Reply to Giving in to DH's porn "needs" = Good Wife or Bad Wife?

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[quote=Anonymous]Whether secular or religious, certain conditions must be met when a couple exchanges wedding vows.  The vows must be made freely, totally, faithfully, and with awareness that children might come into the marriage, and if they do, the couple will be responsible for those children.

Sex, or consummation of the marriage vows, is a renewal of the marriage vows every.  Single.  Time.  Total self-giving, selfless, nothing held back.  That is chastity within a marriage.  Chastity does not equal abstinence, though sometimes chastity may require abstinence.  Chastity is the virtue that removes selfishness from love, that makes love authentic and real and complete.  All humans are called to chastity, because all humans are called to love.  When the love is within a marriage, all sexual expression of love must be chaste, as in, an honest expression of the marriage vows.

Adultery and sexual violence are obvious breaches of true love, of chastity.  But there are more subtle and insidious violations, which we all feel sometimes.  Sex performed dutifully.  Sex demanded rudely.  Sex while thinking of someone else.  Work flirtations.  Sex feared because it might bring an unwanted child into the relationship.

Homemade porn is not problematic because it shows too much, but because it shows too little.  The couple objectifies one another, and themselves.  They reduce their personhood to film.  They take intimacy and make it not intimate.  The beauty of intimacy is its immediacy, its vulnerability, its exclusiveness, its trust, its uniqueness.  It is always unique, like a bolt of lightning.  No matter how much lightning we capture on film, it never, ever could express the fullness of the experience, because it has to be experienced to be real.  How much more so for sex, which involves persons, with wills and feelings and bodies and souls, and not just a chemical reaction of energy and matter.

Is homemade porn just as dreadful as child porn?  No.  It begins with legitimate intimacy.  But where does it go?  What if it is viewed by the wrong person?  What if it desensitizes the couple to the mystery of their love?  What does it tempt the couple--the man, especially--to reduce their intimacy to?  A performance?  Sex should be just lived, in all its power and creativity.

True love is not all pleasure.  True love involves risk, sacrifice.  True love is hard work.  And every single human being is going to fail true chastity sometimes, because we are fallen creatures.  That does not change the truth about love, and sex.

Sex is the most powerful, creative force in our material world, because it can create life;  it is also potentially the most destructive force when misused.  Sex includes our basest instincts and our highest aspirations, pure selfishness and pure self-giving.  It can mean love or the opposite of love.  Living the truth about sex is sublime, intensely joyful, a taste of heaven.  Compromising the truth about sex means sadness, even suffering.

So is it the worst offense against the full meaning of love when husbands and wives exchange intimate pictures, even film?  Is it destructive when they come apart from each other, if it is because they are longing for each other?  No, definitely not.  But it is a compromise of the ideal, and so risks undermining the strength of their love for each other, even as it gratifies legitimate human needs and desires.

Last chapter next...[/quote]

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