TESTIMONY: IT'S TIME. ARE YOU READY? [AKITA REVELATIONS]
It's that time of year. Clothes are down to a minimum. It's an occasion to revisit a recent Facebook conversation: "SI Swimsuit Edition. Lust is the sport. Women are made objects. Men are made predators. Everyone loses. Literally and figuratively. Don't buy it."
Amidst likes and positive comments, I was appreciative to have the dominant, cultural view represented:
"Gotta disagree. The women are beautiful. Didn't God create beauty to be appreciated? These women are objectified the same way pro football players are. But we can appreciate the ferocity of football without it turning into something ugly."
If we're going to have this conversation, we have to be reasonable about what's going on, and what those managing this industry clearly understand and are driving.
(1) No one would or should doubt the beauty of the human body. But at the outset, let's keep in mind that images are mere snapshots. Images do not have the capacity to reveal the totality of a human person, their hopes, fears, dreams, struggles, desires, aspirations. As such, "appreciation of the body" is very deficient where it concerns valuing of a person. As Pope St. John Paul II put it, the problem with pornography isn't that it shows too much, but that it shows too little.
(2) What exactly are we appreciating of "the body"? Are we speaking of the beauty of all God's designed bodies, or merely a particular, culturally-construed stereotype of body, in mostly-naked, seductive poses that essentially say "take me"? These photos do not appeal to any great ascetic or spiritual appreciation (though this could be the case, let's be real...). They're an appeal to sexual desire. They are a reduction of a human person to an object for self-gratificaiton. Knowingly or unknowingly, when women dress immodestly they are inviting others to use them.
(3) Behind the scenes is a multi-billion dollar industry that needs to drive insecurity. They depend upon women looking in the mirror and feeling inadequate, so that their products, services or relationships can be offered as a solution. Of course, they never are. A false identity is not made true by more layers of falsehood. From the vantage of heaven might we consider what they see? A multitude endlessly chasing the ever changing fashion of the latest determined goddess, when they have been fashioned in the image of God! If we only took a moment to consider: What surpasses one's true identity as a son or daughter of God in Jesus Christ?
(4) I'm not declaring any particular person lustful, nor suggesting to what degree they may be lustful, but if the driving force is that "sensual" thing in someone, meant between a husband and wife, of an intimate nature, it is adultery: "I tell you this, if you look lustfully upon someone you have committed adultery." (Matt. 5:28) Let's be honest. These portraits derive their power precisely in their capacity to incite men into a sexual relationship, albeit in the realm of imagination. I don't know of a single wife who would be "ok" with her husband being sexually engaged with another woman at any level. There's nothing private about a man giving part of himself to another woman. It is patently and relationally destructive.
(5) The test. Would you mind your wife, daughter, mom on the front cover?
We live in a veritable sea of real destruction in individual lives, marriages, and an entire culture... because people have come to accept this objectification as benign. I have vowed my heart, mind, body and soul to my wife. Our love says "all of me." This total gift is God's design for our transcendence, our means of literally imaging and participating in the Trinity.
Satan invites us to join him through a door labeled, "It's no big deal." The apple is shiny, and seemingly benign, but it is poisonous. Don't buy it. God desires for us great things, not evil, but leaves the choice to us.