Jonathon Van Maren has penned a disturbing piece for The European Conservative. Entitled, Porn Culture Has Our Girls by the Throat, it covers the dark subject of increasingly violent pornography translating into violent acts by porn-addled men (and boys!) during “consensual” intimate encounters with the fairer sex.
The main focus of the article is the hideous practice of choking one’s partner, hence the name.
It’s a gruesome read, though Van Maren is careful not to degenerate into prurient details while narrating the phenomenon. He writes mostly about statistics (alarming ones) and the effect that these abusive behaviors have on women. The unavoidable conclusion is that this behavior is being normalized.
The obvious lessons?
- Don’t engage in the marital act outside of marriage. (All the women interviewed were, to set aside diplomatic verbiage, fornicators.)
- Don’t consume porn.
Modern porn was, from its very inception, violent. Dr. E. Michael Jones’ book, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, makes that clear. There is no “respectable” pornography, as what porn does is inherently violent.
The fact that both porn and the violently hypersexualized culture of which it is a part are both getting progressively worse is not an indication of the innocence of the earlier stuff; it is, rather, an expected regression following upon the unfettered satiation of base passions. And let us not leave out the influence of the demons of lust. The Church’s perennial wisdom prevents this moral regression at its root. That wisdom simply repeats and amplifies Our Lord’s divine dictum, “But I say to you, that whosoever shall look on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:28).
That’s where the corruption begins, in the heart. Once the heart is unrestrained, no civil law can stop the violence that will ensue. I am reminded here of Saint Thomas Aquinas pointing out the contrast between the Old Law and the New:
…the Old Law is described as “restraining the hand, not the will” [Peter Lombard, Sent. iii, D, 40]; since when a man refrains from some sins through fear of being punished, his will does not shrink simply from sin, as does the will of a man who refrains from sin through love of righteousness: and hence the New Law, which is the Law of love, is said to restrain the will. (ST, Ia IIae, Q 107, A 1, ad 2)
The unloving, unrestrained wills of our modern degenerates invite tyranny, which is precisely why tyrants, like the demons themselves, favor porn: it is an effective means of control.
In light of how “love” is committed by the deviants Van Maren describes, the mantra of the cult of sexual deviancy — “love is love” — is exposed as the empty rhetoric it is. And make no mistake, if you consume porn, you are a deviant.
