The Ana Kriegel case and the elephant in the room.
The harrowing case of the murder of Anastasia Kriegel, for which two teenagers have now been brought to justice, for me really hammered home the profoundly damaging effects that pornography has had on young people in our society. How could a young woman with her whole life ahead of her could meet her death in such a grisly and horrendous fashion, through no fault of her own? And how could two young men, again with their whole lives ahead of them, basically throw it all away in a mindless pursuit of perverted sexual pleasure? I suspect that the possible answers to these questions will upset people on all sides of the political spectrum.
One such answer is that our society seems to endorse the view that sexual impulses, because they are natural, are therefore always good and that to seek to suppress them, or to say that these impulses should only be acted on in a marriage between a man and a woman who are open to new life, is not merely eccentric, but actually psychopathic. As such, it is also claimed that the Church's propagation of this view created an environment that hothoused paedophiles and other sexual deviants. This, I think, gets it backwards. The issue was not the Church's teachings, or mandatory priestly celibacy for that matter, but rather that individuals who were not called to lifelong celibacy, and often pressured into the seminary by their parents or others, were ordained without any regard for whether or not they were suitable for the priesthood. This is turn was compounded by a culture of undue deference, in which instead of being defrocked as they should have been, abusive priests were instead shuffled around from parish to parish, in many cases after treatment which had seemingly "cured" them. The troubles is that it didn't, and many of these priests went on to abuse more children. Anyone who objected to this was regarded at best as a troublemaker, at worst as an enemy of the Church (and in some cases, those on the receiving end of this did indeed become so). So the issue of clerical abuse cannot simply be blamed on the Church's teaching on sexual morality.
Let us not forget as well that attitudes in secular society may well have contributed to the murder. Much popular culture today, particularly in the music industry, promotes, consciously or otherwise, the idea that women are primarily sexual beings whose main purpose is the sexual fulfilment of men. This might seem counter-intuitive at first: this hyper-sexualised culture is often presented as a liberation from old-fashioned, patriarchal norms. But in reality, all it does is reinforce the aforementioned notions outlined above. Many of these singers serve as role models for many teenage girls, who then feel compelled to imitate them in order to be attractive to males, and those who don't are often dismisses as prudes. Ironically, many of these singers are under similar pressure: I would be surprised if Kesha's revelations about how her manager sexually assaulted her are an isolated case.
And worst of all, some of these songs actually appear to glorify criminality: "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke rationalises date rape with the lyrics "I know you want it", while Eminem threatens his fictional girlfriend in "Love the Way You Lie" with the (paraphrased) lyrics "If she ever leaves the house again, I'm going to tie her to a chair and set the house on fire." When one realises that the singer he collaborated with on that single, Rihanna, was herself the victim of domestic violence in her relationship with Chris Brown, it becomes all the more egregious.
Note that I am only talking about the music industry here. These issues are only amplified in the sex industry, which often takes young girls, who are often the victims of sexual abuse and human trafficking, uses them to generate obscene amounts of money, and spits them out at the other end even more scarred than they were coming in at best, or at worst in a coffin. And yet in spite of all of this, we hear calls from time to time for prostitution to be legalised, we have opposition to even the most modest of controls of pornography, and the proliferation of adult shops and other immoral establishments in the cities and large towns of our country!
Don't forget that this is all happening in a society which claims to respect women more than the bad old days of the 1950's (and yes, there were very problematic elements of that society which no one should seek to recreate, like the industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, unmarried mothers packed off to England, etc.) Yet what we are teaching our young men is the polar opposite of that respect, which in extreme circumstances leads to events like we saw in Kildare. Even worse, almost nobody is willing to point out the contradiction and hypocrisy involved in all of this. If we are serious about ensuring that this never happens again, we are going to need a serious sea change in our attitude to sexuality.
One such answer is that our society seems to endorse the view that sexual impulses, because they are natural, are therefore always good and that to seek to suppress them, or to say that these impulses should only be acted on in a marriage between a man and a woman who are open to new life, is not merely eccentric, but actually psychopathic. As such, it is also claimed that the Church's propagation of this view created an environment that hothoused paedophiles and other sexual deviants. This, I think, gets it backwards. The issue was not the Church's teachings, or mandatory priestly celibacy for that matter, but rather that individuals who were not called to lifelong celibacy, and often pressured into the seminary by their parents or others, were ordained without any regard for whether or not they were suitable for the priesthood. This is turn was compounded by a culture of undue deference, in which instead of being defrocked as they should have been, abusive priests were instead shuffled around from parish to parish, in many cases after treatment which had seemingly "cured" them. The troubles is that it didn't, and many of these priests went on to abuse more children. Anyone who objected to this was regarded at best as a troublemaker, at worst as an enemy of the Church (and in some cases, those on the receiving end of this did indeed become so). So the issue of clerical abuse cannot simply be blamed on the Church's teaching on sexual morality.
Let us not forget as well that attitudes in secular society may well have contributed to the murder. Much popular culture today, particularly in the music industry, promotes, consciously or otherwise, the idea that women are primarily sexual beings whose main purpose is the sexual fulfilment of men. This might seem counter-intuitive at first: this hyper-sexualised culture is often presented as a liberation from old-fashioned, patriarchal norms. But in reality, all it does is reinforce the aforementioned notions outlined above. Many of these singers serve as role models for many teenage girls, who then feel compelled to imitate them in order to be attractive to males, and those who don't are often dismisses as prudes. Ironically, many of these singers are under similar pressure: I would be surprised if Kesha's revelations about how her manager sexually assaulted her are an isolated case.
And worst of all, some of these songs actually appear to glorify criminality: "Blurred Lines" by Robin Thicke rationalises date rape with the lyrics "I know you want it", while Eminem threatens his fictional girlfriend in "Love the Way You Lie" with the (paraphrased) lyrics "If she ever leaves the house again, I'm going to tie her to a chair and set the house on fire." When one realises that the singer he collaborated with on that single, Rihanna, was herself the victim of domestic violence in her relationship with Chris Brown, it becomes all the more egregious.
Note that I am only talking about the music industry here. These issues are only amplified in the sex industry, which often takes young girls, who are often the victims of sexual abuse and human trafficking, uses them to generate obscene amounts of money, and spits them out at the other end even more scarred than they were coming in at best, or at worst in a coffin. And yet in spite of all of this, we hear calls from time to time for prostitution to be legalised, we have opposition to even the most modest of controls of pornography, and the proliferation of adult shops and other immoral establishments in the cities and large towns of our country!
Don't forget that this is all happening in a society which claims to respect women more than the bad old days of the 1950's (and yes, there were very problematic elements of that society which no one should seek to recreate, like the industrial schools, Magdalene laundries, unmarried mothers packed off to England, etc.) Yet what we are teaching our young men is the polar opposite of that respect, which in extreme circumstances leads to events like we saw in Kildare. Even worse, almost nobody is willing to point out the contradiction and hypocrisy involved in all of this. If we are serious about ensuring that this never happens again, we are going to need a serious sea change in our attitude to sexuality.
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