The Trouble With Images, Part I

Please welcome the other newest contributor to Everyday Liturgy, Rebekah Giffone, as she contemplates the images of our sex-saturated culture in this two-part post.

I decided this morning that I would make a perfectly dreadful Muslim woman because a burka just would not work for me.  Some veiled women look incredibly beautiful and mysterious because they have lovely eyes, but with my glasses I would look ridiculous in a veil.  I could take my glasses off, I suppose, but then I would get that sleepy-eyed look that everyone with bad vision has when they cannot see more than a foot in front of them.  And there’s nothing winsome about that.

What turned my thoughts to burkas was a conversation on feminism this morning. I remembered an essay I had written for my college application for Wellesley two years ago. It discussed modesty by choice, sexuality and the sort of thinking that causes men to demand that women cover themselves completely except for eyes and hands.

I had a conversation with a young man a few weeks ago on a similar vein during summer school. He said he felt sorry for very sheltered youth who are never exposed to any sort of the sexual images we see all over nowadays.  ”One day these kids are going to be walking in the mall and will see a picture of a woman in a bikini and won’t know how to handle it,” he said. ”It’s sad, but I’m almost glad that I’ve become desensitized – I’m so used to seeing that all the time (in commercials, on billboards) that it doesn’t even phase me anymore.”  He has a point, but the desensitization is lamentable.  You get so used to seeing sexual icons that sexuality becomes divorced from relationship.

Here we come yet again to an example of how much we dichotomize the human being. Think of television or any photographic image and contrast it with face to face interaction. It is one thing to watch a video of your favorite band in concert – it is an entirely different experience to actually see them perform in person.  Whenever you have a photographic representation of something instead of the thing or itself, it becomes very easy to divorce the image from the original and then substitute the image for the original in your mind.  Looking at pictures of my mother may remind me of her, but if I do not see her face to face on a regular basis, the image itself, in a sense, replaces my mother and I am left with a woman whose body has been divorced from her self.

In an informal discussion about television and Christianity, one student noted that there was a time when the pastor at his church was failing in health, so he was only able to preach two sermons instead of the three that he normally did. So for the third sermon, a video recording of the pastor was played as the pastor sat next to the screen. Everyone hated it. Why? There may be myriad reasons, but I would think that one reason is that even though the pastor was physically present and he was saying the same things he said at the previous service, his image was divorced from himself, so he seemed less life-like, less himself.

I read an article once that reported that contrary to the hypothesis set forth by some researchers, they found that increased pornography use decreases the frequency of rape. Why? Because men preferred the air-brushed, idealized, impersonal images of women to feed their sexual addiction. They were less satisfied with real women.

This seems to be the root of a common, skewed view of the purpose and nature of sexuality. Perhaps my book selection was very limited (I am certain it was), but the impression I got from a lot of the Christian books I read on dating/marriage relationships when I was in high school was that men have huge sex-drives and so women need to be loving and dress modestly because there are good single Christian men out there who are trying to get a grip and we need to lovingly encourage them not to be so dang horny. When we get married, Christian women are told, our husbands will enjoy us ourselves and of course we’ll have to have sex to please them but it doesn’t have a terrible lot to do with the marriage relationship.

Let it be known, women do want sex. I have met a few people (both men and women) who have no desire to have sex or to be married or anything of the sort, but I think they are the minority. I think one thing that has prolonged the myth that women want ”love not sex” is because women have a more difficult time separating the two. Based on conversations with some of the brother figures in my life, it seems that it is much easier for men to divorce the act of sex from the relationship itself. A woman becomes more emotionally involved. If she does not feel loved, she is not going to want to have sex. [1]

In essence, healthy sexuality involves sexual desire for a real person whom you really love. Of course the man wants the woman’s body and vice versa because it is very much a part of them. To fully have someone is to have their body also and to fully have someone’s body is to have their inner self also. (This, I think, should be a rational argument against premature physical affection because it can be detrimental to be physically intimate with someone until you are at the same level of emotional intimacy.) Let us not again detach the soul from the body. If we follow that line of reasoning, nothing we do with our bodies will matter – we should feel free to do anything we like. But man is both body and spirit, inextricably joined together.  What we do in the body we do in the spirit also.

Part II continues here.

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[1] This is why masturbation may be even more detrimental for women than for men. A woman is more likely to be thinking of a specific person to whom she is attached, whereas a man can be turned on by the image of an unknown woman.