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If I were single, I COULD have sex with a different female each night and completely disconnect any emotional aspect from it without any consequence on how I live my life in society. Now, whether or not the person I'm with could do that is another question.
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I think the largest fundamental problem with society today is the alienation from ourselves and others, particularly with our emotions. To me, it is obvious that pornography fosters this disconnect. The kind of situation you are describing here in the quote is even more disconnected.
Why would this be important? Because the division between mind and body is a sort of falsehood. Lakoff and Johnson wrote a great book Philosophy of the Flesh: The Emobodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. In this book, they provide a very compelling argument that the concept of division between mind and body is full of problems. Going right along with Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy, it seems that our society is living in very Apollonian times. Our alienation from our own emotions and our own bodies is harmful to humanity.
To provide a case study in how this disconnect has fostered an alienating culture is in Conyers, GA. Frontline (the PBS show) was doing a story on a teenage sex ring that they had heard about, and as they were doing the story a school shooting took place (not a coincidence). The sex ring consisted of many teens and even kids as young as 12-years-old having sex with many others. The story broke when a local sexual health clinic did some data collection and tried to track down where a small outbreak of an STD came from. By the end of her search, she had found hundreds of students that had come into contact with the STD through an "underground" that consisted of sex parties.
Some interesting excerpts from the show ( Frontline: The Lost Children of Rockdale County):
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NARRATOR: At school, we heard lots of talk about sex.
BRANDI: I mean, sex is just a thing. It's no big deal anymore. It's just a thing. It's just a thing. It's just like going to school every day, getting up and going to school. "Oh," you know, you meet this guy, "Let's have sex." That's just how it is with people now.
NARRATOR: If Heritage High School has a social pyramid, Brandi is at its pinnacle.
BRANDI: These guys say such sweet things. I know. They say it to me. They say, you know, "You're so beautiful," and they don't even know, and, you know, "I care about you and I love you. I want to be with you forever." Please! You know? They don't know what that means.
I don't think I've seen any of my friends truly have a love connection because they're too young to know what love is. I mean, guys don't know what love is. So the girl might think they do, but they don't. And they're thinking that it's the guy showing them affection back, and it's not. He just wants some of that girl.
INTERVIEWER: Do you enjoy it?
BRANDI: No. Sex sucks, actually. So I think only guys benefit from it. I think that it's- I think sex was made for guys because you just lay there, and you're just, like, "Get off me. What are you doing?"
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Peggy Cooper, now retired, was a middle school guidance counselor. She reported to the health department that she was hearing stories of late-night sexual games involving kids as young as 12 years old.
PEGGY COOPER: My students were talking to me about the parties that they were having on weekends, and there was one place in particular that they had lots of privacy. The parents were off and gone. And they said that they were watching the Playboy Channel in the girl's bedroom. And there would be, like, 10 or 12 of them up there.
And so I said, "Well, is everybody watching it?" "Oh, yeah. They're all watching it." And so one of the little guys goes, "And we're getting pretty good at it, too." I said, "Good at what?" So he said, "Well, we- you have to do- the game is you have to imitate what the Playboy people are doing."
And one of them said, "And sometimes it's all mixed up, too. You know, it's just like- there may be three or four of us at one time. And it doesn't matter if you're two guys or two girls or a girl and a guy. It doesn't matter. You just have to do what they're doing."
NICOLE: There was this one time when we were all at a party. There's about 30, 40 people there. And this one girl, she- they had been drinking. They were pretty drunk. And she, like, was going to have- she told everybody she was going to have sex with almost every guy that was there.
And her and her friend went back in the bedroom. Her friend had sex with her boyfriend and came out. And then the girl stayed in there, and it was, like, all the guys lined up. And it was like they were from the door to the front door. I mean, it was a lot of people.
And we brought out the bag of condoms we got from the health department, passed them out. And, like, two guys would go in there, you know, and they were having sex with her. And they were, like, having oral sex and, you know, sex. And all the guys that- most of the guys that were there went in the room and had sex with her.
And then she came out. She was- she thought it was the coolest thing, just that she had just had sex with all them. Or maybe they thought she was cool or whatever. Then she was like, bleeding, and her hair had cum all in it, and it was all over her clothes.
INTERVIEWER: Did any of the girls describe the sex as pleasurable?
Prof. CLAIRE STERK: Initially, they described the sex as pleasurable, and pleasurable in terms of it being physically pleasurable, but also psychologically, like, this was a initiation into the next step of their life. It was part of their development that was taking place. Over time, however, very few of the girls talked about the sex in terms of it being pleasurable at all. It became something that was painful, that in some cases they couldn't even remember what they did anymore. So it became very negative.
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Now, I'm sure you can look at this and rationalize it as a non-sequitur for being an isolated case, or something along those lines. However, I think we can look at this as an indicator of our society. Looking at porn as a cause or a symptom is irrelevant, because it is a mutually enforcing variable. We are missing self-respect, respect for others as individuals, and respect for the process of entering another person's body or allowing someone to enter your body. The metaphorical implications of how one views sex are huge because of the metaphorical nature of how humans interpret their environment.
You seem to be claiming that through reflection and a rejection of society we can turn off the connection between mind and body, that it is healthy, and that there are no negative side effects. Regardless of the sin issue (which is an issue, because those that believe in sin have a much more difficult time in developing a healthy sexuality), people aren't meant to shut off parts of themselves like you describe. To do so would be considered, psychologically, a coping mechanism.
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Innominate.
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