Avoid Porn, Develop Aesthetics

Jennifer Fitz of Riparians at the Gate asks in her 3.5 Time Outs this week:

Bleg: Boys, Porn, and Chastity. Had a friend in for tea Sunday afternoon, and she gave me a timely head’s up on the reality of tweenage boys and the very rapid transition into Exceedingly Immature Manhood that is somewhere on the horizon for our boy. (Right now, the only girl he likes is the dog.) Since I know that at least a few of my readers are:

1. Men.
2. Fathers of teens boys and former teen boys.
3. Catholic of the Chastity is Good, Sin is Bad type.
4. Remember what it was like to live inside the body of a teenage boy.

or:

1. Are married to such a person.

or:

1. Are the grown son of such a person.

Want to offer any advice? Practical. Links, comments, a post of your own and link it back here. I’m all ears. Anything helpful. Thanks!

Young Man is currently not-quite-four, so I'm speaking here as a "Remember what it was like to live inside the body of a teenage boy" and also a "terrified on behalf of my daughters" father, since with out oldest two girls at 10 and 8, it's not so many years until I have to start wondering if the boys they play with are learning about women via the nastier portions of the internet. I'm also not entirely sure how this will go over, so I'll give it a shot and see what the reaction is.

Thinking back to my tweens and early teens, two things that formed me in ways that I am deeply grateful for stand out.

First of all, my father was a truly sterling example of a strong and upstanding man who never treated women (in person or in image) in a degrading way. The dads of many other boys I knew kept swimsuit calendars out in their workshops or showed by their actions that it was an okay and manly thing to flip open a playboy every so often. Dad was never like that.

Secondly, however, Dad was not at all a prude. It was made clear to me that there were certain books I was not yet allowed to read and movies I was not yet allowed to see because I was not yet mature enough to deal with the sexuality or nudity in them, but that when I was old enough to have solidified my moral compass it would be alright for me to encounter them. While the parents of some other strictly brought up Catholic kids I knew would fast forward through certain scenes in movies or black out sections of books, I was kept away from such things entirely until it was judged I was old enough to handle them, and then I'd be allowed to watch (usually with my Dad) or read all the way through.

And while there was certainly not anything sleazy around the house, there was a lot of classical and renaissance art to be found in the big art books in our family library. These weren't hidden from me, and indeed we looked and and discussed a number of such paintings and sculptures when covering art history in homeschool. This also was different from many of the other strict families that we knew where anything from National Geographic to the Sistine Chapel which showed the unclothed human body was strictly censored.

Like a lot of boys that age, I was intensely curious about what women's bodies looked like. Since what I had available to me most conveniently (and without much sense of guilt) to satisfy this curiosity was our collection of art books. This meant that I developed and aesthetic of female beauty based on art rather than based on Sports Illustrated or Playboy.

Now, I think some conservative Catholic parents would suggest that they'd rather their tween or teen sons not be looking at art depicting nudity any more than poring over Playboy. Obviously, it has to be clear that using any image (or writing) simply to stimulate yourself is always and everywhere wrong. But a boy in his early teens is also developing his ideas of beauty, and those ideas are going to stick with him for a long time. At the risk of sounding permissive: He is going to get his ideas of beauty in relation to the naked female body somewhere. The key, it seems to me, is for that idea of beauty to be formed by images that really are beautiful and which are designed to convey a beauty of form rather than simply to provoke lust. If he's not not helped into forming that idea of beauty in a positive aesthetic way, chances are strong he's going to be formed by the kind of images that pop culture puts out instead.