Post 9: Promotion of Chastity

Paragraph 22: Promotion of Chastity.

In this paragraph, Pope mentioned that all of the pornography kind of stuff that stimulates men's baser passion or encourage low moral standard should be abolished to promote chastity. He also mentioned that "It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities." How perfect does he want our world to be?

First of all, I believe that what Pope is stating about chastity is pretty ideal for our human world. If every person in this world follows what Pope is saying about this, there would be much less sexual crime. Less access to porn could make our lives healthier. That's what he thinks. Sounds very ideal and perfect. I would half agree to his opinion, but not 100% because I believe first parts of our lives should be chaste; our childhood should be chaste. What I mean here is, for me, teachers and parents can try their best not to let us touch any sexual related things when we are very young (like 10 years old because we don't need it), but not necessarily after getting into junior high or something because I think sexual education is necessary for all of the people. I don't know if an official sexual education (those taught in a text book) would be counted as "obscenity", but without this, we would not be able to correctly understand sexual things. Instead, once we are interested in it, we will find our own ways to learn and understand it, and of course, it might not be always right. For example, let me try to explain this in a scientific way, if there is a certain thing that you are not sure, say a math problem, and there is no textbook nor teacher, what would you do? All what you can do is to form hypothesis and experiment it. And only after trying a couple of experimentation, you will get close to the right answer. I believe this also applies to sexual education. It is better to teach everyone about sex rather than to let them learn by themselves. For safety, sexual education is necessary anyway.

Moreover, I strongly believe that sexual crime cannot be prevented to happen by doing what Pope said. I think it is pretty easy to guess what happens if every porn suddenly disappeared. Some people will go crazy and there will be more sexual crime because if there isn't a porn or something, people will try to make it themselves (Docile body could be seen here as people who wants to fulfill their wants). It is really a tough thing to control every person's mind in this whole world. No matter how perfect one's idea sounds (in this case, Pope's idea), there are always people who go against it. It could be said that unless we have one consistent intelligible body that everybody pursues, there will be contradiction. Pope wants the world to be chaste, but some people don't (I'm the one too.)

To conclude, I believe that Pope's idea about promotion of chastity is unrealistic and certain level of sexual education IS necessary in today's world. Abolishing all the obscenity and indecency will solve nothing.