About a year and a half ago, a friend mentioned a phrase to me that has continued to captivate my imagination and conscience: verbal masturbation. He saw it in a Facebook post by his previous painting teacher. In the quip, his teacher expressed his frustration with the self-importance of contemporary representational painters. He commended their work, but saw getting together as artisans to pat each other on the back for being such wonderful people, for making such wonderful work, as pointless. They weren’t developing their craft in those moments, weren’t moving forward towards anything. They were simply pausing to celebrate themselves—to indulge one another. His naming of this action as “verbal masturbation” has captured me because the metaphor continues to bring a startling amount of clarity to several contemporary problems.
I began seeing this verbal masturbation first in others, but most convincingly in myself. I began to think about why I talk so much in class. Is it because I actually had something worthwhile to say, or because I wanted to hear the sound of my own voice? Have you ever felt this way about someone in class (quite possibly, about me)? I certainly have. Many times I’ve crucified those in my class who seem to speak for no reason except that there are ears forced to hear them. They spout off useless information just so people can know they know it. People exist in that moment for the pleasure of the one speaking. And it does feel good to be heard. But what does this have to do with porn?
First, let’s talk masturbation. What does masturbation exist for? The pleasure of the embodied self. Can you have it without porn? Yes. Is it worse with or without porn? Ask your pastor. No matter when, how, why, or with what you’re achieving orgasm without a partner, you’re masturbating, and, yeah, you’re doing it to please yourself. I am going to go ahead and lean on God’s statement that “it is not good for man to live alone,” (Gen. 2:18) amongst other Biblical truths and say that masturbation was not the intended way to achieve orgasm. It would seem to me to be, even outside of a Biblical perspective, anti-relational. By that I mean that it is an embodied action committed for the self by the self without the need of the embodied presence of another. The philosophical and literal ‘other’ are absent. So, why is this bad? What does masturbating do to us masturbators? I think a few things:
We begin to believe pleasure is for us.
We begin to believe our bodies (and other gifts, depending on what kind of masturbator we are), are for us.
And we begin to believe that we were created for this, because, man, does it make us feel good.
I believe porn offers an interesting extension to these behaviors. Ran Gavrieli, a post-doc studying gender at Tel Aviv University, has a wonderful and entirely secular TEDxJaffa lecture on why he stopped watching porn (YouTube search “Why I Stopped Watching Porn”). He explains there are two basic reasons he stopped watching porn. The first is porn brought anger and violence into his private fantasies that weren’t there before, and the second is by watching porn he created the demand for what he called filmed prostitution. He has both an etymological and empirical basis for this second claim, but I’ll let him explain those to you on your own time. Go watch it. He has some compelling, unsettling, horrifying statistics on the abuse of women and men (women more so than men) within the porn industry.
His first reason is important for us to understand because what porn allows for is metaphorical rape. Yeah, I get it, women and men choose this as their vocation, and yeah, sure, they have, under the Constitution (or personal discretion), the freedom to have all kinds of sex with all kinds of people in all kinds of ways if they want as long as no one gets hurt. Aside from the fact that people do actually get physically hurt, here’s why that’s a moronic excuse for our perversions: none of those people choose who accesses them the same way no one has a choice to listen to someone waxing eloquent in class. Porn is abuse. There’s a virtual break in the connection, but not in the hearts of those watching. Our imaginations are powerful gifts. We can place ourselves just about anywhere, doing whatever to whomever. What porn allows us to do is use both our bodies and imaginations for ourselves at the dire expense of others. And we need to make sure we at Covenant don’t forget how important it is to fight our complacency towards this sin.