Cardinal Heenan had something to say about the mainstreaming of porn, especially whenever people try to justify the things they want to popularise. Like they want to dress their stuff as if it’s more sophisticated and mature than it actually is, not just getting more explicit but also more blasphemous and obscene. Perhaps it’s unsurprisingly it has worsened over time, getting more disturbing each time with snuff and the like. That’s not to say people can’t be educated about say sexual organs and marital relationships, though I think there’s a line between desensitisation to pornographic material in whatever form they appear in and proper sex education.
The latter shouldn’t just end at marriage, relationships and sexual organs but also fostering a respect for marriage, boundaries to which sexual practices can be done and which shouldn’t as well as loving others the way God needs us to. As for romance novels and their ilk, they too are getting more explicit over time. It’s not enough to have a merely handsome hero fall in love with the heroine, but the sex act and the sexualisastion of the hero has to be more explicit. It’s not a stretch to go from mere romantic encounters to disguised hints at sex organs to outright depictions of sex, I feel of all the literary genres it’s romance that’s inherently flawed because it has lust baked in it.
Heroes can’t just be handsome but they also have to fit either one of the many fetish categories, whether if he’s another ethnicity, has piercings or tattoos. He could even be a demon, which is the most disturbing of all in addition to a number of dark romance novels whose plot points and stories seem like what Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade would’ve easily come up with in his lifetime, I have struggled with lust at various points and I feel it needs to be talked about more often. If it’s something that makes you lust, whether if it’s an art book featuring nudes or a romance novel then the precipice is always there in some form or another.
The Bible is very simple about this that if it’s something that makes you lust, get rid of it as much as you can and get rid of the offending material. It could be a romance novel for some people, it could be an art book for others but the problem’s still the same.
fynm 