Pornography: Purulent Infection
Millions of Americans today are peeling off five dollars for the dubious privilege of being voyeurs of kinky sex acts. Porno film-makers are reaping great profits because many people in our permissive social milieu want their cinema sinful.
To state that this pursuit of vicarious sexual titillation via skin flicks shows juvenile curiosity or degraded appetites and the increasing vacuity of our skidding society is to assert the obvious. Surely no one who appreciates the joy of sex as God intended it—within the context of married love—can find current sex films anything but immoral and empty exhibitionism.
Moreover, most of them are crashing bores. During my research for this article I viewed a variety of porno flicks with story lines as bare as the performers’ bodies, and I actually fell fast asleep in the midst of a smoldering lust scene. My eyelids hadn’t closed in a movie since I watched Rock Hudson pilot a submarine under a polar ice cap in Ice Station Zebra. Love is exciting, but sex without it becomes a drag that degrades and stultifies. When will people realize that sexploitation is to abundant living what raw sewage is to Lake Erie?
Porno films are as old as the earliest motion pictures and have long been a staple at stag parties. The past decade, however, has seen the onset of obscene films that even now, I suspect, have not plunged to their lowest depths. Many Christians don’t realize how widespread pornography has become.
In the mid-sixties theaters showed sun-loving bathers displaying their nudity with no overt sexual activity. Then came soft-core pornos, like Russ Meyer’s Vixen, that had bare breasts and suggestive sex scenes. Such soft-core is now standard fare at most drive-in passion pits. “Art theaters” soon after sprang up with “beaver films,” such as those by Alex de Renzy, in which bountifully endowed women tantalizingly took it all off.
In the late sixties, shoddy hard-core “loops” of heterosexual copulation emerged. These amateurish flicks combined the world’s worst acting in the sleaziest hotel rooms with gymnastic love-making accompanied by sound tracks of pop records and lovers’ feigned squeals and moans. In many cities theaters now offer half a dozen of these fifteen-minute loops at a special price of ninety-nine cents.
In 1972, Gerard Damiano’s Deep Throat, the first boffo box-office porno hit, exploded all over America, bringing innumerable arrests of exhibitors on obscenity charges. Deep Throat became the first hard-core film to gross six million dollars. Blase, sexually liberated movie-goers clamoured for $5 tickets to witness Linda Lovelace’s proclivity for fellatio after she is told by her psychiatrist that her clitoris is mislocated in her throat.
The profits generated and the market uncovered by Deep Throat stimulated more technically improved skin flicks. The most successful at the box office have been The Devil in Miss Jones, The Stewardesses, The Resurrection of Eve, and Behind the Green Door. The latter film, produced by San Francisco’s Mitchell Brothers, featured Marilyn Chambers, whose porno sexual antics hardly jibed with her image as the ideal mother pictured then on a box of Ivory Snow. The resultant publicity, said Jim Mitchell, helped the movie gross five million dollars, excluding profits from prints pirated and shown by the Mafia.
The current crop of porno films has moved beyond the usual heterosexual sex scenes to include sodomy, bisexuality, ménages à trois, group orgies, bestiality, lesbian lust, and all types of male homosexual action. The latest debauchery is the B and D film—bondage and discipline—where sado-masochistic beatings are simulated or actually performed to provide sexual arousement. In B and D pornography human degradation finally moves to physical violence and the portrayal of human beings as either worthless or worthy of only hate and punishment. The biblical picture of rebellious man described by Paul in Romans chapter one is all too apparent in today’s sexual cinema.
Although the grossly obscene films of the hard-core entrepreneurs are not regularly seen in most neighborhood theaters, such X-rated “serious pictures” as Midnight Cowboy, Last Tango in Paris, and the 1975 box-office success Emmanuelle have reached wide audiences and garnered critical acclaim despite their aberrant sex acts. Now however, nearly every R-rated film includes a partially nude copulation scene, blasphemy and obscenities, and realistic violence.
The trend toward more filth in films is likely to increase despite the self-regulating rating code of the Motion Picture Association of America. (Its standards call for decency and the upholding of human dignity, and for restraint in presenting: indecent or undue exposure of the human body; illicit sex relations and sexual aberrations; obscene speech and gestures; profanity; brutality, cruelty, and physical violence; and the demeaning of religion.) Movies will be made as obscene and violent as the public desires. Pornographers are motivated primarily by money and will violate any code that limits them.
Pornographer Jim Mitchell, thirty-one, who has been arrested thirty-five times for exhibiting obscene films and is now appealing his one conviction, admits his chief motivation is money. He hopes to make it big with his upcoming epic Sodom and Gomorrah, which mixes the story of Abraham and Lot with astronauts and atomic destruction. Together with his brother Art and his associate Bill Boyer, he hopes to make The Great Pornographic Film. He claims that his sex films meet the legal standard of showing serious scientific, literary, or political value. Boyer justifies pornos on the grounds that they relieve anxieties and allow potential rapists to fantasize their aggression, thus preventing violent sex acts.
Pornography prospers because sinners want it. But it is also true that its ready availability may induce sinful sexual indulgence not otherwise stimulated. Christians need to understand the nature of this socially degrading entertainment and use legal means to close it down.
The sins of the flesh, the mind, and the spirit are becoming more open in American society. Only Jesus Christ can change a person’s life so that love and not lust controls his life.
ROBERT L. CLEATH
Robert L. Cleath is professor of speech communication at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, California.
Newly Pressed
Evie Again (Word, WST-8642). Since her first album her voice has matured and her low notes are fuller. On her upbeat numbers such as “Sunday Mornin’ ” and “Stop, Look and Listen” words and music meld effectively.
Burt Kettinger (Tempo, R-7083) and Bond of Love, Phil and Jill Freeman (Sound III, a division of Tempo; ST-3006). Both albums have a similar sound—as the jacket of Kettinger’s record puts it, “sincere, basic, and simple.”
CHERYL FORBES
‘Witness Art’S: A Contemporary Expression
The Church commissioned some of the earliest religious painting to help its uneducated communicants understand Scripture. Frescoes and altar-piece screens portrayed simplified Bible stories and characters to teach Christianity to those who could not read. Often these teaching art works were breathtaking in their execution: the mosaics shimmering with inlaid precious stones, the paintings and frescoes enriched with gold leaf.
Christian themes were also represented in other forms. Integration of the written word and the visual representation of that word occurred quite early in the form of manuscript illumination. But such manuscripts benefited only the educated.
Despite the predominance of Christian subjects the visual arts tended to be impersonal. Art was never specifically designed to give the owner—and at the time there were few individual collectors—an opportunity to share his knowledge of Christ.
A new concept in religious art, available to people who want to share their faith in Christ, has been created, and is called “Witness Art.” The designers believe it is an expression unique among forms of art illustrating Christian themes.
Witness Art, which will soon be available in Christian bookstores throughout the country, consists of lithograph reproductions of paintings designed as an evangelistic tool. An information card describing the artist’s vision based on certain Scripture passages accompanies each print.
The three preview paintings are all impressionistic, ethereal, and elusive in style. And that is Witness Art’s primary weakness. Use of color, mostly muted tones, gives a washed-out appearance, though it is in keeping with the impressionistic style. I would like to see a stronger use of color and a broader use of styles, including surrealistic, abstract, and even realistic modes of expression.
The lithographs will be in both limited and unlimited editions, framed and unframed. For further information, contact Standard Publishing, 8121 Hamilton Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45231. However, the plan to limit sales to the Christian market is a mistake. We need to witness to unbelievers, not to believers. Christ did not limit the sale of his “product” to Christian emporiums. Neither should we.
MARTHA POLLIE
Martha Pollie is a free-lance writer and photographer, Alexandria, Virginia.
