Is Instagram Porn?
#MeToo and the Church agree? Porn creates “sensational” cartoons of sensuous desires. It’s everywhere.
Is Instagram porn? What about CNN or talk radio? By definition, pornography “stimulates a compulsive interest’’ by overemphasizing our most sensational desires.
We turn on the news desiring truth and knowledge we need. But more and more our news sources are partisan (agreeing with us, rarely down the middle). They have more competitors than ever. Like waiters and waitresses hungry for massive tips, they look amazing and act like they love us, offering the most comforting, shocking or sensational stories.
“News porn” replaces journalism with another “bombshell” or “breaking news” development with accompanying melodramatic music, assuring you your scary enemy is going to jail or about to be humiliated or crushed.
And other promises that never happen. But they at least resemble bombshells, going sleeveless even when it’s cold outside.
We desire beauty because we crave love. But our heads turn by the most appealing versions, where less pleasant details of reality are similarly removed and faded out of the image.
“When we’re starved for beauty, something dangerous happens,” author Christopher West writes. “As with an unfed dog, our hunger can become ravenous… we scorn truth without beauty… we porn beauty without truth. By this I mean we reduce beauty to the merely physical level — cut off from any higher truth — and fixate on idealized images of ‘perfect physical beauty’ …”
For decades, Hollywood and New York have perfected garments, hair styles, makeup and image making to make people more and more desirable (and less real). Push-up bras and yoga pants courtesy of the Liar?
A century ago, our idols were saints on stained glass. Our money soon went elsewhere. World War II soldiers had pinup queens in their lockers.
My childhood peers made Farrah Fawcett and others our real-life revered angels we idolized on posters, lunch boxes and notebooks. When she died, the same day as Michael Jackson, men my age were certain Farrah was going to Heaven. Girls had their own dream men on posters from Shaun Cassidy to Eric Estrada.
A survivor of Hollywood’s #metoo culture describes horrible work environments: women stopped wearing makeup and started putting their hair up in the least flattering ways just so they could be less likely to get their shoulders rubbed by the latest fool who thinks he’s a hot porn star.
Why Instagram was a billion dollar deal
When Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram in 2012, I didn’t get it. I asked Nikki and Chad, two of our younger social media experts (who now make way more money than I do) to help me figure this out. What did this little photo sharing app have that Facebook didn’t? More filters?
Yes! We love and need our filters. Filters help make our loved ones, my red Camaro, sunrises and my plate of steak and meatballs look like porn stars. We are all hot now — even when we really aren’t.
Social media users, particularly the young, were quick to ditch Facebook for Instgram because its focus and mission is so clear: making the world more beautiful. Adjust the filters and everything and everyone is more perfect looking.
Facebook is all over the map, like a Swiss Army knife. Twitter is mean (snarky comments) like a military knife ready to take you down. Snapchat is like a circus clown car, out to make you look silly.
But Instagram is so beautiful — all about emphasizing what’s beautiful. Everytime you look, there’s something beautiful there: beautiful people, their beautiful kids and magnificent meals aka food porn.
It all looks so perfect you just stare and marvel at it. Flawless, amazing, wow. Every young woman is a model. Every man looks rich and successful. It’s distracting, from one beautiful image to the next.
“The problem with porn isn’t that it shows too much; it doesn’t show enough,’’ Matt Fradd, founder of the Porn Effect told Detroit Catholic. “Sex is good. The problem with porn isn’t nudity; the body is an expression of God’s creation…
“Studies come out saying it creates an addiction, and the more we consume porn, the more our brains shrink… I tend to lead with the science and conclude with the moral argument. ”