The Porn Moralists

A porn sight found The Naked Smoke post and tried to mock it with a post-rational porn collage with my name thrown in. If you're the site you know who you are. Hi, it's me Greg.

In my post on Morality and Ethics, I defined a moral system as a belief system of values that flows from a particular metaphysical understanding. With that in mind, for the porn nihilists who want to label me a Christian moralist, it is important to remember that they too are trying to advance a moral system.

The porn nihilist says it's no big deal" to porn the way a drug addict says that his drug is "no big deal". Porn, like drugs to the junkie, is a very big deal and those who traffic in it need their porn fixes. They not only need it, they believe that the craving for it is "natural/primal", defending it as part of their innate design. Porn nihilists will use the language of "liberation" to defend their access to porn, thereby claiming porn as a right of design and a moral freedom.

If you notice what I wrote regarding Larry Flint, I am critical of any defense of porn that is not self-limiting to boundaries where it is out of public right of way. Being criticized for this position by porn nihilists is an indication that they want it to be given public right of way. To advance their metaphysic and the value system that flows out of it, porn nihilists want the right to harness the visual power sex to operate as a sort of "porn evangelism".

So what, exacly, are they evangelizing? As nihilists, they believe that there is no higher meaning to life than to experience "hedons" as they are defined as valueless units of pleasure. From this point of metaphysical understanding, they flatten all metaphysical and moral questions into a "superflat" realm (the term superflat was coined by Japanese philosopher Murakami to describe the flattening of high and low art hierarchies). Pop-culture is the theater of superflat moral, metaphysical spiritual reality, and porn is just one corner of it. In this realm, joy is not possible, since joy by definition is the union of pleasure and meaning. The only pleasure possible is what the French postmodernist Jean Baudrillard described as a nihilistic state of delirium.

The porn nihilist lives in a Beaudrillardian delirium of sex hedons, walking backward into the physical, emotional and spiritual costs of disposable sex, and only reckoning with those costs when forced to by tragic circumstance. Seeking maximum sex hedons is the porn nihilists' only purpose that is left standing after all other ideas of meaning have been rejected and deconstructed.

Enforcing their nihilistic metaphysic, the porn nihilist feeds his latent need for meaning and purpose by finding meaning in the forceful rejection of any claim to higher purpose, something I discussed in my very first post, My lust makes the world go 'round. As the latent need for meeting operates in him like a void, creating the spiritual suction that bonds his murky sense of honor to intellectually defending disposable pleasure. To suggest that there is a moral, intellectual, relational and/or spiritual poverty in this is to threaten the porn nihilist's purposeful purposelessness. It also threatens his jollies.

As I have discussed in other posts, sexual jollies and our need for meaning are intimately connected. That which pleases is us sexually is that which we find our validation in, since the pleasure is the pleasure of being validated, or in the case of porn and other disposable sexual encounters, being psuedo-validated. For this reason, we will bond our selves to the values that are held by those to whom we are sexually attracted, whoever they may be.

I would welcome a porn nihilist to engage in debate. But many a porn nihilists may not bother with words to defend his actions, being as he is a denizen of the super-flat post-rational realm, he'll often rely on post-rational slogans and images.