I think I only just came to the realisation that culture is swinging towards a yet further liberal position as a whole. I’ve generally held the position that people are corrupt no matter the time period and that what happens openly in society itself just changes. I’m slightly rethinking that since what happens in the open places of a society is intimately reflecting , and ultimately also directing, the individuals.

There’s an interesting chain to why I’m rethinking this.

I’m at a conference which whilst priding itself on being a free-thinking innovative brain storm for the interactive industry has a number of sessions that one would think to be slightly out of place since they are focused on or prominently feature sex. Sure sex is an integral part of life yet it’s the deviant nature of how it’s included here. One talk is on protecting our sexual privacy online (presumably so you can do what you like in a second life), another on the rules governing porn in this new web age, another that whilst being focused on interaction design uses sex toys as the case study to mention a few.

I think what really banged this cultural shift home is that in a session I attended, a behind the scenes look at the Onion (which is a contemporary of Australia’s own Chaser), showed a clip that’s censored from their live site (which I swear the Chaser guys have done too but maybe not as far) where a news anchor quizzes a ’specialist’ about the increasing amount of sex in the media as they roll through some stock of sexual imagery. It made use of a common comic device of the irony having people discussing the evils of something whilst they perpetrate it themselves. They also used a sense of ascension to it by raising the level of inappropriateness of the imagery. Now what got me wasn’t how this was so inappropriate (I must say that I’d had this false conception that Americans are so conservative that it wouldn’t go beyond what you’d see on the Chaser) but moreover how people found it so funny. I probably spent more time studying the room as what would be considered as imagery that was increasingly sexually perverse was gaining more and more laughs. At no point did the room ease into a state with a few guys laughing over a silent majority. What this meant was that this imagery was familiar to the majority of the room so much that they could derive humour from its escalating perversion, since it was setting an expectation that it continued to meet.

What I found shocking was the familiarity. Sure at an arts conference you’re going to find more than your average bunch of liberal minded folk yet to have the majority of a crowd being so familiar with such perverse imagery was not my expectation. I guess it just rings home the roll of stats presented by a wide variety of sources about the prevalence of America’s (and since it is just the same in many ways - Australia’s) porn culture. Sure I can see it’s attraction and understand why it’s so large a market yet I also know how destructive it is.

I can’t say that I’m above anyone in my moral standing but it just makes me long for monogamy and makes me want to run from anything as crude and dysfunctional as what is held up for fulfilment. I know the ruinous consequences of any amazing aspect of life that is ruled by desires and that it is not the removal of such desires but placing them in submission in worship to their Creator that truly fulfills.

I’m all too aware of my folly for accepting cheap substitutes but it does pain me to see others unwittingly yet adamantly traversing the path to diminishing fulfillment in which it it will eventually cease all together.

How do you wake people up to a set of affections that’s going to kill them, where they’re like frogs in heating water? I know the answer is the Gospel but how do you tell them without it just being ignored? I guess it has to connect with their understanding of their unmet satisfaction whilst not promising that by acting a certain way you’ll have ultimate fulfillment since Christ says he will be our fill. He said that he who believes in him shall never thirst again. John’s revelation of heaven is that those who have faith in Christ now shall hunger no more nor thirst. It is my understanding that the usage of thirst in these passages relates directly to our personal spiritual fulfillment, the one we unsuccessfully seek to be met by things of this world. It is yet so hard to believe sometimes, to not tell yourself that you need the vain experiences of this world to meet your burning desires but that it is Christ that fills these. Whilst I think that this is what we are to constantly grapple with for our lives on this earth I want to do it, since I want to experience the fullness that Christ speaks of as without him I don’t have a hope on this earth. Also when I do use what I’ve been given by him in worship of him, including my sexuality, it’s then unlocked to be fulfilling in a way that it couldn’t be otherwise.

I want to see people being fulfilled and I’m eager to see the cultural renewal that comes when people are given the grace to experience the satisfaction that is Christ.