The Bible tells us Adam and Eve resided in the most perfect paradise - until sexuality got in the way. In addition to forever branding snakes as vile, contemptuous villains, misreading the biblical creation allegory also does one other thing exceptionally well. It leaves believers with the unshakable notion that nudity - and by implication, sex - is bad, wrong, dirty and something people should engage in only for procreation, not recreation.
To do otherwise would displease God and jeopardize their immortal souls. Thus were the seeds of pornography sown. It was only natural, after all, that suppressing something as pleasurable, natural and mostly unavoidable as sex would become a primary control mechanism for the self-appointed hand of God on Earth - the church - and a primary method of protest and finance for those who rebelled against the church's unforgiving approach to anything that resembled rebellion.
"Somewhere along the lines, the message that sexuality is one of the gifts God gave men and women became a taboo that they wrestle with their entire lives," PrideBucks co-founder Harlan Yaffe said. "I am not sure there is an easy reconciliation between that gift from God versus what is taught by the self-appointed teachers who profess to be speaking and enforcing God's words. An awful lot of people have been speaking awfully out of turn for an awfully long time."
The church has an illustrious history of blaming man's headlong rush into the fiery pit on some outside force that must be eliminated. In the Dark Ages, the target was pagans, idol worshippers who contributed nothing to the church's growing coffers. During the Crusades, the enemy was the Muslims, an unholy religious sect upon which "God decreed vengeance," partially because they were wealthy enough to fund imperial expansion. In 17th-century America, witchcraft bore the brunt of the church's wrath - again, largely because pious religious leaders (who also served as political leaders) saw benefit in singling out "different" others for persecution so their lands could be grabbed.
In all of those ignoble campaigns, sexual activity and money played roles in the identification of "the damned." The church even turned on its own in the latter part of the 11th century, when Pope Gregory VII decreed celibacy for priests. Prior to then, priests were allowed to marry, but families quickly became problematic when priests died, since the often-substantial estates church leaders amassed from their God-fearing parishioners belonged to their heirs, not to the church. The public reason for the U-turn in church policy was that priests without familial obligations could devote themselves more fully to God.
Today, religious conservatives' big enemy (in addition to gay marriage and abortion) is pornography. It destroys families, leads viewers into lives of crime and sexual depredation - and steals money and power from the church. However, without porn, the church would be set adrift with no enemy against which to vent its self-righteous, self-loathing spleen. Porn would suffer without the church, too. Moral outrage is what keeps porn in the news and makes it obscenely profitable. Porn producers frequently exclaim, "We don't want to become ‘mainstream' or ‘acceptable.' That would take all the profit out of the industry."
Strange bedfellows
Despite seeming worlds apart in ideology, sex and religion are similar in some very elemental ways. For one thing, both religion and sex require fans to "give up control," according to First Amendment attorney J.D. Obenberger, who seriously considered becoming a priest before deciding to join the bar. Even though he represents adult-industry clients zealously, Obenberger is not ashamed to admit he's a devout Catholic.
He maintains that in order to live a pious life or experience orgasm, individuals must cede control of their essential beings to a power larger than themselves. In that way, "religion and sex are escapes from the real world," he observed. "They're both deeply emotional and mystical. Religious intensity and sexual intensity properly fit into the same drawer in any cabinet."
Obenberger said scientific studies have indicated that the two pursuits engage the same circuits in the human brain. Of course, with man being a flawed, physical creature, all the electrical energy generated by sexual appetites rambling around in the cranium can't be allowed to go unharnessed, so "traditional cultures subsume all that fervor into religion," Obenberger said.
Obenberger isn't the first person to suggest that both religious ecstasy and orgasm can be considered deeply spiritual experiences. "Oh God!" has left the lips of more than one devotee in the throes of passion, whether religious or sexual. And, Obenberger noted, a survey commissioned in the 1970s by Redbook magazine indicated that deeply religious women had more satisfying sex lives than their more secular peers. Exactly what that means remains unclear, especially after the results of a recent survey by a German lifestyle website indicated that 62 percent of educated women have difficulty achieving orgasm, while only 38 percent of their intellectually disadvantaged peers were cum-challenged.
Moreover, the nearer one is to the zealous extreme of either scale, the more philosophically similar he or she can seem to his or her polar opposite.
Yaffe opined that both religion and porn are fueled by significant amounts of fear. Religious conservatives often are accused of fearing the great unknown of death and the evil in man. Clinging to their faith brings them comfort and security, which cannot be underrated.
More than that, according to Yaffe, people "are afraid of their own sexuality" because it represents giving in to something they have been taught represents the basest of man's nature. Yaffe said adult-industry insiders are afraid of something closely related. "Deep down, they're afraid they are doing something bad," he said. "You can never feel good about what you are doing if, on any level, you feel what you are doing - or thinking about doing - is bad. That covers adult and the zealots. Until we give ourselves permission to be flawed human beings, we will never learn to tolerate imperfection in others."
Preaching in practice
Tolerating imperfection in others is one of the primary tenets of any religion. "Love the sinner, not the sin" is a popular catchphrase among modern people of faith. However, those inside the adult industry don't see much evidence that religious conservatives actually practice what they preach. Organizations like Morality in Media seem to constantly lobby the public and the government to "do something" to stop porn's rampant incursion into the lives of mainstream Americans.
"Porn is an issue of great concern for most social conservatives," Morality in Media President Robert Peters said, adding that the group's battle is nothing new. The organization was founded in 1962 by three clergymen with the specific goal of doing away with pornography. Peters, an attorney, joined the organization in 1985 after retiring from the practice of law to enter a Christian ministry. Since then, Morality in Media has changed its focus somewhat, he said. Obliterating porn from the landscape "isn't going to happen, at least in my lifetime," he said, so the organization has adjusted its mission to "ensure obscenity laws are enforced with diligence."
"I'd hate to see pornography become as acceptable in the country as a whole, as it has on college campuses," he said, citing a Brigham Young University survey that concluded that between one-third and half of college males are "hooked on porn, and 90 percent of them have at least looked at it." However, he said, "if people just looked at it once in a while, morally that would be wrong, [but] the goal is not a morally perfect society."
Instead, a more attainable objective may be to find "some way people could still access porn, but it wouldn't be flooding society," Peters said. "There have to be some effective legal limits on pornography. Pornography normalizes perversity."
Part of the problem, as Morality in Media and Peters see it, is that perversity begets crime. Although even Peters admits there is no scientific proof of a causal relationship between pornography and crime, he says "there is evidence to support a link." Crime is not only immoral, but also destructive of society. That makes porn a dual threat: Both man's immortal soul and society's very fabric are threatened by the economic behemoth the adult entertainment industry has become. Although God will pass judgment on the former, man himself must judge the latter. "Right or wrong," Peters said, "society needs to decide," preferably before the decision is made by default. Already, "mainstream entertainment is in some ways in a marriage with pornography," he noted, and mainstream entertainment is a powerful factor in helping society make value judgments.
Middle ground
Granting that each man ultimately is responsible for determining the disposition of his own soul - assuming each man admits to having a soul that needs to be safeguarded - Peters said there may be some middle ground the adult industry and conservatives can accept. However, he doesn't expect a dialogue to spontaneously erupt. "Both sides may have to be forced to compromise," he said.
In order to do that, "both sides have to be willing to give up something precious to them," Peters said. After all, he added, "the First Amendment is intended to protect debate and discussion," not, as the adult industry argues, sexual expression.
Are religious conservatives willing to give up something? According to Peters, they already have. "The Miller Test is a compromise," he said. "It's better than what existed previously - laws under which it was impossible to convict [for obscenity] - but we really don't know how well it might work because it's not being enforced."
According to Yaffe, that's hogwash. "As Shakespeare said, ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much,' meaning I believe any time someone takes such an unwavering stand on something, the cause for that is rooted not in what they fear in others, but about themselves," he said. "I do not believe there is any porn ever made or will be made that can force people to do or want something that they have no innate desire for from within.
"Perhaps the most fundamental of truths is that while I may not like what another person has to say, I defend their right to say it. I am not sure that mindset is shared by most conservatives and fundamentalists, who find anything but their view to be blasphemy."
Besides, Yaffe noted, the law is being enforced. That's what juries are for in cases like the recent high-profile obscenity prosecutions of Extreme Associates, JM Productions, Max Hardcore and Evil Angel.
For whom the church bells toll
Yaffe is among many in the adult industry who have made peace between their faith and their vocation. So is Meredith Christopher, an executive producer with Adam & Eve. Christopher said she attended Catholic high school, as did four other members of the team in her division at the company, which employs 400 people at its North Carolina headquarters. "Religion breeds porn," she said. "It's something we've always joked about."
Christopher said she is "religious and Catholic" but doesn't "think sex is bad." "My mom tried to raise her kids to be open and healthy," she added. "Porn serves curiosity."
And curiosity drives profit, she noted. "If porn wasn't taboo," she said, "there wouldn't be as much money in it."
Yaffe agreed. "I take fundamentalist criticism as a sign I am doing my job as an adult-entertainment entrepreneur correctly," he said.
Yaffe said he is particularly aware of that criticism because he is not only a pornographer, but also gay. That's something of a double whammy in the eyes of social conservatives, yet he remains steadfast in all of his beliefs. "While being an adult entrepreneur defines what I do and being a gay man defines who I love, it is being raised in a spiritual home - in my case, a Jewish one - that has the biggest impact on who I am," he said. "In my case, all three worlds very peacefully coexist.
"My views on religion in general and on my own religion have not been changed by being in the adult industry, only by being an adult and seeing the hypocrisy that too often rears its ugly head in any form of organized religion. I would say now I am more spiritual. I am keenly aware of what I believe in, and who, and what role that plays in my life every day. Conservatives have been so demonized about sexuality that the desire to eliminate pornography is not to prevent others from accessing it as much as it is to prevent the reminder that they are sexual beings themselves, and, accordingly, they feel they are doomed [to] hell."
Ultimately, Yaffe said, if conservatives and the adult entertainment industry can find some way to open a dialogue without accusation and recrimination, both sides might benefit. If the two sides of the issue simply would talk to each other, they probably "would discover they are fighting the same battle," Yaffe said. "Each overcompensates to fight the demons in the world, which is easier than fighting the demons within."
This article initially appeared in the July 2008 edition of AVN Online magazine. To subscribe, visit AVNMediaNetwork.com/subscriptions.
