Pride and Prejudice and Porn

Mark T. Mitchell considers Jane Austen in light of our porn culture :

That porn culture changes the way men think is obvious, but it also affects the way women think of themselves. In a hyper-sexualized society, women will naturally tend to think of themselves primarily as sexual creatures. Women too often come to act, talk, and dress as if sex is completely separate from love, as if the biological mechanics of sex have nothing to do with reproduction, and as if a different partner every night leads to a satisfying life. The lies compound, deceive, and deaden.

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Which leads me to Jane Austen. I recently read Pride and Prejudice with a group of bright and engaged students. The experience was, in some ways, rather jarring, and in no way are the differences between Austen’s world and ours more manifest than in the area of sex. Pride and Prejudice is in many ways a comedy of manners, especially manners governing the relationships between men and women. And the cultural whiplash one feels when moving from the world of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy to our world of hook-ups and porn is disconcerting. Try, for instance, to imagine Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (Lizzy and Fitz no doubt) hooking up. It is impossible. Given who they are and the value they place on propriety, constancy, amiability, and marriage, to imagine them participating in the hook-up culture is to debase them. It is to seriously damage their integrity as persons. How could it do anything less?

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