Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

Via Roy Edroso, I see Rod Dreher is indulging in his favorite apocalyptic fantasies again. Civilization will rot because men like to look at bare breasts. First, Rod relates a visit from an angel of the Lord in the disguise of a high school teacher warning him of mankind's nasty, dirty sinfulness.

He said he worked in a counselor's role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

So do boarding schools. The men I've met who have the least realistic and appropriate views of women went to all-male schools.

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here. Porn helped make him who he was. After our conversation, I went into the Dallas Morning News online archives, and researched this guy, Greg Goben. He really was a Southern Baptist golden boy, from the time of his youth. Here's an excerpt from the 1988 news story reporting his guilty plea: [etc]

It sounds to me like this all-male group of football players is what corrupted poor Goben. Let's ban football--for oh so many reasons.

You probably heard about serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy's jailhouse confession to Dr. James Dobson (who is a psychologist -- many people don't know that) about the role pornography had in shaping the monster he became.

Bundy's childhood was deeply messed up. He found out his sister was really his mother in high school. He felt alienated and attracted to violent sex from an early age. Porn didn't create this monster, some person or persons did in his childhood. Dreher doesn't know this because for him, blind belief and prejudice is infinitely superior to fact.

We live in a pornified culture. So how do we raise sane, healthy children in this cesspool? What do you think? I haven't thought much about it at all, as a father. I never had any interest in porn, absent looking at a few dirty magazines as an adolescent. It creeps me out. When I was in college, neither I nor most of my close friends were religious, but none of us used porn -- or if any of them did, they kept their habits a secret, because they understood it to be shameful.

"None of them used porn"--what an interesting (and revealing) way to refer to looking at porn. I suspect Dreher is really thinking about masturbation. After all, he's worried about what porn will lead to, not about just looking at porn. Dreher's attitude towards sex is full of fear and distaste and masturbation has a special place in the goldly's hearts as directly forbidden by their god.

Now, there's no shame in it in our culture. This teacher's stories made me think that I need to figure out how to plant seeds in the souls of my children now, to grow within them a sane sense of personal purity and respect for the human body -- both their own and those of others -- that cause them to turn away from porn when it is presented to them, and to stay away from people who use it. Because in this vile Late-Roman culture in which we live, there's no way to avoid it. As long as personal computers and the Internet exist, the temptation will always be there.

"Personal purity." Pure, clean, white. Not sweaty, messy and in many shades, not bone and flesh and fluid. Yeah, that's not unrealistic at all. That's not going to mess with your head at all--being told that your human instincts and needs are foul and sinful and must be denied.