The Porndemic and Corporate Fashion-Grooming

As summer nears, thoughts turn to fair weather and, for some of us, swimming and the beach. But more and more, the beach has come to be somewhere that is no longer what one might call “family-friendly”.

As the pandemic grinds do a whimper, I reflect on the debris that lockdown mania has left in its path. Last year nearly every major periodical published articles on the rise of porn usage during Covid. The shutdown-necessitated closing of porn studios and the shut-down-related uptick in demand set a fire under the already growing porn cottage industry.

Psychologists blamed this increased demand on stressful times and confinement to our homes. In such an environment, they say, sex quickly becomes a coping mechanism. But why porn? I mean, I get the whole sex thing, but why pretend sex? It seems there must be more to this than having time on our hands and experiencing stress. Let’s take a short ride in the way-back machine.

If I recall correctly, somewhere back in the seventies was the first time I saw a book published about “erogenous zones”. The author, of course, was treated by the TV talk show hosts as a demigod who had condescended to snatch us from a virtual sexual stone age. It was a very important book, you see, because we all need someone to tell us what feels good—we’d obviously never figure it out on our own. I guess.

To be fair, there were things to be gained by some frank discussion of what happens in the realm of human sexual intimacy, but the propensity for such a conversation to quickly degenerate into irreverence and become just another form of titillation is undeniable. A quick search on Amazon will uncover dozens of books on the erogenous subject, something which displays, I fear, much more interest in titillation than information.

When my wife and I retired, we decided that we no longer wanted to winter in Wisconsin, not only because we dislike the cold, but primarily for health reasons. I won’t bore you with the details, but swimming in the ocean and walking on soft beach sand are two of the only forms of exercise that are low-impact enough to work for me, a fact that puts me on the beach for about an hour on any day that the weather permits.

I love the sun, the sand, the sea, and, to be honest, it’s also pleasant seeing beautiful women in swimwear. And that’s what initiated this article. You see, those beautiful women are, more often than not, no longer in anything resembling minimally modest bathing suits; no, they’re not entirely naked, but many are—if you’ll excuse the entirely appropriate expression—butt-naked.

It seemed that, for an entire generation, we needed to be lectured about what areas of the body are erogenous zones, only to discover that it would soon be acceptable to display the obvious ones in public. Catholic moral theology is, more often than not, an exercise in temperance: somewhere between men swooning at the sight of an exposed ankle and total nudity there reside some simple rules that make moral sense.

When I was growing up, the generally accepted modesty of the day allowed for sun-bathing to actually be sun-bathing by exposing some skin to the sun’s rays and manufacturing some good old vitamin D. But the modesty of the day suggested, at a bare minimum, covering the obvious erogenous zones of the body: genitalia, the nearby sexually sensitive areas (i.e. the buttocks), and the breasts. But many women now go into public wearing string bikini bottoms, where a strap up the backside disappears completely in the body-symmetry centerline abyss.

Changing gears just a bit, when doing journalistic research into the disgusting world of child porn and child molestation, one will invariably come across the term “grooming”. Grooming is all about normalizing the obscene, the outrageous, the unthinkable, the painful until it no longer triggers an emotional response—until the victim is comfortably numb. Social grooming occurs constantly, though we are, more often than not, unaware of it. We are groomed by the news media, advertising, music, television, movies, books, the medical establishment, and most profoundly, academia—groomed for the acceptance of a host of bad things.

For men, this is an age of tremendous frustration. Let’s be clear: generally speaking, women dress to be noticed. It’s in their genetic makeup. A man’s libido is very much invested in the visual, and every woman knows so instinctively. Why do women wear string bikinis? Because that strap up the middle of the backside is more comfortable? Of course not.

They wear them to be noticed. But it is often the same women who complain of being treated “like a piece of meat”. I know, I know—this is all so obvious that it’s a bit trite to go through it yet again. But there is a phenomenon that seems to have escaped many of us—certainly some of the ladies amongst us. Half-naked images everywhere are a sort of grooming.

If you dwell upon the nude images constantly foisted at you, you are in danger of becoming, in modern parlance, jaded. About that word, Webster says, “made dull, apathetic, or cynical by experience or by having or seeing too much of something.” In other words, groomed. Yes, groomed.

Overexposure dulls our reaction to anything. What man wants to be dulled to the image of a naked woman? Almost none, really, but it’s happening every day in every way. And what is the result? —the relentless search for something outrageous enough to awaken the dulled senses; something to make one feel alive again. On the sexual frontier, most men are not okay with being comfortably numb. And thus, we have the current porndemic.

If you have ever personally witnessed the tears of a young wife who has discovered that her husband is addicted to porn, you have had a taste of how heartbreaking it is for everyone involved. And, perhaps the saddest part of all is that some of these poor wives, victims though they are, may, to an extent, be victims of their own making. Have they participated in this sexual revolution experiment that constantly overstimulates the male population? Judging from what I see on the beach, only a relative few have not. What seems to be missing in our culture, with its immersion in all things sexual, is, ironically, any real understanding of sexuality in general, and specifically, male sexuality.

In the high middle ages, the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas, explained concupiscence from a relatively benign point of view; that is, as our desire for all that is good—albeit, desire comprised of appetites that are inordinate and constantly in need of being reined in. Original sin is a flaw of the will, not of the good which is the object of the will—neither pleasure nor the desire for pleasure is, in and of itself, evil.

Without concupiscence, those desires would have been easily subjugated to the will and served us well. With our weakened wills and our disconnectedness from providence, we need to constrain our exposure to stimuli to lighten the burden on those weakened wills. The Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. It’s a very simple biblical concept—so simple that it has completely escaped the universal sophistry of our day.

The slippery slope that we have created is slippery precisely because addictions are incredibly hard to beat. And in an age when chivalry is often disdained, men are sometimes punished by the very women they love for being chivalrous enough to suggest that the world might be a better place if she were to reserve the sanctuary of her deep sexual beauty for his eyes alone. How can he be so controlling? So jealous? So patriarchal? Common decency has gone the way of common sense—down the rabbit hole.

For me, it goes without saying that the porndemic is not the cause of our woes, it is a sad symptom. Perversity is a severe task-master and throws us into a very vicious cycle—one that is difficult to break, both as an individual and as a society. But there are some simple, tough-love things that we can all do. We can practice modesty and chivalry. It’s tough in these times, I know, but the popularity of these virtues will always come back.

How do I know? The clothing industry is counting on it. In the same way that Oligarchs disrupt the markets because they can make a killing in every economic upheaval, clothing companies have learned to maximize profit in the waxing and waning of human morality; moreover, like the oligarchs they are, they’ve seized control of the trends. The current culture path toward complete nudity on the beach will make swimsuits obsolete—no clothing manufacturer wants that.

They have made a killing selling a fraction of an ounce of cloth for big bucks. To stay in business, the profit margins will have to come down a bit as they add more cloth to the new lines. Women will be pleased when that strap up the backside goes away. It’s all as predictable as daybreak, and the fashion industry’s ability to point us in any direction they want us to go is just as predictable.

Wouldn’t it be great if they had a conscience? Wouldn’t it be great if we weren’t so predictably easy? —if we actually had a moral and spiritual foundation? —if chivalry was not dead? —if all of our lives were driven by something more substantial than corporate fashion grooming?