Donald Trump and Our Pornified Society

Donald Trump and Our Pornified Society October 24, 2016

What could be duller sounding than the word temperance? So out-of-date. So repressive. So passionless. And exactly the word our country needs.

If the political race has done anything good—and that is hard to imagine—it has held up a mirror to our culture and revealed our soulless skeleton. After Donald Trump’s “hot-mic” incident both parties hurled their moralizing grenades, blasting the internet with their hypocrisy.

What the parties, and apparently all of us, have forgotten is that the corresponding virtue to immorality is temperance. Temperance deals with the lusts that war against the soul. When unbridled, desire can control us. So lust is born, and it drives us towards pleasures that cannot satisfy. Our culture drips with lust, evidenced by its pornification.

In 2011 I wrote an article that highlighted a new study published in Sexuality and Culture. I’m revisiting that piece to show how our hyper-sexualized culture continues to castrate our souls.

The study, conducted by University of Buffalo researchers, compiled more than 1,000 images from forty years of Rolling Stone magazine, comparing male and female poses, wardrobe and language used in the articles. The study showed that women have been vastly more sexualized than men. The 2000s showed a marked increase in hyper-sexualization of women in the magazine, which is regarded as a pop culture barometer.

“Hyper-sexualization” refers to images that communicate to the reader that the person in the image desires sex. Sociologist Erin Haden said: “It is problematic when nearly all images of women depict them not simply as ‘sexy women’ but as passive objects for someone else’s sexual pleasure.” In her TEDx talk, Dr. Gail Dines says young girls are trained by pop-culture to be “porn-ready.” They realize they have two options: “f—ability or invisibility . . . the adolescent wants to be seen. Invisibility is not an option.” So young girls mimic the ads they see, which endorse the idea of sexual availability.

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