On The Consumption And Abuse of Women

This post, like the last one, is a copy of a Facebook status that I want to save before it gets lost on my feed:

I was struck hard this week when I found out that a six-year-old girl we serve on the reservation was victimized by a man in her community. What can we say? How can such evil exist? What can I do to combat such immorality? Many times, such events seem so far removed from my life, but are they? During service yesterday, my pastor, David Yarborough, spoke directly and boldly to the men in the congregation and reminded us that the same spirit that directs our hearts to consume pornography is the same insidious spirit that leads men to capture women and children for sex trafficking. 

I could not agree more. This does not mean, however, that these two things are simply and loosely linked to some ethereal spirit of sexual immorality. Rather they develop from the concrete interactions of our normal lives in the fallen world. Our daily interactions, if not given over to deep consideration, inoculate us to the understanding of what is right and wrong by the smallest degrees. In my reading this morning, which I will quote from momentarily, I came across a reminder that the spirit that leads men to consume pornography, as well as to steal away the lives of the innocent, does not begin when young boys discover how to access the obscene recesses of the internet and become grossly obsessed. It does not begin with pornography at all. 

It begins in what we consider to be the mundane, ordinary, and non-moral dealings of everyday life. It begins in the simplest forms, like learning that, with enough money, we can buy many things to gratify our wants and eventually forgetting that some things should not be consumed. We have lost the sense that ethical decisions beset almost everything we do. We need voices like that of Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park (while he is speaking of science here, it can apply to most areas of life in which we are empowered to freely do what we may): 

“If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here; it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now...” 

Likewise, we often consume things without consideration of whom or where it came from, how it was made, and at what cost. We are free to consume what we will, because we stand on the backs of geniuses who formed a free nation and upon the soldiers who died for it. But, since we did not form it ourselves, we take little responsibility for how we use this freedom. Dr. Malcolm continues to critique Jurassic Park and, consequently, modern society: 

“Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should.” 

Just because we live in a nation that has made it easy to consume what we may, does that mean we should? We live in a world in which the highest value is placed on that which can be consumed. Consumerism is heralded as right and good, because it somehow represents “freedom,” but thoughtless access to wants is not freedom, but just another form of slavery, a slavery whitewashed to appear to be a sign of our blessedness: 

“No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person” (Thomas Merton). 

The things that people can use are the things our society values most. While consumption is natural part of life—materials must be gathered for housing, food must be harvested for sustenance, and water must be gathered for hydration—blind consumerism is the perversion of this reality. It is a reality in which we cannot come to appreciate that which should not be consumed or used (things like women and children). If it cannot be used, it is looked over: 

There are men “…for whom a tree has no reality until they think of cutting it down, for whom an animal has no value until it enters a slaughterhouse, men who never look at anything until they decide to abuse it and who never even notice what they do not want to destroy” (Merton). 

While the stars remind us of our limitedness as we can only see their beauty, but cannot touch it, our world is filled with men who obsess over leaving this celestial ball for the consumption of another. We can no longer see our dependency on this earth as our reality, because we can think of nothing more than to consume it; so, we will have to find more and more to consume. Likewise, beauty is no longer a reminder of the goodness of a God beyond us, but a mark for consumption. 

It is only a small step then to abusing the beauty of humans, especially, but not limited to, women and children. After years and years of considering the value in things only by how well they can be used, it is no wonder we begin to forget that some beauty is simply meant to be appreciated and not consumed. If this is true, then this also speaks to our sense of self-worth, how we value our own existence. We no longer appreciate the gift of “being,” but only see our worth in what we “do.” 

So, women (and even our precious children) also get caught up in investing in the evil that leads to their own destruction. If men (and women) only value what they consume, women (and men), to find worth, give others more to consume. Dress becomes more and more revealing, giving men more to consume, and posing for pornography becomes a means to feel loved and valued, because, as we all know, many, many men will consume you if you put beauty out in such a way that it can be used, used, in this sense, for base gratification.

 Eventually, lusting for visions of shorter and shorter skirts no longer feeds the spirit of consumerism. We must see it all. Soon enough, “tasteful” nude shots no longer gratify this spirit, only the obscene. Then, there are men who reach the end of this pleasure, and they seek to touch and to physically consume this beauty, and sex trafficking has then been given more reason to exist. 

We are all guilty and in need of repentance, even if we do not consume what others may. We may only consume, without regret, food to excess, television to excess, or drink to excess, but it is all the same spirit. We are teaching each other that blind consumption is acceptable. Men, be protectors of beauty, not vicious consumers of it. Do not invest your consumption in the exploits of women (or children). You may feel that you harm no one simply sitting behind your computer screen, but you are lending to the machine that consumes the innocent. Women, protect your beauty and know your worth is in your being, not in how much you allow yourself to be consumed. Open your eyes that everyday life is beset by ethical decisions, that our interactions with the world are not non-moral. If we do not think, we may be unwittingly feeding the machine of our own destruction.