A Woman’s Conversation About Purity, Porn, and Erotica

Editor’s Note: Today’s post is written by Katherine. She has her degrees in Child and Family Development and Women’s Studies, and blogs at Her Maiden Voyage. You can also follow her on Twitter at @kathhickey. – Lauren

As a feminist and a Christian, I love opportunities to bridge the two cultures together, and porn allows us to do just that. While I can’t speak on behalf of the entire feminist community, I can say a growing number of feminists are strongly dismissing porn as an anti-woman industry. This probably comes as a surprise to many who aren’t involved in the feminist movement. However, you would be surprised by how many topics feminists and Christians agree on, and pornography is no exception.

On average, 11 is the age at which boys start viewing or are exposed to porn. This means that pornography is the one of the first sex educators. It is crafting young boys’ first images of sexuality. Let’s stop and think about this. A young boy’s first perception of sexuality is of usually extremely violent sex, where the male partner treats his female partner as an inferior, in wholly unrealistic situations, practicing unusual sexual acts. What do you think he is going to expect his first sexual encounter to look like? What do you think he is going to expect his female partner to perform during sex? What do you think he is going to try to perform during sex? I shudder. Researcher and anti-porn activist Gail Dines wrote a book named “Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality”. The title alone captures what is happening in our porn-saturated culture; we are being hijacked. Directors and filmmakers are creating images that dictate how we are expected to have sex. Gail Dines claims men are having “industrial strength sex that makes real sex seem boring”. It treats women as a commodity, disposable. It creates norms, and very disturbing norms at that, for how we are expected to experience sex. It regresses women into patriarchal, stereotypical, gender roles, where sex is something you do to a woman, not with a woman.

There is one particular form of pornography that rarely gets mentioned, and that is erotic fiction. I love my Amazon Kindle, I really do, I just don’t like having to pay for e-books. Amazon offers a list of free e-books, and most of them fall in the category of erotica. What I find interesting is that Amazon has no qualms around releasing all of the erotica for free. I like to think that subconsciously, they realize its lack of value, and can’t imagine charging a reader for such useless books. While I haven’t heard many stories of women who read erotica, I realize that it can be just as tempting as “the real stuff”.

I remember reading The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks in high school and being shocked that there was steamy sex scene in it. While my objections to porn align themselves pretty well with erotica, there is one aspect of erotica that really trumps them all. Authors use words to describe feelings, thoughts, and emotions. We are going beyond the visual of porn, we are stepping into the person’s mind. Not only are told that this is what sex looks like, we are told that sex must also make you feel a certain way, and think certain things. The actual sexual act is hijacked, but also the emotions and feelings surrounding it.

In Christian circles, we tend to associate our conversations around porn with the notion of purity. Purity in itself is an interesting concept. We tend to have a binary, dichotomous, view of purity. You are pure or you are not. You are a virgin or you are not. You are a prude or you are a whore. We have regressed purity to a state of being which, once lost, cannot be retrieved. This is incredibly obvious in our discourse on purity. Why do we call it “losing your virginity”? Why is it lost? Where did it go? Can you find it again? Jessica Valenti wrote a wonderful book on the topic called The Purity Myth. While it is written from a secular standpoint and some Christian readers won’t agree with all of it, it is still a mine of information and insight. Valenti claims, “For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer – the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you’ve never had sex, you’re a “good” (i.e. “moral”) girl and therefore worthy of praise.”

She’s right. We have a double standard. Our sexuality is not limited to whether or not we have had intercourse, even though that’s what religious groups tend to focus on. Our sexuality is engrained in a larger culture and society. Our sexuality is influenced by the media, by friends and family. We may be hesitant to admit this, but nearly everyone and everything around us affects our sexuality. Purity is not an “either/or” situation, but a “both/and” notion. Viewing porn does not instantly turn you into an “impure person” instead of a “pure person”, because let’s be honest, we are all impure. We have all participated, seen, or read something we shouldn’t have. I am not purer than the person beside me who is addicted to porn.

We need to remember that we all have the same goal, and are reaching for the same prize. Purity isn’t something you lose, because you never really had it to begin with. We are all born into sin, in a world saturated in sex and self-gratification. It is something you gain. It is something you work towards. Impurity is about staying where you are, at the bottom of the ladder looking up. And thank God, there will always be room for improvement, to move upward, to work towards the Ultimate Gain..

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