Modern lnternet "porn" is literally terrorism. Freya's reaction to it is the intended outcome. It's purpose is to enrage men and terrify women. And completely traumatize children. It is terrorism.
I feel like the pro-sex people are the ones who dislike porn. Watching porn is like the sexual equivalent of living on ramen noodles and Mountain Dew and loving, procreative sex is like a glorious four-course meal made over the course of an entire day. To me porn is like, the antithesis of sex. It's disembodied, it's gross, it's as removed from humanity as possible. It literally destroys intimacy.
Oh absolutely yes to all of this! It’s like trading luxury for Walmart. Porn users and sex buyers are engaging in practices that are decidedly anti-sex, and so are the sellers/performers. Any part of it which could appear glamorous on the outside to naive/stupid people is just smoke and mirrors, and it’s quite sad.
There are so many parts of this piece that I wish I could quote!
Your conversation with that (potentially) AI bot was wild. Do we really think women involved in sex work a profiting just because they get a check at the end of it? To me women truly profiting from this industry would mean so much more than that.
Also eroticism has always been a part of human nature. Just look at how much erotic poetry is out there. But porn, especially the entity it has morphed into is all but natural.
Thank you, Emily, for another really great piece. If porn was as "natural" as its proponents state it is, then it would also be more equitably distributed between men and women, but it is not. The reason that the entire concept of "male escort services" (men prostituting themselves for women customers) is such a joke is because nearly every woman on the planet does not need to pay for men to have sex with her, so there is no market for this variety of porn (except of course, that some men get off on this too).
This movie is not porn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Luck_to_You,_Leo_Grande, but an exploration of women's unfulfilled sexual desires, which are often not appreciated as we are socialized to pretend that sex is great, even when it's not. (Another thing that I can't imagine men doing.)
Although you didn't comment on this aspect of separating reproduction from our bodily reality, this is what surrogacy does too. Men renting vaginas for 40 minutes are the same as anyone renting a woman's entire body for 40 weeks. Babies are collateral damage when they are bought and sold. So called "altruistic" surrogacy is no better because babies can't tell the difference between being taken away from their birth mothers is for "love" or for money.
Thank you for reading and sharing all of this as well, I will have to check that movie out.
I do believe egg donation and surrogacy is just the latest form of prostitution, it could just be called “reproductive prostitution” really. That is something I would like to write about in a whole separate article I think! Although perhaps you yourself already have, let me know if so!
I also think that attention needs to be paid to a more recent trend in surrogacy, which is that of older men buying babies. Why do single men who are 60+ years of age suddenly decide that what they need in their lives is a newborn?
Oh gosh I actually hadn’t heard of this yet but my stomach already hurts thinking about it. I have really been wanting to write about that organization “Men Having Babies” and now I see you already did the job! It’s on my to read list now.
The other force for evil in today's world are the transhumanists, who funnily enough (ha, ha, not) are mainly obscenely wealthy white guys, some of whom claim a womanface identity, which kind of says it all really.
I don’t want to poke holes in the edges of your argument, but There are male escorts in hyper capitalist places like South Korea.
And a great many men have to pretend sex is good; often to other men, but it certainly is not exclusively. Men are not always the same as the male façade.
I can't get behind this. Barnes and Noble is wall to wall woman porn, from cover to cover. Marketed to kids. Just because it's in verbal and not image form doesn't change what it is.
...And, the events and social mores in it are possibly more disturbing, hard as that is to believe.
I agree that some of the themes of erotica marketed at women are really out there and wild (at least this is what social media is telling me, I certainly do not partake), and I agree that this is very harmful and insidious, and increasingly so. I do think it is tricky to compare buying sex from prostitutes or consuming hardcore porn (which women do as well, yes, but I think we all know at lower rates) to reading books. This is due to the actual, real life commodification of human beings, and the demand for which creates a demand for sex trafficking. Not to mention, yes women’s erotica may have some crazy and gross themes going on, but there are children being raped and filmed in reality—and this theme is worse than any fictional werewolf sex or whatever the hell those books are about. And in these cases, it is almost exclusively driven by male demand, so we have to be honest about weighing these sexual differences and the preferences that go along with them and how they actually play out in reality, and I just don’t think erotica is creating problems of the same weight as human trafficking and child abuse.
I agree with you Emily about women's erotic literature being vastly different to male filmed porn. I challenge anyone to find a titillating theme of child rape/abuse in a story aimed at women. Many women have sexual fantasies, but they would not want to see this depicted by real people because the nature of fantasy is something that either can't or probably can't actually happen (or in reality, you would not want it to happen). That's what makes it a fantasy!
Wow. Is it possible to purchase hard copies of this essay and some others? I want to bind them and save them for my son to read when he’s older. He’s way too young to talk about anything like this right now. He’s 5 and I’m careful to only let him watch things with reverence for life, heroes who save it, and natural families with mom and dad, nothing at all that is part of the agenda right now. Just traditional things. He knows when a man an a woman love “youchother”, as he says, they get married and make a baby from their love. He has a favourite girlfriend at school and he said she will be his wife. lol he’s so cute and special. But I constantly share your work with my sisters and mom- wish my partner could read for more than 2 sentences or have discussions like this but he doesn’t have patience etc. at least he’s a traditional Catholic god fearing Albanian from the North so he agrees with me in what content our son can watch and what stories I read to him and who he can spend time with. We’re very careful about that. But it feels like such an enormous thing to be battling…… anyway. I’d love hard copies… I love this piece.
Thank you! I don’t know how one would purchase hard copies but you are welcome to print them out! I would like to eventually write a book about a lot of the times I write about though, maybe it will be finished by the time your boy is old enough to read it (God willing 😂). I appreciate your words and your sharing my work, and I am so, so encouraged to hear about other women like yourself dedicating themselves to parenting their children in the ways you describe here because it is so very important for our future generations and their happiness.
This is excellent. And I bet those few privileged voices in the sex industry would be vastly outnumbered if all women involved gave their honest opinions about how “empowering” it is.
I am very sympathetic to your position and you’ve written several wonderful lines in this article. The spooky, implacable nature of the AI respondent—all logic, unmoored from ethics or humanity—is a great illustration of what we’re up against.
The sexual marketplace and ecology to which you object strongly resembles the pre-Christian Classical mores of the Roman Empire, when the deciding factor was widespread slavery, not digital technology.
Your visceral, passionate moral indignation and your objections as a woman, wife and mother to the re-emergence of these callous “industrial” (or dehumanised / dehumanising) sexual mores is justified and absolutely right, but the reason for this phenomenon is deeper than our current rapidly evolving technological capabilities.
Thank you so much Chris, I truly appreciate your words of support and also your constructive insight to where I can also shift my focus to and learn more about, as that topic is one I am aware of but fairly ignorant of the details on! If you have any suggestions for reading I would love them!
Hi Emily, I always enjoy your perspective and your expository prose. As it happens, I can recommend a wonderful book; its only flaw is its terrible title. Sarah Ruden is a classics scholar who in mid-career read Paul’s letters. Apparently biblical scholars don’t know classics and classical scholars never read the Bible. Sarah brings her deep knowledge of the culture and society of the Roman Empire to her reading of Paul’s letters with astonishing results. Sarah herself thought of Paul as a misogynist and a prude until she read his letters in the original Koiné Greek. She was astounded to realize how progressive and supportive of women Paul really is, what a defender of slave women he is, how compassionate and understanding his perspective really is when the context in which he wrote is fully explained. It’s a great book that changed my thinking, and very relevant to the issues that are troubling your heart and mind: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/paul-among-the-people-the-apostle-reinterpreted-and-reimagined-in-his-own-time_sarah-ruden/316533/item/4746271/
If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to know what you think.
Sarah and I exchanged emails for several months pre-COVID and she was indeed a feisty, independent soul, a practicing Quaker so a Lefty who I think was slipping into TDS even before the Plandemic. I am an admirer of her scholarship and also have read her translation of the Gospels and her book The Face of Water. Her astonishing insights into the kindness and compassion of Paul remain the aspect of her work that has made the most profound impression on my thinking.
BTW here’s a very relevant Substack article about Paul’s criticisms of the sexual mores of the Roman Empire demonstrating again that the heartless exploitation and disconnection from life and love of today’s sexual ecology has happened before and has much deeper causes than digital technology: https://open.substack.com/pub/mankind/p/how-christianity-cracked-down-on?r=exi3h&utm_medium=ios
Love everything about this. We are so conditioned to accept the commercialization of everything. The wholeness and goodness of my body* has always been a silent rebuke, but I appreciate how well you put it into words.
Yesterday I wrote this. I think it fits rather well.
The destruction of the Patriarchy (the father present at home) has had the same effect on romantic relationships as the destruction of the Matriarchy (the mother present at home) has had on our food and diet:
Short sighted “snacking”: gratification of our desire that leads to underdevelopment, and a breakdown of self-respect, responsibility, lack of planning and missing out on the best in favour of the serial easiest*.
This is genius! I think it could be applied to a lot of modernity really. Social media reels and tweets being the “snacking” for the mind rather than reading books and writing comes to mind as the most obvious, but the snacking analogy has a lot of potential! Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for writing this. I wrote something similar recently, perhaps from more of a male perspective, but I put it behind a paywall. I’m thinking of unlocking it at some point. I’m working on a follow-up post (not to be paywalled) on how to move forward to rediscover private, committed, loving, monogamous intimacy, which I think is infinitely more erotic than any amount of hardcore pornography.
As for your possibly AI interlocutor, aside from the “This upset me, therefore it’s offensive and wrong” non sequitur argument, the argument that “Sexual desire X is natural, therefore it is good and to be encouraged,” is just nonsense based partly on incorrect Romantic ideas about the inner purity of the untutored “blank slate” human being and partly on a misreading of Freud as arguing that because sexual repression causes neurosis (questionable, but accepting it for the sake of argument) therefore all repression is bad. Some things are worth getting neurotic over, and the exploitation of other human beings is one of them. Civilisation relies on some repression of selfish instinct for the sake of family and community.
I am very inclined to agree with your last points there. Some degree of neuroticism is required for survival of the species after all! Self control/repression of harmful urges is also necessary and good on both micro and macro levels, for individuals, the family like you mentioned (the micro society) and outer society as well. Anyone who denies this is simply an addict of some form on some level.
Great essay Emily! Have you read Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae? I found reading that to really form my views on human sexuality. There is so much beauty when the unitive and procreative aspects of sex remain intact. I think those 2 pieces are like a rope entwined together and when they are severed it all just falls apart - literally and figuratively.
I haven’t but I really need to and am planning to now. I have had so many people mention it to me as a recommendation, I do not think I can ignore it any longer! Thank you!
Great essay Emily - your writing improves from piece to piece. Your children and husband are lucky to have such a thoughtful woman in their lives!
Quick question - are you religious at all? I ask because the arguments you use here, while secular, are completely in line with natural law theory and Christian ethical teaching. One of the reasons I turned to Christianity after years of secularism is because I noted all the social ills of modern society you've outlined here and wondered, "why is this the case?" I began to find modern utilitarian and choice based ethics deeply unsatisfying, and when I discovered natural law theory the obvious design built into our humanity began to make sense to me. Sex has both reproductive and unitive purposes, and to frustrate either purpose leads to social dysfunction - when Humane Vitae was written the Pope at the time correctly predicted that the contraceptive pill would lead to further objectification and disrespect towards women, and how could any good faith person argue with him? Liberals have no understanding of sex as they have no insight into the essential nature of the human being.
As an aside, you might enjoy the works of D.H. Lawrence, especially his final work Lady Chatterly's Lover. Writing in the 1920s he correctly identified technology as leading to disembodied sexuality and general rejection of life alongside it.
Thank you so much, especially for the comment about my writing improving, I can hardly read the first few things I published on here so that has been my aim!
As for your question, I am learning more about religion and trying to forge a path towards what version of it that I want to pursue. I was baptized and raised Methodist until my teen years, my parents switched churches to a Baptist megachurch at that time in my life and I was completely turned off by their rhetoric and their aesthetics to be honest. That paired with my contrarian attitude at the time led to my claiming of agnosticism. As the years have gone by and I have given birth to more children, I have become more and more pulled back towards the religious life, but I am interested in pursuing an altogether different version of what I have been exposed to previously. My eldest child goes to a Catholic school so I am considering pursuing our RCIA classes.
I am aware of natural law theory, and find it extremely compelling. I have been exposed to it through the work of Jennifer Lahl, and also from the work of Katy Faust. I have been interested in learning more about it though, as I find it very much in line with what I instinctively intuit about human nature, especially with regard to the body. Do you have any suggestions for reading on the topic?
FWIW this is what pushed me to Catholicism as well. I do find the American puritan mindset still lingers in American Catholicism and am partial to the traditional Italian, Spanish, and French Catholicism that venerates the beauty of the human body and which produced works like Michaelangelo's David. Growing up, I had a good friend from Paris, and she said her biggest problem with Americans was how they viewed even a young child's nakedness as sexual/bad. French society is far from perfect but she was making an excellent point, and I think historically Catholic teaching was good about embracing the beauty of sexuality.
Humanae Vitae and JPII's "Love and Responsibility" are both wonderful. JPII actually talks about how the initial sexual impulse and attraction we feel to someone else is not sinful even if it's not in the proper context of marriage etc. - it's how we respond to that impulse - which is lost in most Christian discourse about sexuality now.
Curious when you turned to Catholicism? I also am finding myself drawn to the more original, European religious teaching but I admittedly just have no idea where to really start, I only even feel this way due to what others have told me they believe would be a good fit for me based on what I write. I really need to read Humanae Vitae, I think at least 20 people have told me to, I think that is more than a sign 😂
I went through RCIA at 19 but I had my "come to Jesus" moment about contraception etc. when I was 23. I was living a bit...loosely on several doctrines before then.
I myself am Eastern Orthodox, but I find many aspects of Catholic thought compelling (though nothing I am about to recommend is contrary to Orthodox teaching).
Kelly recommended Humanae Vitae and Love and Responsibility, and I second both. Theology of the Body, also by JPII, is superb and absolutely relevant to what your interests are.
Ed Feser, a Catholic philosopher, has a blog that is a very valuable resource and is completely paywall free. What I like most about Ed's blog is that he's a very concise writer and you don't need a background in philosophy to understand his work. His blog and book are excellent introductions to natural law, as natural law theory has its roots in Thomas Aquinas, and being a 13th century thinker his modes of thinking are very pre-modern. Feser helps make his work more digestible to the modern mind. Here's a compilation of posts on natural law re: the body and sexuality. https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/06/love-and-sex-roundup.html?m=1
My personal favourite philosopher is David Bentley Hart; his book "The Experience of God" is what turned me to theism. Orthodoxy doesn't have the same developed natural law thinking as Catholicism, but I think you'll appreciate his work on pornography in this article: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-pornography-culture
There's also this article that really affected by Patricia Snow, a Catholic writer. She analyses Lady Chatterly's Lover and Catholic sexual ethics using natural law theory, though she doesn't term it that way: https://firstthings.com/self-abuse/
This is so, so helpful and exactly what I was hoping for. Feser especially looks very compelling, as I struggle with reading things that are as old as Aquinas but have wanted to understand his work. Thank you for taking the time to share and curate it all here so nicely with links!
Emily....I would like to add....there’s something deeply symbolic here, beyond biology. The loss of wildness isn't just about how life is created, but how life is lived. When we outsource not only birth but also meaning-making to machines and systems, we risk severing our connection to the primal, the mysterious, the sacred rhythms that have always grounded us.
We didn’t just come from wombs, we came from wonder. From the earthy, messy, miraculous process of life emerging through relationship.
If we lose that, if we sterilise even the origin of life itself, what else do we make mechanical in the process?
The danger isn’t just in what we’re building, it’s in what we forget along the way.
"But don’t erase us to do it." I see this constantly, and is always a jaw dropping non sequitur. To think something = mass genocide. These words, they don't mean what you think they mean.
But I think I understand what they're saying, which is difficult since it's so demented and mentally ill. "They" are their "Identities" their Ego, so to speak. So they "Identify" with being a sex worker for example, so if there are no sex workers they disappear. This literally the belief they are describing, or Trans, or Gay, or whatever today's "Identity" is.
But to most of humanity, it looks like this: I am a Plumber. That is my Identity. When I swap over to being an Electrician, the Plumber disappears, is "Erased." He is killed. While this is true in some impossibly narrow, shallow sense, QUITE OBVIOUSLY IT IS FALSE, dangerously, totally, completely false, and we all know it. We don't use words this way, or not in any other category. It's a thought-stopper, a smoke bomb. It's an "I want this, so don't cross me" warning. You can have it, that's not what we're saying. It's profoundly mentally ill to accuse people of murder for saying you should switch occupations.
You're leaped in one to the level of needing to be committed as a danger to yourself and others and I didn't make you do that. The greater problem here is, we on the outside are entertaining such words, or anything that comes around, nearby, with, or from them. If someone proves themselves this mentally ill as an opener, that there are Cambell's Soup Dragons in their pocket, clearly everything they say after isn't worth engaging with as mental or social equals. That doesn't mean we don't have charity, but the location and purpose of the discussion is suddenly very, very different.
I agree. Those sorts of statements are just discussion-killers, and hyperbolic statements that reveal the speaker’s over-identification with an idea. It is the words-as-literal-violence thing, which is just stupid and foolish.
I will say I have discussed the topic of “female erasure” in terms of how language is being shifted to include males and trans-identified women who think they are males in with women (the whole “uterus owner” bullshit), and this is because “woman” is not an identity or an idea-it is an actual fact, and shifting language that is there to signify biological reality to include subjective, often delusional, ideas is not a good thing. This is especially so in certain contexts, like medical ones where biology truly matters.
Modern lnternet "porn" is literally terrorism. Freya's reaction to it is the intended outcome. It's purpose is to enrage men and terrify women. And completely traumatize children. It is terrorism.
I think this is a very apt description, thank you.
You could also call it war rape; because it clearly attempts to break morale and render people hopeless, helpless, and angry.
I feel like the pro-sex people are the ones who dislike porn. Watching porn is like the sexual equivalent of living on ramen noodles and Mountain Dew and loving, procreative sex is like a glorious four-course meal made over the course of an entire day. To me porn is like, the antithesis of sex. It's disembodied, it's gross, it's as removed from humanity as possible. It literally destroys intimacy.
Oh absolutely yes to all of this! It’s like trading luxury for Walmart. Porn users and sex buyers are engaging in practices that are decidedly anti-sex, and so are the sellers/performers. Any part of it which could appear glamorous on the outside to naive/stupid people is just smoke and mirrors, and it’s quite sad.
There are so many parts of this piece that I wish I could quote!
Your conversation with that (potentially) AI bot was wild. Do we really think women involved in sex work a profiting just because they get a check at the end of it? To me women truly profiting from this industry would mean so much more than that.
Also eroticism has always been a part of human nature. Just look at how much erotic poetry is out there. But porn, especially the entity it has morphed into is all but natural.
Yes! I am not opposed to eroticism in any way, but I think the distinction matters a lot.
Thank you, Emily, for another really great piece. If porn was as "natural" as its proponents state it is, then it would also be more equitably distributed between men and women, but it is not. The reason that the entire concept of "male escort services" (men prostituting themselves for women customers) is such a joke is because nearly every woman on the planet does not need to pay for men to have sex with her, so there is no market for this variety of porn (except of course, that some men get off on this too).
This movie is not porn: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Luck_to_You,_Leo_Grande, but an exploration of women's unfulfilled sexual desires, which are often not appreciated as we are socialized to pretend that sex is great, even when it's not. (Another thing that I can't imagine men doing.)
Although you didn't comment on this aspect of separating reproduction from our bodily reality, this is what surrogacy does too. Men renting vaginas for 40 minutes are the same as anyone renting a woman's entire body for 40 weeks. Babies are collateral damage when they are bought and sold. So called "altruistic" surrogacy is no better because babies can't tell the difference between being taken away from their birth mothers is for "love" or for money.
Thank you for reading and sharing all of this as well, I will have to check that movie out.
I do believe egg donation and surrogacy is just the latest form of prostitution, it could just be called “reproductive prostitution” really. That is something I would like to write about in a whole separate article I think! Although perhaps you yourself already have, let me know if so!
I have indeed written about surrogacy several times. Here are two examples: https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/telling-it-like-it-is-without-the and https://lucyleader.substack.com/p/queering-babies-is-there-no-escape
I also think that attention needs to be paid to a more recent trend in surrogacy, which is that of older men buying babies. Why do single men who are 60+ years of age suddenly decide that what they need in their lives is a newborn?
Oh gosh I actually hadn’t heard of this yet but my stomach already hurts thinking about it. I have really been wanting to write about that organization “Men Having Babies” and now I see you already did the job! It’s on my to read list now.
The other force for evil in today's world are the transhumanists, who funnily enough (ha, ha, not) are mainly obscenely wealthy white guys, some of whom claim a womanface identity, which kind of says it all really.
I don’t want to poke holes in the edges of your argument, but There are male escorts in hyper capitalist places like South Korea.
And a great many men have to pretend sex is good; often to other men, but it certainly is not exclusively. Men are not always the same as the male façade.
I am really curious about the correlation between male escorts and the hyper-capitalist societies now, that is interesting.
I can't get behind this. Barnes and Noble is wall to wall woman porn, from cover to cover. Marketed to kids. Just because it's in verbal and not image form doesn't change what it is.
...And, the events and social mores in it are possibly more disturbing, hard as that is to believe.
I agree that some of the themes of erotica marketed at women are really out there and wild (at least this is what social media is telling me, I certainly do not partake), and I agree that this is very harmful and insidious, and increasingly so. I do think it is tricky to compare buying sex from prostitutes or consuming hardcore porn (which women do as well, yes, but I think we all know at lower rates) to reading books. This is due to the actual, real life commodification of human beings, and the demand for which creates a demand for sex trafficking. Not to mention, yes women’s erotica may have some crazy and gross themes going on, but there are children being raped and filmed in reality—and this theme is worse than any fictional werewolf sex or whatever the hell those books are about. And in these cases, it is almost exclusively driven by male demand, so we have to be honest about weighing these sexual differences and the preferences that go along with them and how they actually play out in reality, and I just don’t think erotica is creating problems of the same weight as human trafficking and child abuse.
I agree with you Emily about women's erotic literature being vastly different to male filmed porn. I challenge anyone to find a titillating theme of child rape/abuse in a story aimed at women. Many women have sexual fantasies, but they would not want to see this depicted by real people because the nature of fantasy is something that either can't or probably can't actually happen (or in reality, you would not want it to happen). That's what makes it a fantasy!
Wow. Is it possible to purchase hard copies of this essay and some others? I want to bind them and save them for my son to read when he’s older. He’s way too young to talk about anything like this right now. He’s 5 and I’m careful to only let him watch things with reverence for life, heroes who save it, and natural families with mom and dad, nothing at all that is part of the agenda right now. Just traditional things. He knows when a man an a woman love “youchother”, as he says, they get married and make a baby from their love. He has a favourite girlfriend at school and he said she will be his wife. lol he’s so cute and special. But I constantly share your work with my sisters and mom- wish my partner could read for more than 2 sentences or have discussions like this but he doesn’t have patience etc. at least he’s a traditional Catholic god fearing Albanian from the North so he agrees with me in what content our son can watch and what stories I read to him and who he can spend time with. We’re very careful about that. But it feels like such an enormous thing to be battling…… anyway. I’d love hard copies… I love this piece.
Thank you! I don’t know how one would purchase hard copies but you are welcome to print them out! I would like to eventually write a book about a lot of the times I write about though, maybe it will be finished by the time your boy is old enough to read it (God willing 😂). I appreciate your words and your sharing my work, and I am so, so encouraged to hear about other women like yourself dedicating themselves to parenting their children in the ways you describe here because it is so very important for our future generations and their happiness.
You can turn Emily's great work into pdf files and then save and/or print them at your leisure.
This is excellent. And I bet those few privileged voices in the sex industry would be vastly outnumbered if all women involved gave their honest opinions about how “empowering” it is.
Thank you Martha. I agree, it’s just another case of the most extreme minority having the loudest voices.
I am very sympathetic to your position and you’ve written several wonderful lines in this article. The spooky, implacable nature of the AI respondent—all logic, unmoored from ethics or humanity—is a great illustration of what we’re up against.
The sexual marketplace and ecology to which you object strongly resembles the pre-Christian Classical mores of the Roman Empire, when the deciding factor was widespread slavery, not digital technology.
Your visceral, passionate moral indignation and your objections as a woman, wife and mother to the re-emergence of these callous “industrial” (or dehumanised / dehumanising) sexual mores is justified and absolutely right, but the reason for this phenomenon is deeper than our current rapidly evolving technological capabilities.
Thank you so much Chris, I truly appreciate your words of support and also your constructive insight to where I can also shift my focus to and learn more about, as that topic is one I am aware of but fairly ignorant of the details on! If you have any suggestions for reading I would love them!
Hi Emily, I always enjoy your perspective and your expository prose. As it happens, I can recommend a wonderful book; its only flaw is its terrible title. Sarah Ruden is a classics scholar who in mid-career read Paul’s letters. Apparently biblical scholars don’t know classics and classical scholars never read the Bible. Sarah brings her deep knowledge of the culture and society of the Roman Empire to her reading of Paul’s letters with astonishing results. Sarah herself thought of Paul as a misogynist and a prude until she read his letters in the original Koiné Greek. She was astounded to realize how progressive and supportive of women Paul really is, what a defender of slave women he is, how compassionate and understanding his perspective really is when the context in which he wrote is fully explained. It’s a great book that changed my thinking, and very relevant to the issues that are troubling your heart and mind: https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/paul-among-the-people-the-apostle-reinterpreted-and-reimagined-in-his-own-time_sarah-ruden/316533/item/4746271/
If you get a chance to read it, I’d love to know what you think.
Thank you! I just put it in my cart, the author sounds like an interesting person too, and some of her other work looks interesting to me as well.
Sarah and I exchanged emails for several months pre-COVID and she was indeed a feisty, independent soul, a practicing Quaker so a Lefty who I think was slipping into TDS even before the Plandemic. I am an admirer of her scholarship and also have read her translation of the Gospels and her book The Face of Water. Her astonishing insights into the kindness and compassion of Paul remain the aspect of her work that has made the most profound impression on my thinking.
Well that is neat! She sounds even more interesting now.
BTW here’s a very relevant Substack article about Paul’s criticisms of the sexual mores of the Roman Empire demonstrating again that the heartless exploitation and disconnection from life and love of today’s sexual ecology has happened before and has much deeper causes than digital technology: https://open.substack.com/pub/mankind/p/how-christianity-cracked-down-on?r=exi3h&utm_medium=ios
Love everything about this. We are so conditioned to accept the commercialization of everything. The wholeness and goodness of my body* has always been a silent rebuke, but I appreciate how well you put it into words.
*And my children’s bodies, as my husband’s.
Thank you Síochána, the conditioning really is so real! The silent rebuke is just as significant as the noisy one too ❤️
Yesterday I wrote this. I think it fits rather well.
The destruction of the Patriarchy (the father present at home) has had the same effect on romantic relationships as the destruction of the Matriarchy (the mother present at home) has had on our food and diet:
Short sighted “snacking”: gratification of our desire that leads to underdevelopment, and a breakdown of self-respect, responsibility, lack of planning and missing out on the best in favour of the serial easiest*.
(Or should that be cereal easiest?)
This is genius! I think it could be applied to a lot of modernity really. Social media reels and tweets being the “snacking” for the mind rather than reading books and writing comes to mind as the most obvious, but the snacking analogy has a lot of potential! Thank you for sharing!
Thank you for writing this. I wrote something similar recently, perhaps from more of a male perspective, but I put it behind a paywall. I’m thinking of unlocking it at some point. I’m working on a follow-up post (not to be paywalled) on how to move forward to rediscover private, committed, loving, monogamous intimacy, which I think is infinitely more erotic than any amount of hardcore pornography.
As for your possibly AI interlocutor, aside from the “This upset me, therefore it’s offensive and wrong” non sequitur argument, the argument that “Sexual desire X is natural, therefore it is good and to be encouraged,” is just nonsense based partly on incorrect Romantic ideas about the inner purity of the untutored “blank slate” human being and partly on a misreading of Freud as arguing that because sexual repression causes neurosis (questionable, but accepting it for the sake of argument) therefore all repression is bad. Some things are worth getting neurotic over, and the exploitation of other human beings is one of them. Civilisation relies on some repression of selfish instinct for the sake of family and community.
I am very inclined to agree with your last points there. Some degree of neuroticism is required for survival of the species after all! Self control/repression of harmful urges is also necessary and good on both micro and macro levels, for individuals, the family like you mentioned (the micro society) and outer society as well. Anyone who denies this is simply an addict of some form on some level.
Great essay Emily! Have you read Pope Paul VI's Humanae Vitae? I found reading that to really form my views on human sexuality. There is so much beauty when the unitive and procreative aspects of sex remain intact. I think those 2 pieces are like a rope entwined together and when they are severed it all just falls apart - literally and figuratively.
I haven’t but I really need to and am planning to now. I have had so many people mention it to me as a recommendation, I do not think I can ignore it any longer! Thank you!
Great essay Emily - your writing improves from piece to piece. Your children and husband are lucky to have such a thoughtful woman in their lives!
Quick question - are you religious at all? I ask because the arguments you use here, while secular, are completely in line with natural law theory and Christian ethical teaching. One of the reasons I turned to Christianity after years of secularism is because I noted all the social ills of modern society you've outlined here and wondered, "why is this the case?" I began to find modern utilitarian and choice based ethics deeply unsatisfying, and when I discovered natural law theory the obvious design built into our humanity began to make sense to me. Sex has both reproductive and unitive purposes, and to frustrate either purpose leads to social dysfunction - when Humane Vitae was written the Pope at the time correctly predicted that the contraceptive pill would lead to further objectification and disrespect towards women, and how could any good faith person argue with him? Liberals have no understanding of sex as they have no insight into the essential nature of the human being.
As an aside, you might enjoy the works of D.H. Lawrence, especially his final work Lady Chatterly's Lover. Writing in the 1920s he correctly identified technology as leading to disembodied sexuality and general rejection of life alongside it.
Thank you so much, especially for the comment about my writing improving, I can hardly read the first few things I published on here so that has been my aim!
As for your question, I am learning more about religion and trying to forge a path towards what version of it that I want to pursue. I was baptized and raised Methodist until my teen years, my parents switched churches to a Baptist megachurch at that time in my life and I was completely turned off by their rhetoric and their aesthetics to be honest. That paired with my contrarian attitude at the time led to my claiming of agnosticism. As the years have gone by and I have given birth to more children, I have become more and more pulled back towards the religious life, but I am interested in pursuing an altogether different version of what I have been exposed to previously. My eldest child goes to a Catholic school so I am considering pursuing our RCIA classes.
I am aware of natural law theory, and find it extremely compelling. I have been exposed to it through the work of Jennifer Lahl, and also from the work of Katy Faust. I have been interested in learning more about it though, as I find it very much in line with what I instinctively intuit about human nature, especially with regard to the body. Do you have any suggestions for reading on the topic?
FWIW this is what pushed me to Catholicism as well. I do find the American puritan mindset still lingers in American Catholicism and am partial to the traditional Italian, Spanish, and French Catholicism that venerates the beauty of the human body and which produced works like Michaelangelo's David. Growing up, I had a good friend from Paris, and she said her biggest problem with Americans was how they viewed even a young child's nakedness as sexual/bad. French society is far from perfect but she was making an excellent point, and I think historically Catholic teaching was good about embracing the beauty of sexuality.
Humanae Vitae and JPII's "Love and Responsibility" are both wonderful. JPII actually talks about how the initial sexual impulse and attraction we feel to someone else is not sinful even if it's not in the proper context of marriage etc. - it's how we respond to that impulse - which is lost in most Christian discourse about sexuality now.
Curious when you turned to Catholicism? I also am finding myself drawn to the more original, European religious teaching but I admittedly just have no idea where to really start, I only even feel this way due to what others have told me they believe would be a good fit for me based on what I write. I really need to read Humanae Vitae, I think at least 20 people have told me to, I think that is more than a sign 😂
I went through RCIA at 19 but I had my "come to Jesus" moment about contraception etc. when I was 23. I was living a bit...loosely on several doctrines before then.
I myself am Eastern Orthodox, but I find many aspects of Catholic thought compelling (though nothing I am about to recommend is contrary to Orthodox teaching).
Kelly recommended Humanae Vitae and Love and Responsibility, and I second both. Theology of the Body, also by JPII, is superb and absolutely relevant to what your interests are.
Ed Feser, a Catholic philosopher, has a blog that is a very valuable resource and is completely paywall free. What I like most about Ed's blog is that he's a very concise writer and you don't need a background in philosophy to understand his work. His blog and book are excellent introductions to natural law, as natural law theory has its roots in Thomas Aquinas, and being a 13th century thinker his modes of thinking are very pre-modern. Feser helps make his work more digestible to the modern mind. Here's a compilation of posts on natural law re: the body and sexuality. https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/06/love-and-sex-roundup.html?m=1
My personal favourite philosopher is David Bentley Hart; his book "The Experience of God" is what turned me to theism. Orthodoxy doesn't have the same developed natural law thinking as Catholicism, but I think you'll appreciate his work on pornography in this article: https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-pornography-culture
There's also this article that really affected by Patricia Snow, a Catholic writer. She analyses Lady Chatterly's Lover and Catholic sexual ethics using natural law theory, though she doesn't term it that way: https://firstthings.com/self-abuse/
I hope these works are helpful to you Emily!
This is so, so helpful and exactly what I was hoping for. Feser especially looks very compelling, as I struggle with reading things that are as old as Aquinas but have wanted to understand his work. Thank you for taking the time to share and curate it all here so nicely with links!
Emily....I would like to add....there’s something deeply symbolic here, beyond biology. The loss of wildness isn't just about how life is created, but how life is lived. When we outsource not only birth but also meaning-making to machines and systems, we risk severing our connection to the primal, the mysterious, the sacred rhythms that have always grounded us.
We didn’t just come from wombs, we came from wonder. From the earthy, messy, miraculous process of life emerging through relationship.
If we lose that, if we sterilise even the origin of life itself, what else do we make mechanical in the process?
The danger isn’t just in what we’re building, it’s in what we forget along the way.
Absolutely! I love everything you added here and you stated it perfectly.
Love this essay so much. Thank you for stating it so perfectly.
Thank you and thank you for reading!
"But don’t erase us to do it." I see this constantly, and is always a jaw dropping non sequitur. To think something = mass genocide. These words, they don't mean what you think they mean.
But I think I understand what they're saying, which is difficult since it's so demented and mentally ill. "They" are their "Identities" their Ego, so to speak. So they "Identify" with being a sex worker for example, so if there are no sex workers they disappear. This literally the belief they are describing, or Trans, or Gay, or whatever today's "Identity" is.
But to most of humanity, it looks like this: I am a Plumber. That is my Identity. When I swap over to being an Electrician, the Plumber disappears, is "Erased." He is killed. While this is true in some impossibly narrow, shallow sense, QUITE OBVIOUSLY IT IS FALSE, dangerously, totally, completely false, and we all know it. We don't use words this way, or not in any other category. It's a thought-stopper, a smoke bomb. It's an "I want this, so don't cross me" warning. You can have it, that's not what we're saying. It's profoundly mentally ill to accuse people of murder for saying you should switch occupations.
You're leaped in one to the level of needing to be committed as a danger to yourself and others and I didn't make you do that. The greater problem here is, we on the outside are entertaining such words, or anything that comes around, nearby, with, or from them. If someone proves themselves this mentally ill as an opener, that there are Cambell's Soup Dragons in their pocket, clearly everything they say after isn't worth engaging with as mental or social equals. That doesn't mean we don't have charity, but the location and purpose of the discussion is suddenly very, very different.
I agree. Those sorts of statements are just discussion-killers, and hyperbolic statements that reveal the speaker’s over-identification with an idea. It is the words-as-literal-violence thing, which is just stupid and foolish.
I will say I have discussed the topic of “female erasure” in terms of how language is being shifted to include males and trans-identified women who think they are males in with women (the whole “uterus owner” bullshit), and this is because “woman” is not an identity or an idea-it is an actual fact, and shifting language that is there to signify biological reality to include subjective, often delusional, ideas is not a good thing. This is especially so in certain contexts, like medical ones where biology truly matters.
What a profound piece, Emily. I must read this again, slowly.
Thank you Wendy!