It does boil down to an opinion in many respects, and that opinion is inextricably rooted in our notions of morality. My views, as noted previously, are considerably more absolutist than others. I do not invent my own moral compass. And according to that compass given me while there is room for condescension to human weakness and limitation, there are still boundaries, thresholds that must not be crossed because the transgression of those thresholds is ultimately destructive to the best good of the person and of society. Sexual explicitness I believe is one of those thresholds. For certain classes of people the threshold is even more closely circumscribed, monastics for example, for whom the stimulation of any carnal appetite is unwelcome. Most of us aren't called to be monastics though.
We live in a more libertine and a more pluralistic time than ages past, and so less and less are such moral schemas given general credence. Of course I am not of the persuasion that vox populi is automatically co-inherent with vox Dei...in my world view, the crowd can be wrong.
So why the line in the sand at explicit sexual content...where does sexual content pass from provocative (in a good way) to pruriant? I think most of us would agree that gratuitous anything in a putative work of art diminishes that art, teen slasher films like the Halloween franchise being a case in point. They will never individually or collectively be positively compared with the Russian film Ostrov, a quiet but staggeringly rich masterpiece of cinematography and storytelling. Since sex and sexuality are indeed part of the human condition then why is it objectionable to deal with them as explicitly in the arts as with any other facet of the human condition such as joy, grief, suffering, love, triumph, or despair, all the more when any of these things among so many others can be threaded through the experience of sex? Why when these things are suggested together with sex, it often works so well, so powerfully...but when the sex is explicit it rarely (if ever in my book) is able to do so?
It seems to me that there are two (though there may be more) substantive reasons why explicit sex scenes so often fall flat artistically and why they are an artistic choice that is extraordinarily hard to justify. Beyond the pragmatics of my butt shot critique in earlier posts, the first reason lies in the consideration that I've outlined earlier that such scenes are by their nature coarsening to the human psyche. They offer too little in the way of that which is pure, unfeigned, just, beautiful, true, and of good report to justify them. The human soul is simply not ennobled by them...and what effects the person effects the person's world and all others in it, and I happen to think we should make at least a minimal effort to see to it that the effect of our life on the life others is to their good.
I hear the objections now...what about war, murder, abandonment, torture, injustice, disease, etc...all these things are dealt with in great detail on stage, on film, on canvas, and in print, and of themselves not one of them is ennobling. Leaving gratuitous excess aside, what make these things permissible even desirable for our contemplation in their explicitness, but not sex? In what way do we discover beauty and truth and purity and goodness in them? I think this takes us back, way back to what the Greeks understood about the purpose of their plays and public storytelling. They expected public catharsis through identification with the characters and the plot. We might say they expected a kind of enlargement...a healing of their hearts. The festering volatilities of the human psyche could be lanced, duty learned, empathy experienced. It took them out of themselves and showed them their connection to each other, to the gods, to their past, and to their posterity across the ages. These terrible and ignoble things are but individual mouths of the great wound that weeps in the heart of humanity...the wound we are easily cognizant of in ourselves, hence our many excuses for our failings...but we are so often blind to them in others. Art can be the apotheosis of these things, their redemption by becoming vessels of empathy and catharsis. We learn the suffering of our neighbor is our own. We learn mercy and forbearance. But this seldom if ever happens with sexually explicit materials. Grant certain of the interweaving circumstances evoke positive effects in the reader, but they are offset by the constant appeal to the burning appetite. The reader on the one hand may be sympathetic to a given character plight that is entangled with sex...but the sexual content itself engenders a certain delight that is savored even if on reflection the reader/viewer/hearer is disgusted with himself for feeling that way. Why does it so easily do this? I think that brings us to the second reason.
It is related to the question Bdoomed poised,
I find it odd that society allows for nudity in art without a second thought, but it is completely different in film and writing.
. To a large extent I think this is at heart an expression of our relation to sign and symbol. A painting or a drawing is ontologically much further removed from us than film or writing. As a representation it lies closer to the world of sign...this image represents a person. When we see actors or read stories we are ontologically much closer...those are the real actions of real people captured in situ sexually engaged before our eyes, their very impress on film, their symbol. We do not participate in signs...we are informed by them at a distance, but symbols are gateways to participation in the thing itself because the ontological connection is strong...so with this explicit film and its exposition of this normally very private aspect of the human condition, wittingly or not, we have ceased to be admirers/students of the human condition, but become its voyeurs. Deep inside we know that we are engaged in a kind of trespass...we may enjoy the trespass, but it is a trespass nonetheless. It is similar with writing. It is ontologically a symbol, in this case of the author's mind. We are thinking their thoughts after them, having our mental eye and ear guided by them point by point...and they are showing us the naturally intimate and private and rendering us voyeurs again...and worse, for by following their depictions, letting them guide our imagination and stimulate us as they will then we enter the realm not just of the voyeuristic, but the masturbatory...they may fondle us verbally with great art but they are for all intents and purposes running their hands down our pants while telling us a story. Maybe some are open minded enough not mind that...but, I am not one of them.
