Authors-choice: Hope & Revival

Research shows watching onscreen sex and pornography is more addictive and harmful than tobacco, yet Hollywood keeps escalating use of onscreen sex and pornography in blockbusters. Why? This article would argue that the permissive attitude of Hollywood and other social media to onscreen sex, nudity, and pornography, is a deliberate attempt to supplant Judeo-Christian sexual ethics with moral relativism, in addition, this paper would argue that the promotion of the theology of the body of St. John Paul II as the best measure to counter this agenda.

According to George Gerbner’s cultivation theory, people often imitate what they watch. To avoid imitative smoking by their teenage viewers, big studios prohibit cigarette smoking in PG-13-rated movies. Paul (2013) citing studies conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the University of Pennsylvania claims that Hollywood successfully cut onscreen smoking down from roughly 68 percent in 1985 to 21.4 percent in 2010 and onscreen Alcohol use from 89.6 percent in 1985 to 67.3 percent. Unfortunately, onscreen sex and pornography remained at 80 percent high all throughout the period (Paul, 2013).  

Why is Hollywood determined to ignore science when it comes to onscreen sex and pornography? Research confirms that onscreen sex and pornography harm teenagers. Brown & Newcomer, (1991) found that teenagers who watch intense sexual content begin having sex earlier than that those who do not. While Eyal & Finnerty, (2009) confirm that among public health professionals,  escalating sexual content in movies and social media as a growing concern driving the surge in teenage risky sexual behaviors. In addition, research by the Institute of Medicine (1997) confirms that one in four sexually active teens in the US has STD, and of the 19 million STD infections diagnosed annually, half of them are teenagers and young adults between ages 15-24. 

Pornography fuels human trafficking. Peters, Lederer, and Kelly (2012) cite instances where women are kidnapped, coerced, and forced to perform sex acts while being filmed and uploaded to porn sites for real-time views. Cybersex camps springing up in the Philippines with kidnapped and indigent girls enslaved for commercial sex, live streamed to paying customers in the US.

The authors allege that pornography is the leading cause of objectification of women and violence against women.”A study by FBI researchers of 36 serial killers revealed that 29 were attracted to pornography and incorporated it into their sexual activity, which included serial rape-murder (Peters, Lederer and Kelly, 2012 p. 13).”

Furthermore, they assert that pornography is breaking down in marriages, men addicted to onscreen sex and pornography wishing to replicate their fantasies, finding their wives willing, seek out prostitutes, leading to family problems. In addition, law of diminishing returns demands that addicts often require more deviance from hardcore pornography to get the same level of arousal, leading to greater and greater perversion (Peters, Lederer and Kelly, 2012). They also claim that pornography fuels the trafficking of women to produce pornography and consumption of pornography escalates deviant sexual appetite in men who seek out trafficked prostitutes to live out their fantasy, thus pornography drives prostitution and prostitution fuels sex trafficking.

One common theory that tries to explain the use of sex in movies is that it makes movies profitable, in other words, sex sells movies. However, studies by Cerridwen & Simonton (2009) disprove this theory, showing that there is little correlation between a movie’s box office performance and sexual content. Egan(2000) however disagrees, arguing that pornography is indeed a multi-billion dollar industry, tied with many American corporate names. The author claims that DirecTV, a General Motors subsidiary buys nearly $200 million a year in pay-per-view sex films. Egan confirms that international brands like AT&T Corporation are neck deep in selling hard-core sex channels to millions of hotel rooms in Marriott International and Hilton. Mahlburg (2020) discovered that each year, 42 billion users visit the largest pornographic site in the world called Pornhub, where research has revealed every type of criminally deviant porn can be found even with minors. While Asher of Vivid Entertainment Group argues that obsessed people are sources of income, and hotels make up to 90 percent of the profit from streaming in-room porn.

Nevertheless, it can be argued that profit alone fails to explain the proliferation of onscreen sex.  After all, Hollywood and other social media willingly lose out from $8.4 billion dollar bounty that the US tobacco companies spent in 2018 in advertisement and promotion because of their anti-tobacco stands.

Thus, Charles (2014) asserts that the primary objective of Hollywood’s proliferation of onscreen sex is to subvert the Judeo-Christian morals of their viewers. Alberto and Eliana (2009) detail other research that supports the use of onscreen sex to undermine Judeo-Christian sexual ethics. The authors cite the Brazilian military government’s agenda of legalizing divorce, in the ’70s, using television series inundated with sex to little by little deform the consciences of millions of viewers, this successfully resulted in a spike in divorce rates among women across Brazilian municipal areas.

Furthermore, Charles (2014) cites Michael Catt, senior pastor of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany saying, “We’ve always heard that Hollywood is about making money, but I think it’s really about an immoral or amoral agenda to promote lifestyles, relativism, compromise, and shades of gray with no black and white. There is a force in that community. Michael continues, “more important than making $100 million is to plant seeds in the minds of young people that will take them away from Judeo-Christian ethics.”

Gordon Pennington, a successful marketing consultant in Hollywood adds, “Whoever controls the image of culture controls the culture.”

In addition, according to West (2014), they are willing to risk everything, even lawsuits from the #metoo movement of female actors forced to perform sexual content, as conditions of employment. Back in 1953, In an era when an NC-17 rating for X-rated films well known to lead to box office failure, West argues, Hugh Hefner was willing to lose money to destroy by founding playboy magazine, and the adult movie industry to spite Judeo- Christianity. Luckily, the invention of the video cassette recorder (VCR) ended up making him a lot of money, because “The first thing that a lot of people did when they got their VCR was rent or purchase an adult movie (Porn in the USA , 2003).”

Furthermore, other evidence of anti-Judeo-Christian bias emerges with a cursory look at Hollywood’s blockbusters over a thirty-year period. Greydanus (2020) claims that Hollywood consistently links Christianity with murderous violence, like the rosary-clutching villain in the Legend of Tarzan and the murderous villain called “the Butcher” who wears a T-shirt with an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wanted (2008). Again, you have Tom Hanks’, Irish Catholic hit man packing a rosary and automatic weapons in the Road to Perdition (2002). Going further, recall the butchery and cold-blooded murder in Gangs of New York (2002) and The Godfather (1973) all carried out by religious people.

Even more scandalous are depictions of ordained ministers, priests, bishops, and popes as bloodthirsty murderers (Greydanus, 2020).  The Albino monk assassin in The Da Vinci Code a blockbuster released in 2006 as another poignant evidence, and V for Vendetta (2006): a depraved bishop who is complicit in Mengele-like human experiments and who indulges a sexual penchant for very young girls or the Catholic-themed killings in Seven (1995) and The Glimmer Man (1996) (Greydanus, 2020).

It can be argued that onscreen sex and pornography in particular strikes at the heart of Christian sexual ethics. Houck (2009) asserts that Christian moral code exalts decency, modesty, and purity of heart as a basic prerequisite to seeing God. “Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8). However, on-screen sex and pornography excite lustful thoughts and attacks cleanliness and purity of heart. Seghers (2018) argues that for a Christian, sex is holy and linked generation of new life.

According to West (2015), in John Paul II teaches in the theology of the body that Christ spilled blood on the cross and gave Christian life to believers within the Church, in the sexual act, a husband spills his blood on his wife, and gives new life, a new human person. Furthermore, Christians consider the human body as the dwelling place of God, not to be degraded as a sexual object for commercial consumption. West (2015), expounding on the Theology of the body of John Paul II said that if Heaven is the dwelling place of God, then a woman’s womb is heaven on earth since God took flesh on the womb of a woman, Mary. Thus, the author continues, it is by God’s design that in sexual art, a man enters the heaven of a woman’s womb and spills out his life the way Christ spilled his blood for the Church (West, 2015). “Coming together in the profound partnership of marriage, man and woman live for the other in mutual love and deference. This union is expressed concretely in the couple’s bodily sexual bodily gift of themselves to one another in sexual intercourse. Here they speak a profound language of total self-gift and unconditional fidelity (Grabowski (n.d).”

Onscreen sex and pornography break the fidelity between marriage and sex, introducing complexity, selfishness, and lust, into a perfect act of mutual and exclusive self-giving between married spouses.

In summary, with pervasive onscreen sex and pornography, Hollywood is not showing too much sex, rather they are showing too little, and they do not go far enough. Sex is much more than physical bodies, it has an eternal dimension. They treat sex pornography as a consumer product because of the huge profit coming in from it, but also with a primary agenda of subverting Judeo-Christian ethics. Yet the remedy to this destructive distorted view of sex lies in the proper understanding of the Theology of the body of John Paul II

References

 Alberto,C., & Eliana, L. (2009).Television and divorce: Evidence from Brazilian Novelas( Working Paper No. 651). Retrieved from Inter-American Development Bank Research Department website:https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/51502/1/591278979.pdf

Charles, C. (2014). Hollywood’s Immoral Agenda Entertainment Industry Accelerates Attack on Biblical Values. Retreived from https://decisionmagazine.com/hollywoods-immoral-agenda/

Cerridwen, A.,& Simonton, D.K.(2009).Sex Doesn’t Sell—Nor Impress! Content, Box Office, Critics, and Awards in Mainstream Cinema.  American Psychological Association, 3(4),200-210. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/aca-3-4-200.pdf

Egan,T.(2000,Oct.23). Wall Street Meets Pornography. The Newyorktimes .Retreived from https://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/23/us/erotica-special-report-technology-sent-wall-street-into-market-for-pornography.html

Eyal, K., and K. Finnerty. (2009). “The portrayal of sexual intercourse on television: How, who, and with what consequence?” Mass Communication & Society 12: 143-169. Retrieved from https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/sex-on-tv-4-report-introduction.pdf

Greydanus, S. D. (2020). Let’s face it: Hollywood’s got a “religion problem”.Retrieved from http://decentfilms.com/articles/hollywood-religion-problem

Grabowski, S. J(n.d) The Theology Of The Body AccordingTo Pope John Paul II. Retreived from https://www.foryourmarriage.org/the-theology-of-the-body-according-to-pope-john-paul-ii/

Mahlburg, K. (2020, June 26).Tell Pornhub and Planned Parenthood that Black Lives Matter. Retrieved from https://mercatornet.com/tell-pornhub-and-planned-parenthood-that-black-lives-matter/64162/?preview_id=64162

Paul, B. (2013).Study: PG-13 Films Combine as Much Violence, Sex and Alcohol as R-Rated Titles. Retrieved from https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/study-pg-13-films-combine-663899

Peters, R.W, Lederer, L.J and Kelly,S.(2012).The Slave and the Porn Star: Sexual Trafficking and Pornography. The protection project: Journal of human right and civil society

Retrieved from https://www.rescuefreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/slave-and-the-porn-star.pdf

Porn in the USA, part 2.  (2003, Nov 21). [Video/DVD] New York: BBC Studios Americas, Inc., Columbia Broadcasting System. Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/1822822291?accountid=188730

Seghers,J.(2018). Theology of the Body: An Overview. Retrieved from https://www.totustuus.com/essays

West, C. (2015, Oct 24). DCC Lecture Series [Video/DVD] – God, Sex and the Meaning of Life. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHUsnDwB8Ww&t=33s