Pornography Undresssed
by Robert Masters
from his newsletter, “The Crucible of Awakening”
Pornography is sexually explicit material designed to catalyze and intensify sexual charge in contexts that are not only aesthetically barren, but also devoid of caring and real intimacy.
Pornography is dehumanizing objectification in erotic drag, both depending upon and reinforcing obsessive interest in sexual activity and possibility.
Pornography exploits the craving of those who’ve learned to distract themselves from their suffering through nonrelational erotic excitation and discharge.
Pornography’s pictures tell a story with the scantiest of plots, a story that brings together viewed and viewer in a quickly undressed hotbed of unillumined lust. Whether or not there’s actual sex, everyone gets fucked.
Whatever helps amplify sexual charge is brought into the picture or plot; sometimes this is relatively innocuous, and other times it is darker, uglier, blurring the line between sexuality and violence. Pornography gives lust a bad name.
Pornography doesn‘t care about who it fucks with, so long as it has their business. Pornography is erotic imagination gone slumming, losing contact with love, art, and ecstasy along the way.
And pornography is not just limited to dying-to-be-fucked centerfolds, “adult” movies, lurid romance novels, and so on, but is the operational strategy of those driven to employ fantasy in their sex life, especially as a means of getting turned on or staying aroused. In binding our sexuality to our minds, overvaluing erotic stimulation, and reducing our partner to a prop in our masturbatory drama, we don’t see that we are only fucking ourselves. To truly enjoy sex is then out of reach for us, for we do not enter its domain nakedly present and loving, but come in already addicted to erotic expectations and rituals that originally arose as “solutions” to our suffering.
Teenage boys who are chronically distressed and who have discovered the pleasure and relief that ejaculation provides likely will also find and employ various visuals, both externally (like magazine porn) and internally (“hot” girls at their school), that amplify their arousal. If fantasy-centered erotic arousal and discharge remains their method for reducing their distress as they leave their teens, and if they do not question nor attempt to dismantle such conditioning (through skillful therapy and/or awakening practices), they will likely retain it through their adult years, even in a loving relationship. They may keep it in the dark, but when it comes to crunch time — as when they want to feel really turned on — they’ll animate it, perhaps through sexually fantasizing while engaging in sex, or perhaps through viewing porn.
For pornography to no longer be our erotic default, we must reenter, become intimate with, and ultimately heal the very wounding that originally drove us into pornography’s domain; in doing so, we liberate our libido from its dark, loveless ruts...
To read the rest of the article, go here:
from the terrific Robert Masters web site
And no, the site isn't just about sex! I consider finding his teachings and books one of my best discoveries of 2010. His insights and skillful teachings have been hugely helpful in my own life, and the man is deeply grounded in the dharma.
This post is inspired by the ongoing discussion at my note:
Teen Sex and the Internet - Girls Know What Boys Want
