Back when I made a half-dozen visits to the ToolBox in Toronto, I noticed, pretty well first off, a video set playing pornography. The second thing I noticed was that it was good pornography, in that the guys had beards and muscles, and weren’t teenage boys pretending to be girlzzzzzz. The third thing I noticed was that nobody else was paying a whole lot of attention to the video. The fourth thing I noticed was that I, myself, was not paying a whole lot of attention, because after a few minutes bear porn became boring.
The way this thing works is that we can either have a look at such on-screen stuff or we can have a Look. A look can turn into a Look, so it makes some sense not even to have a look. The look does not in and of itself lower us. The Look, however, which grows out of the look, does. It makes us less masculine, more limp-wristed, weaker, more self-centred, more Ratlike. It’s like having (this is my perpetual personal sin, much abetted by the Internet) a jerk-off.
Now what about real sex—not a private jerk-off, not a one-night stand, not an Internet Relay Chat two- or three-way wank-party—not, in other words, the sex that lowers us? What about the sex in which two buddies love each other with every inch of their bodies, man-body to man-body and man-soul to man-soul, the sex an expression of their love, the sex a blending two separate acts of being finally, totally, permanently, into one single act of glorious male being? I haven’t been in this space, but surely other guys have. What to say about this I don’t know, except that the Church does not approve, and that however intellectually limited (as I’ve gone to the trouble of arguing above) the institutional Church may be, I’m still more limited than it. I’m going to subjugate my judgement to the judgement of the Magisterium, but with this further thought: If two buddies were really to love each other, with every inch of their bodies, with their full and absolute and total mutual being, they could demonstrate the depth of their love, perhaps indeed should demonstrate the depth of their love, by loving in renunciation and chastity. This thing is a mystery, as I’ve said already.