The Emperor's New Pose
The clothes are gone—and some people don't notice anything amiss
I confess to sometimes being perplexed when discussing pornified entertainment with other Christians. It’s not that I’m surprised when people don’t share my specific convictions and habits. In even controversial topics, godly people can come to different conclusions. What is surprising is that some who hold to a Christian sexual ethic would so readily excuse or even defend entertainment with hypersexualized material.
A couple months ago, I wrote a Gospel Coalition article on “mature” sexual content in movies, highlighting five arguments that are often used to downplay the insertion of pornified material in mainstream media. While working on that piece, I came across an online debate in which one person (whom we’ll call Oscar) said objections to the inclusion of sex scenes in Oppenheimer were excessive. While acknowledging the film included sexual activity with nudity, he denied that such material was either “graphic”1 or “pornographic.” He later clarified that he would consider something “graphic” only if it involved “genital to genital contact.” He insisted that “you can’t just throw around words without regard to their meaning.”
I would actually agree with him on that last sentence. Words and definitions matter. In Oscar’s case, he seems to have narrowed the definition of “porn” to the point that it only applies to the visual depiction of coitus. In so doing, he failed to acknowledge the existence of softcore porn. And while there is a difference between softcore and hardcore porn, they both still constitute pornography—just as grape juice and a cluster of grapes both involve the same raw materials. Why this is a disputed mater—among professing Christians, no less—is baffling.
Later in the debate, another person (whom we’ll call Jonathan) pointed out the inherent sinfulness of actors sexually acting out with each other for the camera. Jonathan said that “because of our embodied nature actors cannot…simulate sex without, in fact, doing the kinds of things intended for marriage, even if not fully consummated.”
Oscar responded by saying, “I don’t disagree.” He also concurred that scenes like those in Oppenheimer might legitimately be categorized as unnecessary, gratuitous, and even prurient.
So, by this metric, it is possible to label sex scenes like those in Oppenheimer as an unnecessarily gratuitous and sinful portrayal of sexual immorality—but it is inappropriate to label such scenes as pornographic. Such a standard is self-contradictory.
Demographic Dissonance
It’s not just that an individual here or there will talk out of both sides of his mouth. No, the problem is larger than that. Consider my evaluation of Damien Chazelle’s movie Babylon. Numerous mainstream publications critiqued (and even condemned) the film’s sexual exhibitionism, especially in its first thirty minutes. In contrast, most of the prominent Christian reviews of the film ignored its pornified elements altogether, choosing rather to critique the movie’s artistry without considering its morality (or lack thereof).
Those committed to a Christian sex ethic gave Babylon’s blatant—and, yes, “graphic” and “pornographic”—sexual material a pass, while those with a more lenient sex ethic called attention to the film’s lack of restraint. When believers busy themselves discussing the intricacies of the emperor’s new clothes while unbelievers are calling out the reality that the emperor is actually naked, something is amiss.
Another example recently brought up in a piece at Mere Orthodoxy is the 2013 film Don Jon. Though the film intends to expose the emptiness offered by pornography, it ends up wallowing in pornographic material itself. In this particular case, the movie takes things a step further by including numerous clips of real-world pornography in its visual palette.
In The Space of Sex: The Porn Aesthetic in Contemporary Film (2021), professor Shelton Waldrep highlights, among other things, a short list of films—including Don Jon—in which directors dabble with “not making porn films with a minimal plot but rather making conventional films that integrate porn elements” (p. 8). As is clear from his book, Waldrep is not anti-porn—and yet even he recognizes that conventional films can utilize a “porn aesthetic” (as his book’s subtitle puts it).
In contrast, consider Jackson Cuidon’s review of Don Jon for Christianity Today. He acknowledges that the film has a “constant stream of fairly graphic sexual content.” Nevertheless, he says, “striking at the content of the film as ‘immoral’ or ‘detestable’ or whatever may not be technically incorrect, but it also profoundly misses the point, and is at best unhelpful.” Furthermore, he asserts, “I want to champion it and call it good, if just not enough.” He even attempts to argue that, even though there are “hundreds of clips of pornography spliced in…the literal last thing in the world that this movie does is glorify porn.”2
According to Cuidon, a mainstream film can utilize boatloads of undeniably pornographic content without in any way glorifying porn. That implies that the problem isn’t with pornography, per se, but rather with how it is used—as if porn is a neutral tool that can be wielded for good or for evil. It all depends on the intent of the filmmakers, as if there is such a category as “the ethical utilization of porn.” (This is the same excuse used to justify the apparent morality of films like Cuties, Redeeming Love, and The Wolf of Wall Street.)
Immoral Morality
rightly pushes back against this double-minded rhetoric in his post “Movies, Moral Revulsion, and a Post-Christian Age”:[It’s] not that it is impossible for a screenplay to pass a moral judgment against something depicted; the point is, especially when it comes to sexuality, the depiction is itself a moral moment. . . . [I]n a culture where pornographic imagery has triumphed over stigma and now supplies most people with their categories of sexual experience, there is no longer any clear line (if there ever were one) between visual sexual experience that elicits our outrage and that which elicits our lust.
Waldrep also addresses this blurred line between the sexual content in porn and that in mainstream entertainment: “Ultimately, the line between what is and is not porn has eroded to the point that the distinction no longer has any meaning” (p. 9).
Going back to Oppenheimer and films like it (i.e., that avoid licentious content except for one or two sex scenes): if someone says, “This is not pornography,” I would agree in the sense that it is not a XXX feature produced for “adult” entertainment outlets. In the case of Oppenheimer, the film is a serious work of art by a gifted writer/director (who, for the record, is one of my favorite filmmakers of all time). If, however, by saying “It’s not pornography,” a person means, “There’s nothing pornographic about that sex scene,” I would disagree.
Scenes of “simulated sex” in conventional films often share the same artistic and moral space as softcore pornography—something which, by its very nature, cannot be morally desanitized by being slathered with Art, sandwiched between Themes and Morals, and run through a toaster oven of Good Intentions.
Over the years, I have addressed this double standard numerous times (some might say ad nauseam). One thing I’ve spent less time on, however, is the question, “Why?” Why, exactly, would a follower of Christ observe pornified material in film and television and yet deny its pornographic nature? Furthermore, why would he excuse or defend such content as artistically and morally acceptable?
These are important questions, and they deserve their own focus. Since this post is long enough as it is, I will share my tentative diagnoses in the near future.
Stay tuned.
The word “graphic” denotes something clear and vivid. It is widely used to describe sex scenes in movies, as evidenced by Dictionary.com (which lists “graphic sex and violence” as a sample phrase) and Merriam-Webster (which lists “a graphic sex scene” as a sample phrase).
Writer/actor/director Joseph Gordon-Levitt defended his utilization of porn in Don Jon along similar lines when he said, “At no point in these montages is it just showing pornography for the sake of showing pornography. Every little bit is sort of a story point.”