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.