Images Work A Powerful Effect On The Mind. If We Question In Our Hearts Who We Are, Our Minds Throw Up

Images work a powerful effect on the mind. If we question in our hearts who we are, our minds throw up to our vision an image of ourselves. We seek a picture, a word, a name. We feel we do not know our own feelings unless they are named. And we inherit through culture the very names we give to feelings.

This power of culture over our lives is a power we study and recognize. Kenneth Boulding, a philosopher in the sociology of knowledge, writes: "persons themselves are to a considerable extent what their images make them." And he follows this with another insight, which should be terrifying when we consider the images of men and women in pornography and in the pornographic sensibility. He writes: "people tend to remake themselves in the image which other people have of them."

The philosopher of language Wittgenstein gives us a similar insight. He writes: "The child learns to believe a host of things, i.e., it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around."

This relationship between culture and event has tragic consequences in our lives. In 1972, for example, the surgeon general's report on images of violence on television suggested that a causal relationship exists between an exposure to television violence and a child's participation in more aggressive behavior. For culture and event become one another. In the early twentieth century, a magazine publishes a photograph of a real event, a photograph of a woman political activist being tortured by the czarist police. Now this event, through its publication as a photograph, has become culture. And a young man buys this photograph. He stares at it. He becomes obsessed with it. Later he imagines that he is torturing a woman who has rejected him in the same fashion as this photograph depicts. Finally he actuates these fantasies in ritual tortures as a sadomasochist. (We read of his life after he becomes a patient of Wilhelm Stekel.) He makes culture actual.

By this transformation from image to act and act to image, we become imprisoned in a world of mirrors. For we cease to be able to tell illusion from actuality or to distinguish our own natures from the nature we are imagined to have. Thus if we are unhappy, we can find no way out of our dilemma, no door leading us into another world than this world of mirrors. In one mirror we see a photograph of a woman who is tortured. This may be a fictional pose. Or it may be a newspaper reporting an actual event. Or we may witness this event in our own lives. So, gradually, we cease to be able to imagine ourselves as otherwise. Every reflection we see tells us that only cruelty is possi-ble. That violence is inevitable. We are trapped by our own minds.

In this way culture becomes like a web that is invisible to our eyes, made up strand by strand of image and word, each strand becoming more powerful through the existence of the other strands. But we do not see any of the strands. We do not examine our assumptions, our choices, our decisions: Rather, they fade into the background for us. And we confuse them with ourselves and with nature.

So if an image turns into an act, we do not perceive this transformation as having taken place. Rather, we say to ourselves that the image has accurately predicted the future. And if a pornographic fantasy becomes an event, we say that pornography has truthfully portrayed sexuality. And finally, when we read that a man is convicted of kidnapping and "brutally" murdering an adolescent girl "to fulfill a bizarre sexual fantasy," we do not come to understand that the pornographic imagination can lead to actual murder. We do not suspect, as we ought to suspect, that pornography endangers our lives.

-Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature