Matt And Dawn Fight About Porn

Dawn Eden has a post where she expresses some anger at a post by Matt McGuiness on the subject of pornography. Here is Matt:

We take our humanity seriously when we don't “short circuit” the questions that desire raises in us. The Catholic moralist would say, “Impure thoughts, bad! Stop having them;” the Catholic realist asks, “Impure thoughts, what are you really after?” Hence, we can be confronted with the same “raw material,” but end up in radically different places. If you find scrupulosity satisfying, then, I would say, “Keep at it.” However if keeping notes on your temptations and sins doesn't interest you or even begin to solve your problems, I invite you, dear reader, to take a deeper look at desire.

The concept here is that the desire behind impure thoughts is good but twisted. We can purge those impure thoughts and think about something else but the desire remains. Is it possible to untwist impure thoughts? Can we fix our sexual desire so it is possible to have it spark good and holy thoughts rather than immoral and degrading thoughts? Yes and no.

Dawn Eden makes an important point on the other side.

Rather than join Father Angelo Mary Geiger and Kevin O’Brien in pointing out the flaws in your theological arguments, I will leave you with some quotations from Blessed John Paul II’s pontificate on things you won’t find in the article: the objective sinfulness of pornography, the dangers of desensitization to sin, the need to avoid occasions of sin, the grace offered to us when we encounter Christ in the Sacrament of Penance, and the necessity of growing in virtue.

We want to pursue the good in sexual desire but untwisting an evil might be wrong image. God does not come to sinners and say, "You are very close, just tweak this or that and you will be there." He comes to sinners and says you need to die to sin. Yes that death does lead to resurrection. Still the image of dying and rising to new life does paint a different picture. The starting point is different. We are not supposed to start with our sin. We are supposed to start at square one. That is why in Theology of the Body John Paul II goes back to Adam and Eve. He does not look at the output of the sexual revolution and make suggestions for how we can fix it.

But what does the redeemed sexuality look like? We want to avoid impure thoughts but what kinds of thoughts arising from sexual desire would be pure? I am not sure the question should be addressed that way. Look at greed. Do we need to make some positive effort to cultivate a holy desire for wealth? Not really. We just curb the disordered desire. So if we don't talk that way about the desire for possessions why should we talk that way about the desire for sex?

Theology of the Body does not completely ignore the question. Beyond Adam and Eve John Paul points to Catholic art, to the Song of Solomon, and to various saints especially Mary. Still most of all he points to grace. If you can avoid lust then a healthy desire will grow naturally. Just be open to God through the word, the sacraments, prayer, etc. You might not even recognize it as being connected to your sexuality. Just a real appreciation of women as women and men as men leading you to love all people more deeply.