The past couple of decades have seen an unprecedented rise in the use of pornography and an associated decline in the social stigma that accompanies it. Pornography has been downgraded from scandalous to humorous, from aberrant to mundane. Rare today is the young man (or young woman) who has not at least dabbled in it. For an increasing number of people, it has become ubiquitous, habitual, often the first and primary means through which they explore and express their sexuality.
While there are many valid concerns when it comes to the rise of porn, Carl Trueman takes a unique tack in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. In a chapter committed to exploring the rise of the erotic in Western society, he shows that pornography involves detachment. Part of its deviancy is in the way it detaches sex from four different things.
Pornography detaches sex from a real physical encounter. Where God designed sex to involve the physical union of two bodies, pornography removes the physical aspect altogether. Where sex is a physical event to be participated in, pornography is a disembodied act to be spectated. In that way it makes sexual pleasure
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