How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

ii. A New Kind of Porn

1.

Then again, the real problem with pornography may be not its widespread availability but its nature and quality. It would not cause us so many difficulties if it weren’t quite so far removed from all the other concerns that a reasonably sensible, moral, kind and ambitious person might have – sex aside. However, as currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it, in order that we give ourselves over wholly to the most mindless sort of lust. The plots are daft, the lines of dialogue absurd, the actors exploited, the interiors ugly and the photographs voyeuristic – hence the feeling of disgust that overtakes us the moment we are done with it.

Yet it is possible to conceive of a version of pornography that wouldn’t force us to make such a stark choice between sex and virtue – a pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values. In fact, something not dissimilar to this already exists, and in what may seem the single most unlikely place imaginable: the sphere of Christian art.

During a certain few periods in its history, Christian art understood that sexual desire did not necessarily have to be the enemy of goodness, and could even, if properly marshalled, lend energy and intensity to it. In altarpieces by Fra Filippo Lippi or Sandro Botticelli, not only is the Madonna beautifully dressed and set against an enchanting background, she is also good-looking – indeed, in many cases, indisputably sexy. Although this point is not typically dwelt upon in art-historical discussions or museum catalogues, the Mother of Christ can quite often be an unambiguous turn-on.

In deliberately striving for this effect, Christian artists were not contravening the caution generally shown by their religion towards sexuality; rather, they were affirming that at selected moments, sexuality could be invited to promote a project of edification. If viewers were to be persuaded that Mary had been one of the noblest human beings who ever lived – the embodiment of kindness, self-sacrifice, sweetness and goodness – it might help if she was also pictured as having been, in the most subliminal and delicate of ways, rather alluring sexually.