Starving on Illusions

by Sarah Jane Souther

It’s Valentine's Day and I sit here at the window of a coffee shop, watching the husbands and the boyfriends and the men walk by with flowers and cookies and chocolates and things. I question their intent and feel like a cynic. My lens, skewed for the moment by the “love” I’m bombarded with in advertisements and on the screens. “Love” exhibited by men and women. The kind that’s detached from commitment and obsessed with pleasure and reaches its climax on this shallow holiday originally named for a martyred saint. The love I see outside the window doesn’t seem like the kind one would be willing to die for. 

Weeks go by. I sit at the window again. I read a chapter in a book¹ that’s essentially an exposé on pornography. How it’s made and sold and the creeping influence it has gained, spreading out into fashion and film and music and lacquered pop culture spreads. What is vile, now acceptable. Chic. 

I close the book. I feel sick. A billion dollar industry built on violence towards women and rife with abuse amongst its female performers. All the lip fillers and the fake breasts and the lingerie photoshoots glaring back from every magazine cover and Instagram feed, unconsciously (or consciously) taking their cues from the plastic porn stars men have created for themselves in order to torment and dominate and sell it all on the internet, packaged as entertainment for $24.99 a month. 

I watch men walk by on the street carrying their briefcases and their newspapers and their gym bags and I wonder how many of them² corrupt their minds and bodies with illusions of intimacy. There must be some force of deep loneliness and dissatisfaction driving those actions. But I find my anger rising all the same—for all the women desecrated at the altar of warped desire and towards all the men who want a flawless object and not a real woman. Does anyone want a real woman anymore? 

But haven’t I been consuming and consulting the same culture that says if I conform my body to the mirage it sells, I’ll be more desirable.  And being desirable is everything. And if I’m more desirable, maybe I’ll be enough. I wish these wishes were familiar to only me, but I hear the same whispers from the lips of women everywhere. 

And isn’t this as old as Genesis?

Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.³ 

At the deepest and darkest places, the cycle of a curse continues. Women will contort themselves just to feel desired by hollow men who stop short at illusion.

We feel this uncomfortable truth before we see it sometimes—like biting down on a cherry pit, rock hard with traces of cyanide. There’s no getting around it and we would do well to remember it’s there.  

But cynicism is insufficient. I see too much evidence against it. Not all men are hollow and strive to dominate. Not all women contort themselves to fit men’s desires. I know men who have honored and loved me and every woman they encounter. I know women who live whole-heartedly, celebrating their bodies and their minds. These are people who have spent their lives cultivating virtue, confronting difficult truths and fighting to live a different way. They break my cynicism in a moment. People are not statistics and they are not curses.

Days later, I sit at the table adjacent to the windows and think of The Velveteen Rabbit. The story about the stuffed bunny who wants to be real and at the very end, is transformed by a good fairy and the love of a child. He loses his plastic fur and glass eyes and enters the terrifying beauty of reality.  

And isn’t this the ache at the center of everything? The yawning hunger for something that lasts? To be the thing that lasts?  

He has also set eternity in their heart.⁴

Is this the worst unrequited love of all—the love we have for our illusions?  The attention we give to what will eventually hollow us out and destroy us? Illusions are everywhere, a corrosive force. We live in a culture where personality is valued over character. Entertainment over truth. Politics has become theater. We can create separate online lives. We’ve become experts at creating illusions that we project to others and to ourselves, and we’re more concerned with how we’re perceived than who we actually are. Everything is about image and the way you tell (and sell)  your story matters more than the story itself. 

Reality is complicated, messy, uncomfortable. It doesn’t look good online. It tastes bitter almost as often as it tastes sweet. Reality contains cellulite, aging, illness, tragedy, atrocity, and the inevitability of death. Illusion is flawless, untouchable, perfectly safe, always comfortable, and utterly without substance.

 Illusion cannot be redeemed, but reality can be. 

It’s Good Friday and I sit here at the window of the coffee shop finishing this essay. I’m thinking of the most compelling story of love ever told. A love that shatters illusions and breaks curses. A love that confronts reality to the point of nails piercing flesh. 

And isn’t this what we’ve been starving for all along? 

1. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, Charles Hedges

2. Statistics would say about 57% of men ages 30-49. https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-prevalent-is-pornography

3. Genesis 3:16

4.  Ecclesiastes 3:11