Hey, Feminism! How is that future working out?

How women made porn popular:

Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian became famous and rich for making a sex tape, and they spun off empires of TV shows, fashion lines, perfumes and paid appearances. The message is: one leads to the other. But it is women who made Kardashian famous. And it is women who have become the fans and consumers of everything Kardashian and books such as Fifty Shades of Grey.

Using sex for money and fame, women have found a new way to feel powerful and secure without a man or even necessarily a family – Octomom has openly become a porn actress and stripper.

Mothers, too, are now sexualizing their daughters and dressing them up as sexual candy for the world. Lindsay Jackson dressed her 5-year-old, Madisyn ‘Maddy’ Verst, in a sexy police uniform and a Dolly Parton outfit complete with padded breasts and padded backside for a TV reality show. And Jessica Simpson dressed her 4-month-old girl in bikinis.

Porn could never have become mainstream and socially acceptable without the support and endorsement by women. In human behavior, we call this ‘the law of frequency’ -- the more often two things are linked, the more powerful that association becomes until they become inseparable. And women and the media have linked consuming porn or behaving like a porn actress with instant money, fame, power, glamour, prestige, respectability and social acceptability. In other words, if you become a porn actress or behave like one, you will triumph with all of these things.

Accordingly, girls are more fascinated and driven by the desire to become famous than they are to become an engineer, doctor or scientist: Kim Kardashian has 14 million followers on Twitter.Thus, women are creating new values and morality promoting money, power and glamour as more important than intelligence, achievement, motherhood or contribution. Studies reveal that female college students are more narcissistic than males. And teenage girls are now also becoming fans of porn actors such as 26-year-old James Deen.

The paradox is that women are becoming more educated than men as women surpass men in attendance and graduation rates – for every two men who get a college degree, three women will do also. But, women are failing to realize the dangers of falling for porn or promoting porn as the new fashionable profession and path to fame, riches and glory. This is the antithesis of female empowerment as MTV, Kim Kardashian and Octomom are teaching young girls to gain power over men by using sex.

Women have now created false empty idols and have lost their real sense of self-worth, value and significance, replacing it with fleeting pseudo-power and artificial values and relationships, leaving them feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied.

I appeal to women to beware of being deceived and betrayed into the world of porn and sexual objectification the same way that women were tricked into smoking cigarettes in the 1920s.

And Ghent needs prostitutes, so it's "win-win" all around.

People, peoples and cultures can be sucked into allocating resources based on what they view as "the good." Jews view education as the good and produce scholars. When a culture views rap artists and atheletes as the good it produces rap artists and atheletes.

However, not all choices are equally prudent. There is a limited number of slots for those who excel at Basketball. And the social returns from gearing a culture to excel at sports is not the same as one that produces businessmen or scientists.

From a prudential standpoint, developing an ethos that caters to narcissism insance. It's easy to do, obviously. People are bent that way naturally. But there is a reason that society works hard to counter that natural impulse by holding up self-discipline and self-sacrifice as a kind of model. When we lose that model as the ideal, then where will we be?

"Pornography and beautiful art cannot co-exist, because their messages are inherently different and radically opposed."

Because, basically, art appreciation kills lust.

This is a seriously good essay on how focusing on objective beauty in art, which glorifies the human form, is the antithesis of pornography.  It also suggests what we've lost by forgetting that there is such a thing as objective beauty.

Right away we see the artist portraying a beauty, perfection of form. And the exact same is true of the body of Venus. I hold that it is a knife to the heart of lust, to realize the same beauty that strikes our hearts by way of flowers, galaxies, stained-glass windows, seashells and sunsets, is personified and condensed into the female form. The artist is not portraying nudity as being pornographic, he is portraying it as utterly beautiful. As a waterfall is beautiful, and as conch shell is too, so is woman, but infinitely more so. Again we find the Golden Ratio:

Isn’t that incredible? The length of her torso, from hip to head, divided by the length from her breast and her head, gives us 1.6301. Again, were I only more accurate, I wonder how close Botticelli came to achieving the replication of what God wrought in the oak-leaf and the pineapple. Does is become more difficult to corrupt the female breast into a mindless stimulus for lust when you realize it is in perfect proportion woman in her wholeness, in a striking example of integritas, that pre-requisite of beauty that declares all parts must add to the whole? That is for you to decide.

Speaking of integritas, we mentioned before that it’s not just about the woman herself being displayed with glorifying proportionality, it’s about her proportion to what’s going on around her. (Which is why it is entirely difficult for me to conceive of any situation in which the artistic display of the marital union would be acceptable.) One way the artist puts Venus in proportion to the entire painting, as a beauty to be honored, is by strictly following the rule of thirds and the use of the triangle.

The triangle is apparent; the arms and bodies of those surrounding Venus form it. Again, how does this glorify the beauty of Venus’ naked form while avoiding lust? The triangle in art is a symbol for completeness, developed as such by Christianity in light of the Triune God. Wholeness of form. Perfection. Here I found two main triangles one surrounding Venus – declaring her as the perfection of beauty – and another created by the pose of Venus herself, by the lovely angle of her arms. The latter triangle nestles within the first – not only does she incorporate beauty, she gives it.

You’ll also notice that the very center of the painting is obviously directly below the womb of the nude Venus, the place of birth. Do I need point out that this is in harmony with the whole painting, The Birth of Venus?

So what’s my point? This: Perhaps with an appreciation for the glory the artist gives to the nude form, the porn-addicted man may be aided in avoiding the temptation towards lust when viewing nude art. What does pornography do but degrade women? It says she is nothing more than a stimulus to a watching organism. Through the conveyance of beauty – whether in triangles, the golden ratio, color harmony, the rule of thirds, etc. – the artist is specifically glorifying women. Pornography and beautiful art cannot co-exist, because their messages are inherently different and radically opposed. (Obviously, this applies to the male form as well.)