Have you heard about this Duke University porn thing? Good, you shouldn’t. It’s totally unremarkable. Nothing you could stream for days on end from Netflix would be less edifying than following this story in the news. It’s nothing more than a real-life rehearsal of an ABC Family special: person makes bad decision, person is publicly understood to have made said decision, jerks use social media to harass person, person goes on campaign of self-vindication. In short — a Duke University freshman did porn, her jerk fratboy friend told everybody, malicious people used twitter, email, facebook and so forth to harass her, and now the web is replete with self-righteous defenses of porn.

It’s all so mundane it seems like it belongs on the facebook wall of somebody you vaguely knew in high school, but for some reason, it persists. Why?

Two reasons, I think: first, the media loves porn (obviously) and the next best thing to showing porn is talking about porn. (More on this shortly.) Second: this person has made a case not only for her privacy, which would be totally unremarkable, but also for her brand of sexual ethics. That’s where the really interesting stuff is, in my opinion.

Now, there is a certain brand of Christian for whom sexual behavior is the sole province of Christian ethics. You probably know the sort I mean — the type who say, more or less, that if you only have sex with your opposite-gender spouse and don’t kill anybody the rest is negotiable. I’m not a fan of that kind of Christian ethics, in part because it tends to behave as though people are characterized totally by their sin (e.g. dividing the world up into ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ people) and also because the unevenness of its focus seems to suggest a mere weaponization of Christianity to act on what is actually a visceral disgust. That being said, there are better cases to be made for Christian sexual ethics than are often advanced by, say, the folks of the Westboro Baptist Church.

So what are the claims on hand? Knox (Belle Knox is this individual’s porn stage name, but it’s what I have, so I’m going with it) makes two claims I find interesting, both of them in editorials she submitted to xoJane.com, which is more or less Jezebel off infinite scroll mode:

1.)It terrifies us to even fathom that a woman could take ownership of her body. We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy. A woman who transgresses the norm and takes ownership of her body — because that’s exactly what porn is, no matter how rough the sex is — ostensibly poses a threat to the deeply ingrained gender norms that polarize our society.

This is Knox on the political use of porn, which I totally disagree with. Put most gently, you are not bucking the patriarchy by participating in the commodification of women’s bodies. The patriarchy loves marketing and profiting from women’s bodies. Porn is one drop in the cultural tide, but you can see that current everywhere: billboards flashing boobs, commercials playing on female sexuality, pop-ups on the net, so on, so forth. Porn is a product, it’s a massive industry, and it’s extraordinarily profitable for the people at the top.

And women in porn are sold qua women. Though men and women in porn often have identical screentime and do comparable work, women performers earn more than their male co-stars. We can chit chat about why this is — greater risk for women, for instance — but it testifies to the fact that women aren’t sold as interchangeable performers here, but rather specifically as women. When this is done with accountants and retail workers, we rightly say it’s a sign of sexism. When it’s done with porn performers, it’s precisely the same sign: women’s very female-ness is part of what’s being bought and sold when it comes to porn.

In short, the patriarchy is perfectly happy to sell women’s bodies. It is totally amenable to the structure and mission of the patriarchy to confirm the idea that every woman has a price, and that female sexuality can be reduced to a dollar value. Moreover, porn is not usually profitable for the performers. It’s a high-dollar industry that pays off big time for the people at the top, and disadvantages the people at the bottom. (Being independent contractors, porn performers have serious difficulties getting any serious labor protections.) If it has any political value at all, it’s in favor of the commodification of women’s bodies, not against it, with little discernible improvement to the actual material station of women.

So selling women’s bodies is easy. On the other hand — look at how challenging it is to sell women’s minds. Not that the aspiration should be to be sold, per se, but when it comes to how the patriarchy operates in a capitalist frame, compare Knox’s two industries: she’s had little trouble getting into the porn industry, but her writing has only been published with women’s venues, and she’s been nothing but tabloid fodder for bigger media venues. This is because she’s only valuable to the patriarchy insofar as she’s willing to be marketed and sold as a porn star. If she weren’t doing porn, but were rather an essayist who took exception with patriarchal sexual norms, her writing would never see the light of day. She is valuable and interesting to the very system she detests only because she’s willing to approach it in the way it wants to be approached — by a highly sexualized woman with a body for sale.

2.) Because, for anyone who is telling me to “shut up,” please dissuade yourself right now of the delusion that you control or own me. It is not your right or your place to tell me to be silent. I am not your child or your property or your Madonna or your whore. I stand for every woman who has ever been tormented for being sexual — for every woman who has been harassed, ostracized and called a slut for exerting her sexual autonomy — and for every woman who has been the victim of The Double Standard.

One of the recurrent themes in Knox’s argument is that people who don’t like what she’s doing must perceive her as lacking agency. This might be the case for some people, but it’s certainly not the view of Christian ethics that error arises from a lack of individual agency. On the contrary, Bonhoeffer:

“The original community of love, as the repose of wills in mutual action, is destroyed when one will exchanges the movement of love for egocentric movement. And it is of the nature of the situation that the one who sees everyone around him abandoning the unbroken community and adopting an egocentric direction should himself take the same direction, for he sees that his own movement toward community is empty, and without response.”

Bonhoeffer quite rightly holds that sin is actually the most extraordinary expression of individuality, in that it breaks away from concerted will (that is, participation in the will of God with the whole contribution of the community of love, untainted humanity) and splinters off into self-centered and inward-directed action. This is why sin, when forgiven, is done so with a gesture to the return to union with a community: sin separates us.

So it’s not the case that people critical of the decision to engage in unethical sexual practices are necessarily diminishing their agency; on the contrary, we’re probably emphasizing their agency and individuality to a much greater degree than they even do. We just think there’s something fundamentally lesser about atomistic individualism and the turn away from community. Porn is a powerful example of this turn, because it takes what should be a community-oriented act — that is, an act that unites husband and wife in the truest sense and leaves open the way to children and thus family, those units that form the very fabric of society — and turns it into an impersonal and marketable product. It uproots sex, isolates it, perverts it from something unific and generative into something pre-packaged and consumable.

And this is the objection, in my mind, to what Knox is up to. Now: does that make it alright to harass her? Of course not. Never is our duty to mercy and compassion dispensed with, doesn’t matter what wrong somebody has done. The people who are giving her hell are doing so likely out of disgust, which is proud, and need to chill out and remember we all sin, if not similarly, then on the same order of magnitude. After all, we’re all responsible for the destruction of the community of love through sin, and it’s nonsense to heap the full blame for that onto people who just happen to be convenient scapegoats. It’s also the case that she makes some perfectly decent points about the abhorrent maltreatment of sex workers, and those points deserve to be acknowledged. Still, acknowledgement and debate don’t benefit from being uncritical, and I hope I’ve contributed something even-handed and compassionate here.