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

The advantage of having sexual fantasies while looking at a Botticelli Madonna rather than at a stereotypical product of the modern porn industry is that the former doesn’t compel us to make an uncomfortable choice between our sexuality and other qualities we aspire towards. It allows us to give free rein to our physical impulses while remaining aesthetically sensitive and morally aware. It gives us a chance, in short, to bridge the gap between sex and virtue.

These paradigmatic images of Mary hint at what an enlightened or integrated pornography of the future might look like. Ideally, it would excite our lust in contexts that also presented other, elevated sides of human nature – in which people were being witty, for instance, or showing kindness, or working hard or being clever – so that our sexual excitement could bleed into, and enhance our respect for, these other elements of a good life. No longer would sexuality have to be lumped together with stupidity, brutishness, earnestness and exploitation; it could instead be harnessed to what is noblest in us.

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This new kind of pornography would have the incalculable benefit of mitigating some of the self-hatred that the current genre tends to produce once we have finished with it. Adolescent boys, a demographic obsessed with pornography in a way that much concerns their own consciences as well as upsetting their parents, would be absolved of having to choose between loving to look at sexy pictures and caring about their family, schoolwork and sporting achievements. The new pornography would combine sexual excitement with an interest in other human ideals. The usual animalistic categories and hackneyed plots, replete with stock characters seemingly incapable of coherent speech, would give way to pornographic images and scenarios based around such qualities as intelligence (showing people reading or wandering the stacks in libraries), kindness (people performing oral sex on one another with an air of sweetness and regard) or humility (people caught looking embarrassed, shy or self-conscious). No longer would we have to make a painful choice between being human and being sexual.