culture.
Because pornography is not a catalyst of bad desire, but the most obvious symptom of a disease of desire, of a social illness which masquerades as a greater social good: the belief that we should get what we want, that we’re important or exceptional in and of ourselves, that the customer is always right, that we deserve a break today. It is a disease which leads to an extremely individualistic and atomized society, which sees the good as determined by the needs and desires of an autonomous, self-generating (thefore highly illusory, mind you!) Selfhood/Individuality. It is the empire of relativism writ large. Using legislation or the political process to cure this illness is doomed from the start–the political process is deeply infected already. There is no salvation, as the Psalmist says, in the horse or its rider–armies, kings, judges, legislatures, institutions, bureaucracies cannot produce the peace which passeth all understanding. You cannot legislate the Kingdom of the God of Love into existence.
The only cure is simple: the self-giving, self-emptying, other-oriented, unconditional love of God. Our call is to love, but it is also to receive the gratuitous love of God which is, by nature, salutary. The more that we open ourselves to that love by grace, the more it teaches us how to be open to it, the more it shapes us into pure vessels of love, true images of itself, reforming our desires, and the more it moves through us to others. This is part of that Kingdom which the world cannot give us, a Kingdom which looks like the beautiful Body of God, of which we are called to be members.
Under the Mercy,
Mark
All is Grace and Mercy! Deo Gratias!
Could be a make believe fetish though.