A depersonalizing conception of the body inevitably
leads to a commercial exploitation of it.
Direct or indirect exploitation of individual sexual
pleasures has become a powerful stimulant for economic, scientific and technological
activity. This is evident for contraception and abortion over which specialized lobbies
and even the Mafia jealously stand guard. According to the United Nations Fund for
Population, perfecting of a new contraceptive product, before marketing, requires an
investment in the range of $200,000,000.00. That gives us an idea of the interests that
are in play.
That clarifies also the reasons why the maximum
extension of marketing for contraception is called
for: All the potential customers are far from having become effective consumers, and
passing from the first to the second category will be facilitated by the promotion of a
hedonist morality, permissiveness in morals, pornography, initiation in licentiousness
under the pretext of sex education. In turn, this promotion will contribute to the early
spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Now, if these produce a large and defenseless
clientele for pharmaceutical firms, they also create terrible dramas for individuals and
families, and they weigh very heavily on the budget of the whole of society. And so, youth
is doomed to depravity by companies with a cynicism bordering on madness, and scientific
research as well as Social Security are powerless before the scope of the problem.
This is, then, fundamentally the same logic which,
starting with a narrow concept of human freedom, ends by thinking that the human body can
be disposed of as one disposes of a thing. The body is an object of alienation. An
elementary truth is forgotten, namely, that is not enough to say that we have a
body, but one must say that we are a body. The whole of anthropology is certainly
not exhausted by this formula, but it does affirm something essential.
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