Porn’s Assault On Dignity
When we don’t see people as humans, it’s easier to treat them as objects…like punching bags.
Isn’t that what Hitler did to the Jews? If you dehumanize someone enough, anything is permissible. And porn is doing the exact same thing to men and women by way of our sexuality. It has dehumanized it and reduced sex, this God-given gift, to body parts on a screen.
i had been thinking about the topic for this blog post for a couple of days when i came across the quote above on the blog of Ethan Renoe.
I recommend Ethan’s blog for an honest description of the struggle on the journey to freedom.
What Ethan is getting at here is the way porn destroys humanity. He doesn’t quite say it that way, but no question that is what’s at stake.
He states it with the appropriate coldness: “If you dehumanize someone enough, anything is permissible.”
We don’t need to go back to Hitler for examples of this. Abu Graib comes to mind for me rather quickly.
But really, we don’t need to look any farther than our own lust for examples of dehumanization. Lust is so brutally selfish it strips all sense of legitimate worth.
Lust reduces everyone and everything to objects. Talk about a destruction of Dignity.
Dignity is defined in multiple ways, but consistent in those definitions are the characteristics of worth, worthiness, and respect.
Porn assaults Dignity. It assaults the worth of all people – the performers and the consumers.
Porn tells performers that their value is defined by their body parts; specifically, parts that must be unrealistic sizes and shapes to satisfy an insatiable public that demands fantasy over reality. It also tells performers that their worth is linked directly to what sex acts they will perform.
Porn is driven by supply and demand in their most cold and calculating forms. The industry wants to know it can sell its material, and the material is dependent on the performers; therefore, it’s the people who are being sold, ultimately.
Like many consumer products, porn promotes a culture of devouring and then disposing.
Performers have a notoriously short lifespan in the industry.
As for the consumers of porn, well, the industry is really counting on men (predominantly) and women (increasingly) to be easily seduced.
Images. Impulses. Ignition.
When you think about it, the relationship of a porn consumer to the material is very much that of a user to his drug.
That’s nothing new. People have been talking about the ways porn acts as a drug for many years. But there is something about stopping to think about it and write it down that, for me, reinforces the fact that porn assaults our Dignity.
Intentional Warriors 
One Response to “Porn’s Assault On Dignity”
Well said, James. And the crazy thing too, it seems to me, is the subtle way porn morphs and changes its users to start dehumanizing others. Like “Smeagol” in The Hobbit, you end up a twisted, caricature of the creature you were meant to be. For the porn user, at first maybe you just dehumanize the object(s) of your lust in the image(s) you see, but over time you end up going through life continually viewing all people as dehumanized objects, whether it’s a woman in a magazine or walking down an aisle at the grocery store.