MISCmedia for 1/9/01
Baring Witness

LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.

Then we went off on a tangent, and started instead to discuss the centuries-old dichotomy between established Christendom and the pleasures of the flesh, a topic some folk have written whole books about.

Religion needs more sex; it needs to acknowledge human passions and the joys of earthly existence. And it always has needed this. Back in the early Christian days, when the study of Jesus was was essentially an ethnicity-free Judaism for Romans (and Roman-conquered peoples), women from prominent families were among its leading converts. These women appreciated a religion that treated women as something more than just sex-and-baby machines.

(Then, of course, Constantine made it Rome's new official religion, and a hierarchy formed that kept women out of power within the church, etc. etc.).

Anyway, Christianity developed as an antithesis to the decadence and excess of Rome's bread-and-circuses culture, its orgies and slavery and human lion-feedings and corruption and cruelty. It developed into a religion that, in various degrees and with various exceptions over the years, renounced sex and the whole physical aspect of human existence.

But porn (or erotica, or whatever PC term you prefer to use) also needs more religion, or at least more spirituality.

Whether you're talking hardcore videos and magazines, hard-sell web sites, softcore cable shows and magazines, strip clubs, "women's erotica" books, or the get-a-guy articles and see-thru supermodel pictures in women's magazines, you get almost nothing to do with two human souls using their bodies to come closer together.

You just get stimulus-response mechanisms. Sex is defined as a shallow physical pleasure to be obtained by spending lots of money and suppressing anything cool or individualistic about yourself.

It's a ruthlessly materialistic vision. In a nation where prostitution is outlawed (except in rural Nevada), commercial sex-culture defines both female and male genitalia as nothing more than capitalist tools, products to be sold and/or target markets to be sold to.

All this means the "Christian porn" I thought up last Friday half jokingly could actually be a useful thing, an aspect of reintegrating bodies to souls, females to males, and humans to one another and their universe.

We finish this topic, at least for now, with a very brief example of what written Christian porn might be like.

(Be warned: This particular fiction piece is not only sexual, but also involves an attempt to write characters of an ethnicity other than my own, in a nondemeaning yet candid manner.)

Dozens of African-American adults (and a few interracial-couple spouses) arrive at a series of revival tents constructed at a private campground. They remove their well-ironed, handsome garments to enjoy a nude BBQ feast. This is followed inside the tents by a boistrously inspiring service of chorus music; a nude and exhortative preacher who gets everybody into the right state of emotional ecstasy while he encourages everybody to love everybody in the room; and then the sex itself.

All the attendees gleefully join in: Thin to obese, young-adult to elderly, breasts heaving, erections proudly flailing, couplings (and triplings and more) of every pleasurable sort, a few woman-woman and even man-man encounters somewhere in the tent, orgasm moans in "tongues," many "Praise Be"s and "Hallelujahs."

Outside, there are a few church buses among the parked cars, a gorgeous sunset between the trees, and a couple of strewn flyers marking this as an event that would only be promoted within churches--"No TV or Radio Advertising; No Outsiders Will Be Invited."

TOMORROW: Remembering some things that went away at the end of Y2K.

ELSEWHERE:

• "A guide to white rap hand jive...."
• Fun, and only possibly dangerous, things to do with a microwave! (found by Larkfarm)....

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