If you have brushed with YouTube media criticism recently, at least in more right-wing or culturally disaffected circles, you’ve inevitably encountered a certain complaint: ‘The women in these new movies just aren’t hot enough.’ It’s touted as a reason for declining sales (not entirely wrong), of course, but the complain doesn’t stop there. Many argue that hot women should be reinstated in the stories not just because they make the box office better but on the merit of the suggestion alone. In other words, the fact that modern media has a schizophrenically inconsistent hatred of feminine sexual appeal has been declared an artistic problem. This complaint, at first blush, has some plausibility, as it points to numerous examples of seemingly intentionally ugly characters, in movies and video games particularly,¹ but while it points towards a problem, it misidentified the problem, resulting in a less-than-useless solution.²

To excite lust is not the solution. Increasing the sexual appeal of a work is not truly an improvement; at best, it is a side-effect. Lust itself must never be the goal, for reasons both artistic and moral. We must not live by lust, and therefore we must not write towards it.

Art

Lust is an artistic detriment, dragging down whatever excites it, because lust is a selfish sensation. Love, joy, happiness, fear, sadness, envy, longing, all these are emotions which the reader can have alongside the characters, which they can enter into with the characters. These are emotions which allow empathy, which set the reader outside themselves. I feel exhausted with Frodo (though fascinated by his story); I feel jolly with Bombadil; I feel foreboding with Gandalf. Lust is different. Lust pulls to the self, centers thought upon the reader’s body, considers the story in relation not to itself and God but to the reader’s physical sensuality. Lust says ‘towards’ not ‘alongside of.’ If I feel lust for a character, I do not do it in sympathy with the other characters but in selfishness, for myself.

Not only does this crack the relationship between reader and character, it breaks the world itself. Lust polarizes the difference between fiction and reality, between conception and reality. Lust is of the physical, the present; the story is of the intellectual, the hypothetical. A movie watcher who feels lust is not entering into the story; he is extracting the thing or character lusted for. The self is put at the center.

Thus on the one hand escapism is denied, the prison reasserted. The ‘Recovery’ which Tolkien avers necessary to true Escape is neutered; we cannot meet again with the world when we have refused to first leave it, when we have anchored ourselves to our first conception by the chains of sensuality (not of the senses, to be clear, but of prurience and hedonism). On the other hand, if the story did not desire to bring Escape but rather to illumine the world, not to leave but to explore, as is legitimate, lust binds the eyes, sets all thoughts on the self and on benefiting the self-already-seen, obscuring the world-unseen. In both directions of travel, then, lust stifles art, preventing it from declaring both the truth beyond and the truth within.

Morals

More importantly, though, we have a moral duty not to seek to excite lust. Christ provides the basis for this pronouncement in Matthew 5:27-28, saying, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The author, it is true, may not be committing adultery in writing to produce lust (or filming for said purpose). He may have no personal lust in his heart at the time, be desensitized or compartmentalized. Yet to tempt another to sin is in itself a sin. For this, if the testimony of Matthew 18:6 were not enough to establish this principle (“… whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea”), then consider that in tempting another to sin, we would be filling the role of Satan, the enemy of God’s people, both in the Garden (Gen. 3) and in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1).

Because God is the original artist, we can be certain that increasing the lasciviousness of our art is not the solution to our problem, as it does not imitate His character, even aside from its artistic demerits. The common solution having been debunked, we must ask a question: is there actually a problem? Unfortunately, yes. The solution was false, the problem misidentified, but the problem exists. Modernity eschews human beauty (and other beauty as well) to its own detriment. The denial of beauty is considered a virtue, not a vice or a neutral choice.

The Real Problem

Modern art does have a problem, a problem that includes a deliberate removal of female beauty (to a greater extent than male beauty). The root of this problem is that modernity hates God and therefore hates His beauty, His truth. God made man in His image (Gen. 1:26), and therefore modernity abhors what beauty of that image shows through, even just in the physical. We can see a grotesque exemplar of this in ‘high fashion’ shows, where clothing appears deliberately made to avoid beauty, to avoid being aesthetically fitting to the human wearing it, to please the eye, even though it may expose as much skin as it can, seeking to stir lust without risking beauty.³

Further, modernity (I use the term as meaning ‘now’) has a peculiar set of biases and circumstances that explain the biased nature of its relationship with lust, how mainstream art seems to be fine with exciting lust towards the male form but not towards the female.⁴ Simply put, modernity hates the human, hates the masculine, hates the feminine, and hates how they are supposed to relate.⁵ This hatred is encoded in our current gynocratic culture (not matriarchal because it hates motherhood, and not formally gynocratic but biased towards women and the female concern nonetheless).

Modernity’s hatred of the masculine is obvious and blatantly forwarded at nearly every angle. Men are blamed for every evil possible, are denied as much agency as possible, are denigrated in their very existence. To call for the end of the male gender is, I think we can all see, not nearly so controversial as to call for the end of the female gender, if not as fashionable as calling for the eradication of humans altogether. This alone, though, does not explain the apparent allowability of sexualized male figures in fiction.

To understand this, we must recognize that modernity does not merely hate masculinity; it also hates femininity. Modernity, in truth, desires to make men feminine, women masculine. Thus men are emasculated, given emotional support roles, denied physical prowess; thus women are made stoic warriors, more physically powerful than their counterpart (this is the fabled Strong Female Character). A part of the stereotype of masculinity that the culture imposes on its conception of women, upon its fictional females, is lasciviousness. That men have a problem with lust is an undeniable problem (1 Cor. __), though women are not exempt (Prov. 8:__). Modernity, however, demands that women become ‘masculine’; a part of this is indulging lust, and thus the continued sexualization of male characters in a way female characters are not.

That modernity hates the human is visible in every depersonalizing element of modern life; I hardly need to get into it. Suffice it to say, that which modernity worships itself, it despises mankind. Mankind may be the ultimate authority, but he is also the ultimate evil. To display his virtues, even in a distorted form, is then detestable. Human beauty, therefore, must be eliminated where possible. In the case of female characters, other cultural prejudices generally agree; in the case of male characters, they sometimes disagree enough to overcome the bias, whether through authorial lust or ideology. Even when the physical beauty is preserved, however, whether for male and female, virtues- the universal virtues as well as those more prominent in one gender (if still universal)- are denigrated and removed; what virtues are present, typically, are the virtues which remain attached to the stereotype of the other gender or which are near-impossible to remove from the physical beauty (i.e. physical bravery).

Finally, I asserted that modernity hates proper gender relations, and this is present already in what I’ve shown. Modernity wants to make men who act like women and women who act like men, even just the stereotypes thereof (and any stereotype with a long enough history will turn out to have some truth, some lie in it). How can people who are distorted from their God-given natures mesh with each other? A man who acts like a woman and a woman who acts like a man will not have the relationship a man and a woman ought to have. They are not spiritually or biologically equipped to do so. This covers relationships within a gender as well; the centralization of sex to the person (and man is that not a whole other topic) has helped to make male friendship mean homosexuality, not friendship, a distinctly un-Biblical assertion (David&Jonathan__; Ex. Homosexuality__; afterownheart__).

We should note also that the ‘increase hot women quantity’ solution has another difficulty: the oversexualization of much modern media. While many mainstream works are sexually sanitized to the point of unnatural, intentional sterility (not the natural un-sexuality of, say, Winnie the Pooh), none of us can honestly claim that sexually charged material isn’t made in abundance. Novels nowadays, if they’re meant for adults, seem to expect at least one sex scene, graphic please, and cinema, particularly streaming television, is littered with the things (I hope I say enough; I do not desire to display this evil more). These works don’t fix the problem, because even where female beauty is acknowledged, the modern hatred of beauty persists. Remember also that female beauty acknowledged through lust is degraded, not appreciated, made into that which the Lord condemns in Isaiah 3:16-17.

True Beauty

Modernity despises Biblical beauty; even where it allows beauty, it pollutes it by mixing it with lust. Peter gives us the truth of a woman’s beauty in 1 Peter 3:3-4, saying, “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God’s sight is very precious.” This beauty is despised and destroyed by modernity. This is a beauty contrary to prurience, reproving and denying it, and it is the beauty which artists ought to seek: inner beauty expressed in their story as a whole, not merely the external sensuality of lust.

In this world, lust and human beauty are linked. Our bodies, as they are, and our souls, incarnate in this flesh, easily tangles beauty with lust. No depiction of human beauty is truly incapable of eliciting lust. This does not preclude us from writing about human beauty, else The Song of Solomon would not have been written (if you’re reading this article, go read The Song of Solomon; it’s a beautiful work of art). What is precludes us from is writing in a way which seeks to cause lust.⁶ It sets upon us a duty to be sure that we write towards beauty, not lewdness, so that of every part of our work we can say, ‘It is true and necessary to the beauty of itself and its context.’ A part of fiction is an unavoidable duty to truly depict a world filled with evil, evil often (especially initially) combined with physical beauty. Here we must be careful, but the path has not changed: tell the truth of His world in order to tell the truth of Him, always taking care that we do not write a single word which has a purpose of temptation. Our task as authors is to declare His beauty with our art, visual, auditory, textual; it is to incarnate beauty in flesh of art as He did in His creation, all in imitation of Him and of His surpassing beauty.

God bless.

Footnotes

1 – These are visual mediums, making the aesthetics front and center to the initial and actual experience. Further, they are at the center of culture in a way textual mediums are not. I could have mentioned still art, in its digital forms particularly, though ‘high art’ nowadays seems mostly to consistent of intentional nonsense and obfuscation. 

2 – It also represents a nostalgia for the times of about two decades back, before our cultural degradation became so apparent, when the remnants of Christianity still managed to reign the hedonism and nihilism of postmodernity into something coherent and deceptively stable. This pro-lust stance is not a Christian position but the objection of those who two or three decades ago were considered progressive, who have been passed by in society’s pell-mell to destruction.

3 – I believe that some of the recent mania for ‘subversion’ in modern cinema rises from this hatred of beauty, albeit much of it is merely incompetence or delusion. Subversion improperly used, after all, is the replacement of beauty with shock value.

4 – This will obviously be a limited, abbreviated look at the topic.

5 – Another topic which will receive a minimalist treatment! I’m not in this to write a book on gender relations.

6 – A sentence that didn’t fit anywhere in the article, but which was part of the thought process: ‘Modern art has degraded to the point of flaunting abnormal sexuality as standard, yes, but flaunting somewhat-less-abnormal sexuality (voyeurism is still perversion) is no answer.’