When Netflix Ambushes Your Family Evening
No shame. I couldn’t really compute what I was seeing—a major Netflix show, a well-established-and-respected actor playing a middle-aged acting coach alone in his room looking at nanny porn. I looked at my nineteen-year-old daughter who was watching with me, and turned off the show. Her face said everything. I wish I’d done it sooner. Really should have. Perhaps the director felt that the realism afforded by showing pornographic images to the viewers was essential to the show, but I disagree. We’d both had a feeling that it was getting out of hand and wouldn’t be worth watching, but I loved the characters. Maybe it would turn out all right.
I’m no TV prude. I understand the human story includes powerful hormonal drives and a deep existential longing for intimacy, and that this drives otherwise decent people to adultery and fornication. So I am usually prepared to fast-forward past content that could be hinted at rather than explicitly portrayed. I could have done that last night, but I didn’t see it coming. And it stunned me.
Pornography is often laughed at in the media and assumed to be a universal indulgence. I had my experience with it as a teenager, and it left me empty. Now seeing someone still going back to that emptiness a middle-aged man made me wonder, “Can’t he see it’s an obvious counterfeit?” Why would this man, either the actor or the character, share this private moment of despair, giving up on reality so casually?
Sex was not meant for one’s own isolated pleasure, especially while fantasizing about imagined relationships with images of another’s naked body. At best, making porn misuses another person’s body, and at worst it violates the rights of its subjects and abuses them profoundly. The porn star is reduced to an image, an object of desire and fantasy—not a real person.
If we give up on intimacy, we give up on love and surrender any hope of enduring sexual relationships. The formation of stable communities goes out the window along with family life. When we take the easy solo path we isolate ourselves, pretend we are all OK, and ignore the hard realities of social degradation as our humanity drains away.
We sat in silence a bit after I turned off the TV. I don’t recall saying anything. Things can’t be undone. Eventually, the evening continued as if nothing had happened. But something had.
