By Hans Fiene
Monday, April 27, 2015
“Reality TV is pornographic.”
I don’t remember how we started discussing “Fear Factor”
in my eighteenth-century British literature class, but I still remember my
professor speaking those words. It was early 2002 and Fox was jumping on the
“Survivor”/“Big Brother”/“Bachelor” bandwagon in typical Fox fashion, enticing
audiences with the sight of contestants schlurping down cow eyeballs for an
outside shot at a year’s salary. In class that day, one of my fellow students
must have recalled watching the show with giddy horror, prompting my professor
to state her views on the genre bluntly.
At first, I didn’t understand what she meant, as most
people I knew didn’t particularly want to snort rancid yak cheese or whatever
Joe Rogan was barking at contestants to do, while nearly all human beings have
a biological urge to do the thing depicted in sexually explicit material, even
if they don’t want to carry it out in Larry Flint-inspired fashion.
But when another student asked her to explain her words,
my professor did something that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously
admitted he couldn’t. She perfectly defined pornography. “Reality TV is
pornographic,” she said “because the audience is finding satisfaction in
another person’s humiliation.”
In other words, in order for something to be truly
pornographic, the people on screen don’t need to take their clothes off,
although that helps. They just need for us to watch in salivation as they
embarrass or debase themselves. And when the public’s addiction to porn in
reality TV form was so strong that it effectively killed the early 2000s
sitcom, it shouldn’t surprise us that the same lust for our neighbor’s
humiliation has spilled over into every cyber corner of the Internet.
It shouldn’t surprise us that social media networks have
become the number-one distributors of judgment porn, the form of pornography on
display every time we share and link and tweet the latest story or video
intended to fill us with satisfaction by exposing a fellow human’s moral
failings.
The New Village Stocks
In November of last year, when hackers leaked a number of
Sony co-chair Amy Paschal’s emails, we tweeted screen shots of the damning correspondence
because we found perverse enjoyment in her humiliation over typing what we
never would have typed. Last week, when footage surfaced of ESPN reporter Britt
McHenry berating a tow lot employee, we hashtagged our insistence that ESPN can
the uppity blond because, not perceiving the irony, we won’t stand to look at
pathetic, inferior human beings like her.
A couple days later, we woke up bored with McHenry and
pointed our wagging fingers at Ben Affleck, insisting that he was a typical
Hollywood elitist for pressuring a PBS show not to air the rather humiliating
piece of information that one of his ancestors was a slave owner.
This is the general formula for the distribution and
consumption of judgment porn: Person A does something he or she shouldn’t have
done and that transgression is somehow made public. We, then, unable to control
our desire for satisfaction at his or her expense, make that humiliation even
more public and justify doing so with feigned outrage and how-dare-they-isms.
Then, after the high of moral superiority wears off, we look for another
humiliated subject to feast upon, and we begin the cycle again.
Feasting On Other People’s Shame
At its core, judgment porn is no different than the
traditional kind. Just as we know that countless women who have left the porn
industry would give anything to scrub the Internet clean of the sins they committed
during their years of brokenness, we also knew that Paschal would have done
anything to cover up the record of those humiliating emails. But we still
refused to avert our eyes because, like all forms of pornography, it felt good
to get high on someone who had fallen so low.
Just as we know that a girl who texts naked pictures to
her boyfriend wouldn’t have done so if she’d have known the entire school would
see them, we also knew that McHenry never would have insulted the appearance
and education of that tow lot employee if she’d known that her words would end
up on YouTube. But we still publicized her sin all the more because, in that
moment, she was the judgment porn equivalent of a dirty skank and dirty skanks
don’t deserve to have their sins covered.
Just as teenage boys are ready for a new object of lust
ten seconds after feasting upon the shame of the latest girl to show up naked
in their texts, so the judgment porn addicts will be ready to find a new target
immediately after decrying the last one. Affleck’s perfectly understandable
family-whitewashing will be forgotten the next time a hot mic catches someone
body-shaming Kelly Clarkson or crassly body-affirming Kim Kardashian, whichever
transgression appeals to us more that day. Then we’ll lustfully share a video
of people who didn’t know they were being filmed doing something racist before
lasciviously hashtagging our outrage at someone who kicked a dog on a security
camera.
How to Break the Judgment Porn Addiction
How then, should a society that is hooked on our
neighbor’s humiliation get clean? How do we detox from our judgment porn
addiction? Not by going cold turkey, but by understanding the right way to
judge. Quite predictably for a Lutheran pastor, I believe that proper
understanding is found in the words of Jesus.
Although it may come as a surprise to those who quote
“judge not, that you may not be judged” every time someone questions their
decision to start a fourth extramarital affair, these words from Matthew 7 are
not an absolute prohibition against judgment. In Matthew 18, for example, Jesus
commands Christians to judge when he gives them instructions for carrying out
church discipline, the act of declaring an unrepentant sinner to be outside of
the faith.
When your brother has sinned against you, Jesus teaches,
go to him privately first with the hope that he’ll turn away from his sin
without anyone else finding out about it. If he won’t listen, go back with just
two or three witnesses and aim to restore him again. If that doesn’t work, only
then should you bring his sin before the church with the hope that he will
listen to the entire assembly.
Balancing his words in both Matthew 7 and 18, Christ’s
teaching on judgment becomes clear. Christians are called to judge each other,
but not in the way of the Pharisees, who found satisfaction in exposing the
sins and humiliation of those around them and who thanked God that they were
not like other, unrighteous men. Rather, our immediate reaction to our
brother’s sin should be to judge that he’s in spiritual danger, and seek to
rescue him with as few people as possible finding out that he was ever lost in
the first place.
While the sins of people like Paschal and McHenry have
become more public than the ones Jesus addressed in Matthew 18, the general
principle of seeking to restore your brother and cover his sin should still
guide our response to salacious stories of this nature.
If you’ve shared a video of a drunk celebrity burping out
racist epithets in order to revel in his humiliation and your superiority,
delete the URL and do your part to conceal his transgression. If raging against
someone’s indiscretion on Facebook isn’t going to bring that sinner to
repentance, and it most certainly won’t, avail yourself of the other thing the
Internet is good for and post a picture of adorable kittens instead. If the
guilty party has already tweeted an apology but you want to keep drooling over
her self-inflicted indignity, do what you would want the world to do if the
lowest moment of your life had been captured on film, and treat the footage
like it doesn’t exist.
My British lit professor was right. Pornography is found
wherever we get satisfaction in another person’s humiliation. The only
difference between laughing at a desperate woman on “The Bachelor” and lusting
after a desperate woman on a porn site is that the latter is more likely to
infect your computer with spyware. And the only difference between sharing
pictures of sixteen-year-old girls who foolishly sexted their boyfriends and
sharing McHenry’s anger-induced snit-bomb is that the former is illegal. But
while finding joy in a fellow human’s shame may give us a brief moment of
euphoria, a far holier and more lasting joy awaits us when we make our
neighbor’s dignity more important than our anger by letting love cover a
multitude of sins.
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