LETTER: English scholars value love
To the editor:
Liz Emery concludes that pornography “really isn’t all that bad” and that “viewing pornography is not a bad thing.” What’s perplexing about this article is how Ms. Emery, with a background in English, arrived at these conclusions.
William Wordsworth observed: “For the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this. For a multitude of causes … are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.”
Mary Wollstonecraft considered friendship to be a quality that “succeeds love.” Shelley noted that love “is the bond and the sanction which connects not only man with man, but with every thing which exists.”
These writers placed love, the mind and relationships on a higher plane than this article does. Ms. Emery’s argument partly rests on the earning potential of porn stars and the education of Ron Jeremy. Will these porn stars with their college degrees and $450,000-per-year salaries be remembered 100 years from now? It’s doubtful. Yet artists such as Mary Shelley, Blake, Wollstonecraft and Wordsworth have endured in our culture, not for their bodies or money but for their ideas. It’s also ironic that these writers who endured poverty, wrestled with depression and despised formal education are being studied by us for degrees.
College degrees and money do not make a fulfilling life, yet this article argues just that. Sex was important for these writers, Blake especially, but they found complete fulfillment in life only through awakening the mind’s faculties and letting go of the “self” through friendship and communion with nature, not through cloistered viewing of tawdry, mass-produced entertainment. Pornography use, as this article explains it, is an activity “to be carried out alone.” One should rightly note that Shelley and Byron were promiscuous to say the least, but I have yet to see a work comparable to “Prometheus Unbound” published by a porn addict or star. Ms. Emery should be applauded for her views on romance novels and child pornography, but it is unfortunate that a talented writer such as Ms. Emery should advocate the use of “gross stimulants” to “promote healthy relationships.”
Chase Kirkham
Jean M. Lown