Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Avoid Porn, Develop Aesthetics

Jennifer Fitz of Riparians at the Gate asks in her 3.5 Time Outs this week:
Bleg: Boys, Porn, and Chastity. Had a friend in for tea Sunday afternoon, and she gave me a timely head’s up on the reality of tweenage boys and the very rapid transition into Exceedingly Immature Manhood that is somewhere on the horizon for our boy. (Right now, the only girl he likes is the dog.) Since I know that at least a few of my readers are:

  1. Men.
  2. Fathers of teens boys and former teen boys.
  3. Catholic of the Chastity is Good, Sin is Bad type.
  4. Remember what it was like to live inside the body of a teenage boy.

or:

  1. Are married to such a person.

or:

  1. Are the grown son of such a person.

Want to offer any advice? Practical. Links, comments, a post of your own and link it back here. I’m all ears. Anything helpful. Thanks!
Young Man is currently not-quite-four, so I'm speaking here as a "Remember what it was like to live inside the body of a teenage boy" and also a "terrified on behalf of my daughters" father, since with out oldest two girls at 10 and 8, it's not so many years until I have to start wondering if the boys they play with are learning about women via the nastier portions of the internet. I'm also not entirely sure how this will go over, so I'll give it a shot and see what the reaction is.

Thinking back to my tweens and early teens, two things that formed me in ways that I am deeply grateful for stand out.

First of all, my father was a truly sterling example of a strong and upstanding man who never treated women (in person or in image) in a degrading way. The dads of many other boys I knew kept swimsuit calendars out in their workshops or showed by their actions that it was an okay and manly thing to flip open a playboy every so often. Dad was never like that.

Secondly, however, Dad was not at all a prude. It was made clear to me that there were certain books I was not yet allowed to read and movies I was not yet allowed to see because I was not yet mature enough to deal with the sexuality or nudity in them, but that when I was old enough to have solidified my moral compass it would be alright for me to encounter them. While the parents of some other strictly brought up Catholic kids I knew would fast forward through certain scenes in movies or black out sections of books, I was kept away from such things entirely until it was judged I was old enough to handle them, and then I'd be allowed to watch (usually with my Dad) or read all the way through.

And while there was certainly not anything sleazy around the house, there was a lot of classical and renaissance art to be found in the big art books in our family library. These weren't hidden from me, and indeed we looked and and discussed a number of such paintings and sculptures when covering art history in homeschool. This also was different from many of the other strict families that we knew where anything from National Geographic to the Sistine Chapel which showed the unclothed human body was strictly censored.

Like a lot of boys that age, I was intensely curious about what women's bodies looked like. Since what I had available to me most conveniently (and without much sense of guilt) to satisfy this curiosity was our collection of art books. This meant that I developed and aesthetic of female beauty based on art rather than based on Sports Illustrated or Playboy.

Now, I think some conservative Catholic parents would suggest that they'd rather their tween or teen sons not be looking at art depicting nudity any more than poring over Playboy. Obviously, it has to be clear that using any image (or writing) simply to stimulate yourself is always and everywhere wrong. But a boy in his early teens is also developing his ideas of beauty, and those ideas are going to stick with him for a long time. At the risk of sounding permissive: He is going to get his ideas of beauty in relation to the naked female body somewhere. The key, it seems to me, is for that idea of beauty to be formed by images that really are beautiful and which are designed to convey a beauty of form rather than simply to provoke lust. If he's not not helped into forming that idea of beauty in a positive aesthetic way, chances are strong he's going to be formed by the kind of images that pop culture puts out instead.

8 comments:

Jennifer Fitz said...

Darwin, THANK YOU!! Very helpful.

[Other readers -- if you have more to add than fits in the combox, you are entirely welcome to post at your own place and then leave a link back at mine, or e-mail me the link.]

Banshee said...

Thank you for the tribute to your dad, because it sounds a lot like my dad. :) He formed my brothers to be honest, gentlemanly men, and he formed me to expect no less in the men I know and work with.

Anonymous said...

Love this.

Matthew Lickona said...

"At the risk of sounding permissive" is my new favorite euphemism. But I think you're on to something. When people joke about masturbation fodder during the years before porn access, they tend to reference things like the underwear section of the Sears catalog. Never classical art. Said the man who has made a lifelong study of such things. Hoo!

mary said...

For crying out loud, this is one of the best things you have ever written! I have three boys...and it seems that everyone these days either ignores their son's budding interest, or is in total denial about it. I cannot tell you the number of mothers I know who give Iphones to their 9, 10, 11, 12 year old sons and think " Oh...they would never look on some dirty site!" It is like they are delusional. Also, from the squirmy looks I have gotten from folks when bringing this topic up, I think most of these moms are using porn themselves in their marriages or they have husbands who do. I myself fell into a bit of this years ago with my husband, before I realized the depravity of it. But...i think these women just don't get it...they really don't get how different the landscape is today as opposed to just a few years ago pre-internet.

I wish so badly I knew your Dad! I really suspected that men like him really did not ever exist! The way men refer to women is also key. My own father sometimes made very improper remarks about young women in my presence. The older he got, the weirder it was. Also, I had a friend who was a gorgeous Jessica Rabbit type, and our friends' fathers would openly drool over her when she was around. It was really horrid.

Lauren said...

Where do you draw the line with classical art? I haven't seen any fine art that is as disturbing as some of the stuff on the internet, but some of it is not exactly woman as Beauty. Pompeii is full of some rather sexually graphic frescos. Also Michelangelo's Last Judgement has a lot of nudity, but it's certainly not erotic. Nudity accompanied with grotesque violence is very common in a great deal of Western art of both Classical and Christian themes.

I suppose this is all preferable to what's floating around the internet. We had Playboy's in my house growing up, and I don't think it's healthy family reading. I'm glad our home is free of that stuff. But I do have some classical art books that are rather graphic. No boys yet in the family. So maybe I have time to think about this topic further. It's such a tricky line to walk when talking about sex. You want to pass on that sex is about love and joy to your kids, but you have to wrap it up in so many warnings about sin. I'm glad I've got a few more years before I have to start dealing with this stuff.

Darwin said...

Lauren,

Certainly, I don't want to suggest that anything old is therefore okay -- though the Ancient Roman pornography (and similarly ancient Indian, Chinese and Japanese) that I've seen examples of (not as a young teen) is weird and alien to our culture as not to be terribly arousing.

Similarly, as you point out, not all depictions of women in pre-modern art focus on beauty. (Michelangelo's women always look really man-ish to me anyway, though I gather there may be a reason for that...) Though if it's one of his main aesthetic outlets you can definitely rely on a teenage boy to sort through and find the stuff that does have an emphasis on beauty.

I think my main thing in relation to art (and this even relates to better modern art photography as compared to pin ups as compared to soft core) is that when a teenaged boy is developing his sense of what is attractive in female beauty, you want that to be based a kind of idealization that isn't focused on trashiness. Pin ups or soft core photos are definitely idealizations of a sort, in that they don't look just the way real women normally look. Similarly, images of women in classic art are idealized. However, the idealizations are different and emphasize different ways of looking at women. And my point is basically just that you want to have your aesthetic sense formed by the latter kind of idealization rather than the former.

Lauren said...

When I was taking a tour of the Uffizi gallery in Florence , I saw the Venus of Urbino by Titian. Mark Twain called this painting "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses." Now perhaps Twain had a high dose of yankee prudishness, but I think this would fall into the category of art you are talking about. To each his own. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Urbino

I completely agree with you about Michelangelo's women. They are basically men with breast implants.