By: Shane James O’Neill
4 min read
Nude Art or Porn?
A film came out a few years ago, the name of which I’ll refrain from sharing least it lead you in a dangerous direction. Regardless, this film followed the life of a self-diagnosed female sex addict. She loved sex, specifically sex with men, while she pretended to be a virgin. In her words, she loved being picked up and put back down like a thing. And over time she becomes numb to even the intimacy of sex.
The film won all sorts of global awards. Many people believed it revealed the plight of women, or the horrors of abuses, and most thought it helped to mainstream pornography and celebrated the film for that reason. All of those reason may be true, and yet…
This movie is not popular on ANY porn site. There is no reddit thread that discusses this film as a movie that really gets them going. People celebrate this movie for its sex and nudity, yet never use it for pornography. Why?
Because of how jarring it presents the life of someone who embraces a life centered on sex. The entire movie is told by a woman with bruises across her body telling an older man the stories of her lewd lifestyle.
Her intimacy is all a lie, she’s addicted to men falling in love with, she breaks apart hearts and families, and in the end she is left bruised and broken. Her bruises color every intimate story she tells, so that behind every sex scene are swollen colors of black and blue and dark green.
The film is hard to watch. We may deny the sacred position of sex, but when we see it abused we can’t help but react and feel a sense of injustice — hence all the awards this film won.
What’s the Difference??
This film is a stark illustration of nude art as distinct from pornography. There is nudity, even sexualized nudity, but the viewer still isn’t able to view these scenes with the lust of pornography.
While I would never recommend someone viewing this film, the movie stands as a witness that nudity doesn’t simply exist as a hormonal release. This film shows us a sacred texture to sex, in the sense that people aren’t able to watch it with the aim of desecrating it.
In many instances, including the film above, we find it difficult to abuse nude art and make it porn — whether it be Adam in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, his Statue of David, or the graphic tales of a sex addict.
In the Oxford series of short introductions, aestheticians (philosophers who study beauty) communicate that the difference between nude art and pornography is that nude art points to something deeper, something sacred, while pornography points only to itself.
(Nude) Art is a window that lets us see into vast spaces of wonder, while pornography ends with itself.
Art and One-Night Stands
This connection between art and pornography is similar with the difference between marital love-making and one-night stands.
Making love is about knowing another person, sharing affection, becoming one, and enacting a faithfulness that goes beyond the activity of sex. While a one-night stand is about the self, about personal indulgence, and ends as soon as we’ve mined all the pleasure from that experience, leaving it barren of joy.
Porn is its own point, just like a one-night stand, while art and love take us to new worlds of imagination and experience.
Simply put, porn takes and art gives.
Pornography, as we talked about before, come from the Greek word porneia, which means prostitution or prostitute. Pornography has a very specific end.
While true artists, as Matt Fradd has said, “… aim at capturing their vision of beauty in order that the beautiful might be apprehended and appreciated.”
Porn creates a singular desire with a singular end, while art invites us to explore the wonder behind the image.
The porn director would be baffled and put off if you told him his work was beautiful and all you could do was watch with wonder. While Michelangelo would be appalled to think of someone standing under his fresco in the Sistine Chapel and sexually getting off.
Related: Publicly Violated or Boiled Alive: How Jesus Revolutionized Western Sexual Ethics
A Naked King
Of course, the most vivid illustration is a naked man dying on a cross. Very few people in history have been warped enough to find arousal at this scene. All of us, I would hope, find the cross more of an offense to the eyes than they do a lust of the eyes.
Even as an unbeliever, when I watched The Passion film I wept in anger and hate. My soul was revulsed with every blow, every whip, every stoke of the hammer, and every penetration of nail through appendage. My flesh hated watching his flesh ravished for me.
The best man who ever existed allowed his body to be dehumanized because of my broken humanity and all that I have done with my body.
His body took the sin of my body.
Nude art finds its nexus in a naked man hanging by nails on a naked cross. In this sense, all of theology is a practice of art, working to capture the wonder and mystery of Jesus’ naked humanity and adorned divinity.
Porn, The New Art?
Pornography is not the new art. Porneia has been around for a long, long time. It is because of this ancient evil that Jesus’ allowed his body to be abused.
And at the Place of The Skull, pornography is undone by the naked king.
At the end of the movie we discussed at the beginning, the woman gets to the point in her journey where she is able to admit why she has lived the way she has. Her reason for living for sex was as a rebellion against love. She destroyed her life as a cry against love.
Pornography and lust are wars of rebellion against love.
As you contend with pornography, place your bare shame and exposed sin on the naked body of the one who loves you and gave himself for you. Only in that scene can Heaven’s Artist recreate you and make you new.
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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.