Given the things "moses" is allegedly recorded as having done to the children of vanquished tribes, it is impossible for a biblical literalist to be a moral tutor. Pornography may be bad, but if so, biblical literalists can only tell it is by the happy accident that others have drastically improved our culture beyond the vile and stunted visions of such a (ninety-)ninth-rate prophet.

Of course, one fundy here has already claimed child-murder and child-rape by "moses" followers was "justified".

Rusty.

Poirot
“…Christianity sublimated human sexuality and contained it inside the vessel of marriage.”

In theory it did. It never did in practice – far from it. As Kinsey showed, even the people who believed it don’t practise it. Virtually no Christian ever complies with the orthodox Christian idea of what is normal sexuality.

Evolutionary psychology, not the Bible, explains this fact.

“Our intellect rejects our animality”.

Speak for yourself. I accept sex as a normal, natural, healthy, pleasurable part of life. It is harmless so long as it does not involve an act of aggression or fraud against the person or property of others.

Whereas without Helen’s assumption both in this article and her article on prostitution that sex is intrinsically abusive and degrading, her whole argument doesn’t make sense.

Helen
None of the above discussion frees you of charges of intellectual dishonesty and gutlessness, and moral stupidity.

Your conclusion depends on your premise that sexual discrimination is ipso facto harmful, which you establish not by reason but by appeal to authority.

Yet what is discrimination but preference by another name? Please admit that, according to your logic, all sexual preference whatsoever is “harmful” and should be illegal.

You are asked to define “porn”, on which your whole argument depends, and you go quiet.

You can’t distinguish “degrading” from non-degrading porn because you assume sex itself is intrinsically degrading.

On the one hand, you think that consensual sex, people’s peaceful expressions, and freedom of association are abusive and should be overridden backed by threats of force. On the other, you think that human rights are whatever the most violent party declares them to be, even if you can give no reason but self-contradiction and claims that contradict fundamental principles of human rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The fact that your work may be approved in universities, which are supposed to be centres of enlightenment, humanity, and rational learning, only shows how far they have degenerated into hothouses of any kind of irrational and violent meddling intolerance.

Peter,

"In theory it did. It never id in practice-..."

I did say we were psychologically suspended between two worlds. Sex for most people means a loosening of the bindings - an disengagement from one mode of behaviour in favour of another. Constraint and self-consciousness are replaced with a rhythmic freedom of physical expression.

Regarding my statement that humans reject their animality - what I meant was that we mentally compartmentalise it. Certain behaviours and biological necessities are usually hidden from public gaze. All societies have taboos on what is and what is not acceptable in the realm of public display of bodily functions.

Paglia points out that the modern media has opened the floodgates and allowed carnality to rush into the fray amidst our Apollonian civilised life, thus blurring the edges around our self-constructed psychological elevation as above and beyond nature.

Okay now I get it.

Temple Grandin's perspective is interesting. You know her autism showed a genius for understanding animals, which made her the world's leading designer of stock-handling facilities? Don't know if you've seen the strange curved cattle races that are used in stockyards these days? Apparently stock don't like walking up a straight race - they like it to curve away into mystery.

She was talking about the various parts of the brain. The mid-brain functions, which we share with other mammals, include dominance, submission, hierarchy, groupthink, the fear of ostracism, and such like. The strong feelings of jealousy towards others having sex is common to many species, even non-mammals. For example, rams can't stand seeing another ram topping a ewe, and will charge him, and can break his leg in doing so. Same with bulls - and men! These base passions are very strong and anti-social, and a lot of the pleasurable and anguished feelings we get from sexual relations, I believe are mid-brain phenomena. Sex in humans is almost universally a private activity.

The forebrain phenomena include speech, logic, serial analysis. So the all the discussion and theory is a forebrain phenomenon, intellectualising about mid-brain phenomena. That's the "psychological elevation as above and beyond nature" bit.

However mass carnality in the media is an expression of the mass of people's driving interest in sex. It probably "will out" whatever the prevailing rules trying to restrict it, because it's so strong and fundamental. Perhaps instead of the media opening the floodgates, Christianity merely succeeded, very imperfectly, in suppressing such expressions for a relatively short period of history for certain activities in a minority of cultures.

Peter,

I think you're right that Christianity did succeed in suppressing such expressions. However, humanity tends to utilise sexual suppression as a mechanism to accommodate the differing realms of our experience. Taboo, as I mentioned, is practiced in varying degrees in all societies.

It's interesting that Christianity is a "sky cult" which offers reward in an afterlife as opposed to a belief system that concentrates on earthbound imperatives. In aiming our trajectory beyond the world in which we are physically immersed, man's Christianity (which is of a patriarchal construct) veered away from the femaleness of nature as source and succour to guide his conduct and consciousness, thereby furnishing him with a divided psychological experience of life.

"...man's Christianity (which is of a patriarchal construct) veered away from the femaleness of nature as source and succour to guide his conduct and consciousness..."

Well it did, and it didn't.

It is very much a deep part of female consciousness to seek support for her child from someone, and patriarchy provides for that security, by entrenching a moral and legal obligation on the man to provide material support for his acknowledged offspring, and later, any offspring. This could not have been reasonable unless he was given assurance that the child was his. And that could not have been achieved but at the cost of her sexual freedom. And since, in the days before patriarchy, her sexual freedom was her economic freedom, the cost of that securitisation was her dependence: the wife-as-chattel situation.

However imagine a situation in which there is neither moral nor legal obligation on a man to provide for his biological offspring: no statutory child support, no child maintenance as a matter of family or de facto relationships law, no family provision act, no laws of automatic inheritance; and no tradition of any such father-specific provisions as to give rise to more general provisions such as public schooling and other welfare state provisions. That is what patriarchy did for women. So I don't think it's true that it ignored the female nurturing and succouring side. On the contrary, in that, it probably provided more for women's own most urgent and important values, than would have the old regime of her sexual and economic independence combined with great material insecurity.

To me, the big divided psychological experience of life that Christianity advanced, was not so much between the mundane and after-life, but between monogamous marriage, and the pre-dominant mode of heterosexuality before paternity was recognised, a matri-centric society based around what later came to be called, and vilified as, prostitution.