"The quintessential deathwork of our time . . . is pornography."

      Carl R. Trueman, The rise and triumph of the modern self:  cultural amnesia, expressive individualism, and the road to sexual revolution (Wheaton, IL:  Crossway, 2020), 98.  "A [Rieffian] deathwork . . . represents an attack on established cultural art forms in a manner designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society. . . .  Deathworks make the old values look ridiculous.  They represent not so much arguments against the old order as subversions of it.  They aim at changing the aesthetic tastes and sympathies of society so as to undermine the commands on which that society was based. . . .  [A deathwork is] a symbol of something deeply sacred to the second world being presented in a form that degrades it and makes it utterly repulsive. . . . [It turns] it into something dirty, disgusting, and vile. . . .  The major problem with pornography is not what many religious conservatives might understand it to be—its promotion of lust and its objectifying of the participants.  It is certainly both of those things, but the problem is also much deeper:  it repudiates any notion that sex has significance beyond the act itself, and therefore it rejects any notion that it is emblematic of a sacred order" (96-99, paragraph breaks ignored).
     The reference is to the first book in the trilogy by Philip Rieff entitled Sacred order/social order:  My life among the deathworks: illustrations of the aesthetics of authority (Charlottesville, VA:  University of Virginia Press, 2006).