27 July 2008

Consequences

Found some stuff at First Things.

From Editor Joseph Bottum:

Finally, the pope warned that contraception would lead people to picture their bodies as somehow possessions, rather than as their actual being. If a woman can paint her house, then why shouldn’t she get her nose bobbed and her breasts blown up with silicon to the size of beachballs? It’s what men seem to like, after all, and the body is just a thing, isn’t it?
From Mary Eberstadt:

The onslaught of porn,” one social observer wrote, “is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as ‘porn-worthy.’” Further, “sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity. . . . If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up. People are not closer because of porn but further apart; people are not more turned on in their daily lives but less so.” And perhaps most shocking of all, this—which with just a little tweaking could easily have appeared in Humanae Vitae itself: “The power and charge of sex are maintained when there is some sacredness to it, when it is not on tap all the time.” This was not some religious antiquarian. It was Naomi Wolf—Third Wave feminist and author of such works as The Beauty Myth and Promiscuities, which are apparently dedicated to proving that women can tomcat, too.
One of two things can form a couple's sexual ethic: the church, or prostitution/pornography. Anyone who doesn't like what the church has to say about chastity and procreation is going to find herself subjected to the whims of a dude (even a husband) whose appetites are determined by a porn-driven world where strippers and hookers set the sexual standards of attractiveness and performance. Take babies out of the sex equation, and anything goes. Many Christian women are forced into humiliating and disgusting appearances, procedures, and acts, because what grounds do they have to say no? It turns him on, and she's his wife.

That alone is worth a marriage's fertility-span spent perpetually parturitional.

6 comments:

William Weedon said...

So my mind in warped, but you know what I thought of when I read this? That the same seduction happens for those who lust after the visible Church and who will not learn to love the Church that is. She's just too ordinary, too plain, too unexceptional. After all, she's only a faithful bride to God bearing sons and daughters daily for the Kingdom. Surely the hottie over in the next patriarchate is where it's at?

RPW said...

Wow...

Take that further...our children are not our children, rather than being a sacred trust from God that we are accountable to Him for how we raise...and a civil trust to raise good citizens (according to Charlotte Mason)....since the role of sex is not to have children...they are a choice in much the same way as buying a car is a choice...

We had our cars over to mechanics because they are too technical. We had our children over to teachers and recognize the judgement of everyone from the obstetrician, the pediatrician, the teachers, the legislators, as more valid judges of what is best for our own children than we are. When the family ceases to be the basic unit of physical survival and it instead becomes the self (and whoever we are hooked up with at the time, either legally or more informally) then life itself is simply about being an object relating to other objects.

William Weedon said...

One more oddball comment: to a godly man there is no woman more beautiful than she who has given birth to his and her children - and each stretch mark, each gray hair, becomes a testimony to her sacrifice of love, and he cherishes these signs in her of such love. To him her who bears these signs will always have a beauty deeper than all the gloss that the porn distributers can dream up. And that's not bull. That's the truth.

Sandra Ostapowich said...

I stumbled across an interesting article that fits along in with this...



FWIW.

Dawn said...

Roar.

I'm still game for an afternoon of picket protests at V.S. Just call the location.

Reb. Mary said...

Fr. WW: your comments aren't random or oddball, but timely and appreciated :)