Sex, Tech, and Faith

Ethics for a Digital Age

Kate Ott

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781467465366
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Sexuality & Gender in Religion

Avalues-based, shame-free, pleasure-positivediscussion of Christian ethics in response to a range of pressing issues in the digital age—including online pornography, dating apps, sexting, virtual-reality hookups, and sex robots.

Digital innovation has rapidly changed the landscape of sexual experience in the twenty-first century. Rules-based sexual ethics, subscribed to by many Christians, are unable to keep up with new developments and, more often than not, seem effective at little other than generating shame.

Progressive ethicist Kate Ott steps into this void with an expansive yet nuanced approach that prioritizes honesty and discernment over fear and judgment. Rather than producing a list of don'ts, Ott considers the possibilities alongside the potential harm in everything from the use of internet porn to the practice of online dating to human-robot intimacy. With the aid of thought-provoking anecdotes and illuminating research, Ott invites readers to wrestle with the question of how to practice a just and flourishing sexuality in the digital age—and does so by drawing on core values of the Christian tradition.

A rich resource for both individuals and groups, Sex, Tech, and Faith includes discussion questions at the end of each chapter for those considering these issues in community, as well as extensive youth study guides for parents, pastors, and teachers in need of age-appropriate means of beginning these difficult conversations with teens. Readers of all backgrounds and identities will be challenged to consider how their choices and habits in the digital world can lead to sexual health, wholeness, dignity, and fulfillment—for themselves and those in relationship with them.

1

In the Image of God

TO CONSUME AND MAKE DIGITAL PORNOGRAPHY

TECHNOLOGY IS OFTEN THOUGHT OF as a tool that humans manipulate and control. Rapid proliferation of technological devices, access to them, and programs for them have, however, reinforced what humans have known for years: technology shapes us as much as we shape it. Have you ever swiped the screen of a laptop, forgetting that it isn’t a touch screen like your phone’s? Do you expect an instant response when you send a text? Have you lurked around Facebook checking in on old friends, wondering what their lives are like now? Social media and mobile technology have changed our behaviors and expectations, as well as our standards of privacy.

Related to sexuality, no other aspect has been more revolutionized by digital technology than pornography. Pornography has been a part of societies for thousands of years, from sculptures and wall drawings to print and magazines to moving pictures and DVDs. Each new technological innovation more intimately portrays human bodies and sexual behaviors and increases the privacy of the consumer. Digital technology exponentially exacerbates these two features—imagery and privacy. All forms of pornography are available on multiple digital platforms that can be accessed without others being aware of the viewer’s behavior.

Overexposure to sexualized images through everyday media makes it more and more difficult to know the difference between sex-affirming or sex-positive versus exploitative material. Without a counterbalance to the ubiquitous access to and stereotypical portrayals in media, people can adopt a commercialized and objectified approach to bodies, sexual behaviors, and relationships. The church’s two primary responses—silence or blanket criticism—limit discussion about body-positive theologies and cultivate shame. Additionally, many adults and youth are (knowingly or unknowingly) creating pornography via selfies, sexting, and video media such as Snapchat. Self-made pornography is not new, but digital technologies make it easier to produce and disseminate.

How do we make healthy, faithful decisions about our own bodies and the way we view others? Objectifying another person’s body or sexual acts dehumanizes and degrades the sacredness of sexuality. Some pornography eroticizes violence and features degrading behavior (often toward women), exploitation, and subjugation for the purpose of sexual arousal. These features are what make some forms of pornography illegal. Yet not all sexual material fits this description. There is a difference between material depicting mutual erotic activity and material that is violent, sexist, or racist. Some sexuality experts distinguish pornography from erotica—a category of sexual material that does not harm or objectify persons or sexual behaviors. Erotic materials like these are often a teaching tool used in sexuality education and counseling. A primary way to find out more about bodies and sexuality is to observe other people. In healthy and loving relationships, use of erotic materials may enhance a couple’s sexual relationship. Thus sexual material is diverse, and it should not all be de facto judged illegal or immoral.

Does viewing a person naked or watching someone perform sexual behaviors turn them into a sexual object? There is a perception that the Christian answer to this question is always “yes.” Many cite Jesus’s response in Matthew 5:28: “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman [or anyone] with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” However, what’s missing is a nuanced understanding of lust. When we look at another person, we are called as Christians to see the image of God in them and to value their beauty in physical, emotional, and spiritual ways. Finding another person attractive is not an automatic objectification of them so long as we are valuing them as a whole person and affirming their beauty as a reflection of God’s creation. Similarly, enjoying sexual pleasure is not implicitly exploitative or sinful so long as we are not engaging in that behavior for personal gratification over and against another person’s pleasure and consent. Even self-pleasure or masturbation can be empowering, as it helps us understand how our bodies work and perhaps be more open to communicating with a partner about sexual pleasure, so that pleasure will be mutually experienced. In this chapter, we will explore sexual theologies and ethics that provide the foundation for a body-affirming sexuality.

Even if one seeks to avoid all sexually explicit material, sometimes it finds you, through pop-up ads, forwarded posts, or email spam. More often than not, adults seek it out. Pornography use may not be talked about in faith communities because of sexual taboos or lack of education, but those who fill the pews are definitely accessing it. And it’s not just adults. Research published in Pediatrics found that four in ten tweens and teens visited a sexually explicit site over the course of a year. While boys were more likely than girls to seek out pornography, two-thirds of the time exposure to images was unwanted.¹ Findings suggest that use of online pornography by youth may skew their understanding of bodies, sexual behaviors, and relationships.² Similar findings have been reported for adults and will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

The use of digital technology to view pornography raises specific issues. Online pornography can result in legal infractions either because of the age of the user, the age of the actors, the type of content or the device used to view it. For example, using a work laptop or a school computer (though most block sexually explicit material) can result in criminal charges regardless of the legality of the content. In many cases, it is the specific content that determines legal punishment, and that most often relates to child pornography. This is an important issue. However, this chapter will not focus on explicitly illegal pornographic material such as that which features children. Ease of production and distribution leads to difficulty tracking down those who produce child pornography or participate in sex trafficking, which is something I address in chapter three. That is not the predominant use of pornography, and there is overwhelming consensus in faith communities on its immorality. While this chapter focuses mostly on the user of pornography, digital technology has caused rapid changes in the pornography industry, creating a gig economy that gives sex workers more autonomy.³ The creation of pornography now includes diversity in labor, production, and distribution of materials—from traditionally produced videos or photos where workers have less control over the product to video games, members-only websites, virtual reality, webcamming, and OnlyFans, where the worker, or the “star,” controls production.

Sexually explicit material online is extremely diverse. The focus of this chapter is whether or not legal sexually explicit material can have an educational purpose or moral value in ways that witness to the image of God in other human beings. First, online platforms make a variety of pornography widely accessible—able to be viewed in private and affordable (even free)—increasing its use among all segments of the population, some benefiting and others experiencing negative outcomes. Second, research suggests that the speed at which online pornography can be viewed contributes to compulsive behavior for a small, specific demographic of users, impacting their future sexual satisfaction with self and partners.⁴ This chapter will delve deeper into the science of this phenomenon and social responses. Third, innovations in technology have also brought about the “personalized pornography” boom. Sexting is the popular term for sharing sexual content such as words or pictures, or for live interaction via social media. This new form of sexual communication can have unintended adverse consequences in some contexts and can promote relational well-being in others. We need to have conversations about how or whether various forms of pornography enhance or deny values of honesty, consent, and mutuality in relationships, as well as how they impact our self-image and expectations of sexual performance. Even though creating, viewing, and sharing sexually explicit material is an age-old practice, digital technology shifts current experiences.

Affirming the Body and the Image of God

Sexuality is about the whole person, something even our Christian traditions have often neglected. When we do not openly talk about the connection between sexuality and spirituality in faith communities, we perpetuate a shame-filled and dualistic approach to sexuality and bodies. That affects how everyday Christians live their sexualities. Consider the following typical young adult experience.

Kicking off her shoes and removing her coat, Danielle collapses on her bed, exhausted and bored from another long day as an office manager. She rubs her brow, tired of solving everyone else’s problems during the day, and sinks into mindless scrolling. She opens Instagram. Her thumb flips photos upward. Then a photo piques her attraction. She switches over to a free porn app and searches using the same features that piqued her interest in the IG photo. She begins to masturbate to the fourth or fifth option, dismissing the other videos after only watching a second or two. She knows her friends do this too, but they don’t really talk about it. Easy access to free porn on the internet sometimes means Danielle has to scroll a while to find something she likes. She doesn’t mind because it’s private on her phone. Danielle is a thirtysomething who goes to church periodically but was much more active as a child and teen in Sunday school and youth group. She doesn’t see her faith as having anything to do with sexuality, but she does think the stuff she learned about girls being temptresses makes her shy about her body. She’s never felt comfortable sending a nude photo to a partner even though she does when asked. She feels guilty about the fact that she hasn’t married yet. As a biracial, straight woman, Danielle uses porn primarily for self-pleasure, which helps her reduce her stress and chill, without all the hookup drama. She feels too shy to communicate what she wants sexually in a relationship. So she started using porn to explore how her body responds when she masturbates. She avoids the stereotypical porn types because she feels affirmed when seeing different racial identities and body types, like those featuring big beautiful women (BBW).⁵

Even though religious experience is often sensual and embodied, most Christians struggle with a legacy of spirit-versus-body dualism. Danielle’s statement that she doesn’t see her faith having anything to do with her sexuality isn’t an anomaly—she hasn’t experienced a faith-based message that connects with her experience of sexuality.

When we shift our focus to Jesus, God incarnate, we can see the necessity of bodies for the Christian life. It is not in spite of bodies, but because of them that we can love, birth, pass peace, anoint, nourish, and relate. Pastoral theologian Bonnie Miller-McLemore writes, “Adults are not all that different from children, although we like to think we are. We do not leave sensate experience and knowing behind, even though Western doctrinal and intellectual history implies that such detachment is possible and even admirable. Our own religious convictions are more deeply buried in our bodies and bodily practice than we realize.”⁶ Far from denying or ruling over the body, sexual theology and ethics needs to promote a deepening understanding of how we live in bodies and relate to other bodies.

Sexuality includes spiritual, emotional, mental, and tactile experiences. This is what I mean when I say sexuality is embodied. The teaching of imago dei—humans created in God’s image—forms the theological understanding of what it means to be human. When we speak of the imago dei in one another, it is a theological connection to or explanation of our embodiment. It doesn’t reduce us to flesh, blood, and bones that are an exact replica of God. The imago dei is knowing and being known by God, evidencing God’s presence in the world through embodiment—the tangled, integrated, and complex mess of spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and physical existence.

Embodiedness has become shorthand for the material ways humans are known or marked by sex, gender expression, race, and disability. Often society and religious communities use these external identifiers to create policies and practices related to who is included or excluded in communities. Like Danielle, we often look for spaces where we see other bodies like ours reflected as beautiful, sensual, and desired. The majority of pornography tends to valorize certain forms of white, able-bodied, young, physically fit, and sexually well-endowed bodies. In these cases, we must peel away the stereotypes of beauty that determine people’s worth and further diminish the intended diversity of God’s creation.

Embodiment is far more than these social categories.⁷ That is to say, we don’t just have bodies; we are bodies. And we often use technologies to extend the limits of our bodies. When interacting with technologies, we are not always cognizant of how we are being reshaped in the process. For example, when a person uses a shovel to dig a hole, this is a tool under their bodily control. And yet, they become a much more efficient hole digger when using a shovel and probably later in the day, their hand is aching from the reshaping of muscles and the blisters. Their identity and physical body are changed in the process. These types of embodied changes are exponential and more hidden with digital technology. For example, will Danielle’s use of digital pornography enhance her self-image, and will it lead to greater sexual pleasure when she is in-person with a partner? We don’t know the answer to that, yet; research shows it is different based on types of consumption, but pornography use does have an effect.

In “A Theology of the Body for a Pornographic Age,” theologians Rhea and Langer note, “From Plato to Augustine to the Council of Chalcedon, the church and the general intellectual culture from which it has grown have found it difficult to grasp the ways that the physical body relates to the spiritual dimension of human life.”⁸ This is why past sexual ethics have focused on directing sexual desires toward one behavior or practice such as procreation, celibacy, or temperance. Sexual desires were originally thought to be part of humans’ sinful nature and a distraction from relationship with God. In both Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians and Augustine of Hippo’s influential writings, we hear about sexual desires as overwhelming and the need to choose celibacy or confine sexual behaviors to marriage. We can find similar teachings in today’s teen sexuality curriculum, like those Danielle experienced in youth group.⁹ For ethicist Christine Gudorf, the ongoing perpetuation of teachings about sexual desire as a slippery slope of sinfulness and the body as something to be ruled over and controlled lead to the taboo nature of sexuality, and “The silence and shame—breeds ignorance.”¹⁰ Continuing the silence produces more shame and hinders one’s ability to fully participate in sexuality as a good, created by God.

To honor the fullness of our embodiment and the expansiveness of sexuality beyond only sexual behaviors, we need something more akin to erotic attunement discussed in the introduction. Attunement requires critical engagement with how our sexual desire is elicited and engaged through sexually explicit material. Are we using it to better understand our own desires, needs, and bodily responses? Or do we consume it without reflection and awareness of the embodiment of those producing it? Danielle seems to have fumbled onto this insight on her own as she turned to pornography and masturbation to better understand her own sexual desire and pleasurable embodied response. Erotic attunement reclaims the pleasure of touch and does not seek to confine sexual desire and pleasure or suggest it is only for marriage or procreation.¹¹ The connection between personal use and larger social conditions is extremely important to recognize. In Danielle’s circumstance, she knows the difference between fake model bodies and a more normal range of body types, and she instead searches out examples that show different body types that are more representative of her experience.

Achieving erotic attunement is something most of us would struggle with in an offline context. It requires we tap into a suppressed theological tradition that values embodiment, trusts human ability to cultivate desire in meaningful and fulfilling ways, and engages a multisensory and tactile experience of knowing. This is difficult work for those who suffer from Christian shame and taboo about sexuality mixed with a severe lack of quality sexuality education. No wonder Christians are confused and reduce sexual ethics to a few quick, blunt rules. In response, people in the pews go looking for answers elsewhere. As with Danielle, one of the primary places adults and teens go for sexuality information is pornography websites.

Online Pornography

Danielle probably isn’t the stereotype you imagined of an online pornography user. According to research on women’s use of pornography, however, she is fairly typical. I of course added the experiences of sexuality education in a faith context. Joel and Peyton are also typical users of pornography:

Joel...