Here’s a great article on the soft near-porn of magazines like Maxim, which convince men that they’re only admiring the aesthetic of the feminine form, rather than stewing in their lust.

[These magazines] exist to allow men to look at women’s bodies sexually but not pornographically. With the emphasis on suggestion rather than revelation, the women in their pages are slick materialistic ideals, as current in their smooth plastic forms as the Prius or iPhone.

The downside to such manufactured people is that they’re all the same. If you were mugged by any one of the women in the top 10, you couldn’t pick the perpetrator out of a lineup. They’re all white. They all have long hair and they’re almost all blonde. They all have the same high cheekbones. They all have the same nose. Each woman is allowed exactly one deviation from the norm, and the deviation is immediately remarked on – her tattoos or her extra-dark eye makeup or her curves. The girls of FHM are obviously products of a fundamentally icky consumerist objectification, but their engineered homogeneity also reveals an incredibly limited imagination.

Ah, and there it is.  Sin is almost always the result of a weak imagination.  Unable to imagine a better way of doing something, unable to imagine a God who’d care, unable to imagine a richer experience, human beings follow the path of least resistance.  A good article.