CATHOLIC NEWS

It hangs over us as a persistent dark cloud.

In 2008 we were crowned by Google as the country with the highest per capita porn searches, not in the Caribbean, not in the English-speaking world, but in the whole world. This unenviable title was repeated more than once. We are sick on sex and it comes hand in hand with human trafficking, especially of women and young girls. A subset of this sickness about sex and sexuality is the sorry state of the man/woman relationship in this country and the pervasive inability of men to deal with romantic breakdown and jilted experiences.

Proof of this is seen in that horrid expression that often punctuates the pages of the daily press - “in a shallow grave”. No matter how cruel, insensitive, unfaithful some women may have been, nothing justifies such a death. Woman’s rejection of man should never occasion such a deadly and macabre response.

Psychologists tell us how pornography incarcerates the mind and will, virtually becoming an addiction. Men addicted to pornography end up treating women as property, as things, as objects of personal aggrandisement.

When this aggrandisement is no longer controllable the result is violence. But there is something more here than power relations, and our own experts in the fields of sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy and religious studies need to discuss this more openly in a way the man in the street would understand. We think here particularly of the prodigious output of French literary critic Rene Girard on mimetic theory and his postulation that “violence is heart and secret soul of the sacred”.

This means that our religious texts - should be more critically and honestly read, and myths and passages that promote violence towards women, misogyny and inferiority must be uncompromisingly exposed.

The cleansing of religious cultural memory would be an important step in the theological- emotional restructuring of the man/woman relationship. To claim that our scriptures speak uniformly of treating women with respect and tenderness is sheer hypocrisy and nonsense. History refutes this.

Relevant state departments need to collaborate with CBOs, NGOs and religious organisations in offering workshops that reach every town and village with the objective of showing men and women how to negotiate healthy relationships, how to bring them to a peaceful end when they are no longer life-giving, and how to start over mindful of the mistakes of the past. We need to be free of this suffocating air. The liberation of Easter, to which Lent looks demands it.