Refractions from the Pornographic Lens

Some thoughts involving a fairy tale

The world may be frozen, but hope always thaws the coldest of hearts.

/ Hans Christian Andersen /

For Christmas last year, my sister-in-law gifted my daughter with a beautifully illustrated book of fairy tales. What I find both equally wonderful and jarring about this book is that it’s fairy tales in their original tellings—with all its grim (pun intended) and seemingly random details.

One of these tales is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, where a distortive mirror owned by the devil is shattered into a billion pieces and incorporated into earthly existence. Some become window panes or smaller mirrors themselves—some of the tiniest fragments are lodged in people’s eyes, or worse—into their very hearts, where it infects their souls with an impenetrable cold. Such is the initial fate of one of the story’s central characters, Kay—a young boy whose heart is pierced by a shard of mirror, and takes him on a path of increasing bitterness.

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I’ve been pondering what I’ll call “the pornographic lens,” for the sake of this piece, for some time. I’ve looked through this lens, and it’s dismal; my work now also necessitates that I continually remember what that felt like. It’s a lens that distorts every person in front of you, including yourself, far beyond just sexuality and bodiliness. It’s a lens that makes everyone in its view an object for use, whether that’s physical, emotional, spiritual. Those within its scope exist for the viewer’s comfort and gratification, and this reality exists in an array of forms that at times can be hard to detect.

The pornographic, too, is a distorted mirror shattered into sometimes the tiniest of slivers—but slivers distort just the same.

I have felt the infection of the cold shard of mirror in my eye. I have taken pains to extract it. And like many iterations of the “devil we know,” once you have seen through the pornographic lens, perhaps you can identify its many shards in places where you couldn’t before—perhaps in places others cannot see them.

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Helen Roy

wrote an excellent piece several months ago called “Conservative Women’s Aunt Lydia Problem”--an excellent piece for many reasons, but partly because she drew the tie between pornography’s moral education of men and the treatment of women in some conservative mentalities. Within these mentalities, many men find a convenient “baptizing” of the moral education they’ve received from porn consumption—that women are still objects to be used, even if that’s in ways that a sacramental state sanctions. As Helen writes, the “redpill” movement and its Christian offshoots allow men to “confirm all their priors about what women are for, while simultaneously absolving themselves of their guilt.”

Her point struck me, and got me back on this train of thinking about the lens that pornography requires one to look through—perhaps even when one is not personally consuming, but passively receiving messaging from an over-sexualized culture. That lens is not exclusively secular, not even close. There are mentalities, practices, and beliefs that, on the surface, may seem truthful but underneath do not require us to remove the mirror’s shard from our eye, at best—and at worst, they embed the shard right into our hearts. As Bishop Erik Varden writes, “The risk is that we think perverse behavior is confined to extreme environments. We have been poorly prepared to acknowledge it in our midst, not to mention in environments supposed to be radiant with light.”

When men speak of women as mere machines to produce and rear children, I see the pornographic lens—partly because of its objectification of women, and partly because of its viewing of motherhood in such an objectifying light, as well. When someone like Matt Walsh writes a piece referring to women on OnlyFans as “whores,” I see a sliver of the distorted mirror (because, ultimately, others’ objectification of their own selves does not give you permission to objectify them, too). These mentalities may seem conducive to one’s beliefs on the surface, but underneath they reek of the pornographic. People are not objects to be used, for any purpose, at any time.

How the shards in women’s eyes manifest can look different, but equally cold. Women can objectify men—and other women—readily, yes, but I also encounter many women who view themselves in a pseudo-pornographic light; as objects to be used, as machines whose worth come from production, as beings whose happiness is found in unhampered subservience. There is an imbalance that is palpable, an imbalance that resembles when women identify with the same qualities in the sexual sphere. I see the online world-fed jargon about women being made solely for designated purposes, covered by a convincing veneer of the sacred, and see a shard of that dark mirror. However beautiful fertility, motherhood and homemaking might be, to reduce women’s worth to them is still just that: a reduction. We are not our biological capabilities, or even our vocations—they are meant to be a crucible in which we become more deeply ourselves. The pornographic lens can be situated quite comfily into vindictive conservative narratives, no doubt, just as a sliver of it can be found in enslavement to work, idolatry of food and fitness—the list goes on.

I was taught my whole life that the most destructive lies are half-truths, and those are certainly the kind Satan loves to employ. Pornography has sent shards of its distortion across the globe, touching almost every human life at different levels—whether as a personal demon, or simply existence within an over-sexualized culture. I can say this with certainty: none of us are spared. We are trained in the pornographic tone, reared in an environment where it’s thick in the air. Pornography objectifies for the sake of sexual purposes—but even when it is left behind, objectification for other purposes can remain. Shards stay quietly lodged within the eye, “baptized” by narratives that seem upright and moral. All of us are tasked with collecting those shards from the ends of the earth, first and foremost the ones within ourselves.

Healing can certainly be found within the significance of recognizing the designs of one’s body, and the sacrificial, life-giving telos of that design—but that is only part of it. I work with women daily who are devoted wives and mothers, yet are entrenched in sexual compulsion. Why? Because functions (again, even noble ones) don’t save us, and cannot remove the inherent ache. Don’t misread me: women who are called to and deeply embrace fertility, motherhood, and beyond are not catering to pornographic refractions—but the voices that say “this is what you are for, and you will find fulfillment in nothing else” are, even if it’s the smallest sliver. I pray we learn to run from them, and run towards the truth: we are not objects, but persons to be loved.

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In The Snow Queen, Kay is saved from his state of being completely frozen by his friend, Gerda, as she weeps over him. He is thawed by her tears, and weeps the mirror’s shard right out of his eye. The point of the tale is clear and easily applicable: love is what thaws the frozen heart, and raw, human grief is what releases us from the shards of objectification’s mirror. Grief over the state of our world, the loss of innocence, our own wrongdoing—but most of all, the paradoxically hopeful grief that we are not yet home in such a shattered world to begin with. Nothing we do here can take away the knowledge that we belong to a “far-off country” that we’ve never visited, yet know is home.

Kay and Gerda are able to return from the Snow Queen’s palace of ice to their home, where they are now grown-up, and hear the verse being read aloud:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” (Matthew 18:3)

Healing is learning to be with oneself, not look around for one’s “use”--to remove every ounce of coldness that the pornographic lens’ refractions have caused in one’s heart. Healing is learning to slowly become a child, who refuses any notion of being made for any purpose but love. You cannot find healing in a function (again, even if that function is a noble one), you can truly only find it in trusting that you are loved, and made for eternity. That hope, truly, thaws the heart.