By: Shane James O’Neill
3 min read
Celebrity First Sex Scene
Celebrity Jennifer Lawrence describes her first on-set sex scene:
“I got really, really drunk. But then that lead to more anxiety when I got home because I was like, “What have I done? I don’t know.” And he [Chris Pratt] was married. And it was going to be my first time kissing a married man, and guilt is the worst feeling in your stomach. And I knew it was my job, but I couldn’t tell my stomach that. So I called my mom, and I was like, “Will you just tell me it’s OK?””
Heartbreakingly, Lawrence’s experience is shared by so many. Celebrity Ruta Gedmintas describes her first sex scene by saying: “I was absolutely terrified and had no idea what was going on…I cried afterwards because I was thinking, ‘This isn’t acting, what am I doing?’”
Most of the time, you and I create guidelines about what we watch on the basis of how it could affect us, as the viewer. Considering how the people in those scenes are being impacted is something that sobers me and shapes my heart in extremely healthy (yet oh-so-difficult) ways.
If what we view shapes us, then how is it shaping the people who are in those scenes? Our moral considerations need to go beyond ourselves because one way or another we are interacting with other human beings.
Celebrity Pain
When it comes to purity, we ache when we, yet again, mess up. We feel the influence of those scenes and actions upon our souls. So, how much more so for those living inside of what we view? Stepping into the performers soul and feeling their ache goes a long way in revealing the lies we keep in dark places.
Here are a few more words to describe their ache: “awful” (Eva Mendes), “nerve-wracking” (Margot Robbie), “terrified” (Reese Witherspoon), “mortifying” (Jemima Kirke), “toxic” (Michelle Williams), “humiliating” (Claire Foy), “shell-shocked” (Dakota Johnson), “traumatic” (Natalie Dormer). And still, the list could go on, from celebrity to another.
The descriptions that each celebrity gives is heartrending, not least because they’re doing this for us. There’s a demand, so it’s standard logic to provide a supply. There is money to be made and jobs to create. And all the while, we wonder why our country is the way it is.
As Cap Stewart has said, “There would not be so much hypersexualized material in our entertainment if there was not such a high demand for it.”
At the end of the day, we’ve created the industry, we’ve diluted the ethical landscape, we’re the ones transforming the western imagination of what intimacy is. Porn, mainstream sex scenes, and hook up apps are created for us, and in that sense, they’re created by us. We supply this demand.
As the author Anna Lappe has said: “Every time you spend money, you’re casting a vote for the kind of world you want.”
Lest you think I’m preaching; it doesn’t feel at all good to write these words. While researching for this article, my gut has churned at every turn and testimony. I have contributed my fair share to that demand.
Becoming Human
When it comes to porn, it’s easy to dehumanize the people we are using. It’s even easy to convince ourselves that we’re not using them because it’s their choice to perform and they’re getting paid for it. But then that might just be a way to justify our viewership, our habits, addictions, and actions, and it just might be another way to dehumanize. There are always real people behind the scenes we use for ourselves.
Related: Sex Week, Advent, and Jesus’ Body
Porn teaches us to dehumanize and that practice goes with us wherever we go. We tell ourselves it’s isolated and doesn’t impact other areas of our lives, but if watching a movie or reading a book changes the way we view the world and think about people, can we really expect our habits around the greatest act of intimacy to not change us?
Just because we can’t (or won’t) note the changes in ourselves hardly means those changes aren’t taking place.
This is less a call to guilt, though feeling that is appropriate, I certainly feel it. It’s more a call to actually love our neighbors as we love ourselves.
Hurting For Others
We apply moral guidelines to ourselves, and when we fail, we think it only affects us. It’s a slope with such a long drop and when you fall down it you’re so concussed that you think you’re uninjured. Perhaps we can get away from that ravine altogether by hurting for others instead of continuing to hurt ourselves (and hurting them along the way).
By sitting down and actually asking how what you’re viewing is impacting the performers provides a window to see people, actual people, like your mom or sister or wife, behind the screen of your own fantasy.
Let’s love that way. Let’s humanize and dignify the hurt and actions of others. And let’s take responsibility for our part in that hurt.
Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves requires us to love God well. More often than not, loving God really just means letting yourself be loved by God. Intentionally caring for people this way will take you far in the way of freedom, as you learn to love others, yourself, and Jesus.
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Article outline taken from Cap Stewart’s essay in Cultural Engagement.
Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for Proven Men Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.