At First Things, I take a crack at explaining why smutty art is bad in the way airbrushing and CGI Yoda are bad.
It’s the same reason we should object to airbrushed skin and photoshopped waists. It’s the same reason we should object to sending barely pubescent girls or anorexic teens down the catwalks to model clothes ostensibly being sold to adult women. False images distort our vision, and they feed misogyny. Fashion designers openly admit that their collections presume that “the ideal body shape [is] a female on the brink of hospitalization from starvation.” Why should we give them the benefit of the doubt that their destructive vision is merely thoughtlessness rather than an active war on women?
These works are marked by a sense of unreality—they take important things lightly. They treat human relationships and loves in an uncanny way.