Brian Somers In the Torah, to establish a matter requires the testimony of two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15) and affirmed in the New Testament (Matthew 18:16; II Corinthians 13:1).
The matter at hand is how pornography reduces human beings to just their sexual emotions and body parts. Years ago, Roman Catholic Cardinal Wojtyla wrote a book “Love and Responsibility“ Note should be taken that this book was written when he was Karol Cardinal Wojtyla of Poland before he was elected to the Papacy as John Paul II. From that book, a paraphrase has been repeated numerous times and can be easily found via a DuckDuckGo search. This paraphrase is:
There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.
— John Paul 2 as quoted by https://www.goalcast.com/2017/12/08/25-pope-john-paul-ii-quotes/ and several other sites
I downloaded the Kindle version of the book and the below is quoted from locations 3147-3160.
“However, the essence of what we call pornography in art lies even deeper. Pornography is an explicit tendency to emphasize in a work of art the moment of sexus in the reproduction of the human body or in the reproduction of love and persons who experience (przeżywać) it. This tendency aims at evoking in the recipient of this work, a reader or a viewer, a conviction that the sexual value is the only essential value of the person, and that love is nothing else but experiencing (przeżywać) or co-experiencing (wspόłprzeżywać) this value. This is a harmful tendency, because it destroys the complete image of this important fragment of human reality that consists in the love of a woman and a man. For the truth about human love always lies in the reproduction of the reciprocal relation of persons regardless of how much the values of sexus would dominate in this relation. It is the same as with the truth that man is a person regardless of how much the sexual values are manifested in his body. A work of art should bring out this truth regardless of the extent to which it happens to touch the sphere of sexus, and if it contains a tendency to distort this truth, it deforms the image of reality. But pornography is not merely a mistake or an error—it is a tendency. Once the deformed image becomes equipped with the prerogatives of artistic beauty, a greater possibility exists that it will be accepted and engrafted in the consciousness and the will of the recipients. For concerning this point the human will very often displays a great susceptibility to accepting a deformed image of reality.”
— “Love and Responsibility” by Karol Wojtyła
(edited to remove hyperlinks to endnotes)
While reading Dr. Patricia Dixon’s book “We Want for Our Sisters What We Want for Ourselves” (1st edition, 2003), I came across a discussion of pornography as it impacted (and impacts) black American society, both male and female. Dixon quotes Maulanga Karenga’s 1989 article, “The Black Male/Female Connection”. I was startled at how closely Karenga as cited by Dixon tracks with Cardinal Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II.
Karenga defines five basic ways pornography expresses itself as a definite social thought. “First it is an expression of species alienation. It reflects man alienated from and oblivious of his species half confused by the contradictory emotions towards thoughts of her as ‘whore and high priestess’. mother in public and sex machine in bed (p. 48a). Second, it is “objectivation of the species half, turning a natural partner into an object of use and misuse. It is this objectification which leads men to say while pursuing a woman, I’m going to get ‘that’ and to reduce women to parts of their bodies” (p. 48a). Third, pornography “is fragmentation of the body, hacking the body into usable pieces [and] rejecting the wholeness of the human personality … No one in a flesh connection wants a whole body, just holes in a body” (p. 48a). Fourth, “it is brutalization, most viciously expressed in the sadomasochistic vulgarities society at its most violent and alienated level has produced” (p. 48a). Finally, it is a “sexual commodity form. Its practical expression is in the selling of the body or its image” (p. 48a).
Dixon, pp 164-165
It is remarkable how a Polish Catholic author, deeply versed in theology and philosophy and a Black/African Studies professor through social studies could arrive at the same assessment of how pornography damages both men and women by reducing them from their whole persons and beings to that fraction that constitutes sexuality. When two people so divergent in background and training agree on a matter, note should be taken.
It is the position of this blog that pornography as an industry and a work product as well as the associated illicit business of sex trafficking are an unmitigated evil.