This first installment will be very painful for some to read and for that, I’m sorry. It’s hard to say these things, harder still, I’m sure, to read them. But this has to be said before we get into helping those caught in the black widow’s web of porn.
Porn is harmful. It takes something natural and beautiful, bending its purpose into shapes and variations foreign to the intended design. Sexual pleasure is intended for the intimacies of the marital bond. It is deeply personal or was intended to be. It was designed as a private affair. Porn violates all these foundational aspects of sexual intimacy. Sexual contact is to be voluntary between consenting adults—in a marriage. Characteristically, there is some attraction. Sex is also intended for procreation, the birth of children. This is not the case with porn. Porn violates all this.
Porn is voyeurism. Typically, porn involves a spectator who, rather than peering through a window like a yesteryear’s “Peeping Tom,” is peeping in through a camera lens or a screen of some sort. The actual participants may not know one another, may have different (opposite) sexual orientations, and are prostituting themselves for money. They may never have met before; likely, their names are aliases or “stage names.”
Let us not forget human trafficking. Many of the participants in porn videos are women, little girls, and little boys who have been kidnapped and exploited in unspeakable ways. They are performing sexual acts with others against their will (and well-being).
Today, our society has primarily legalized porn. In Hollywood, we have “the adult film industry.” Where prostitutes are having sex on camera for money. None of which is natural. None of this is normal. Don’t kid yourself.
Above all, understand that there are “Designer Specifications” for sexual intimacy, and virtually every aspect of the porn industry violates these “specs.” At every level, porn is involved in some criminal activity—morally, if not legally. But porn isn’t about morals. It’s about death. Porn is slow motion suicide and murder.
Porn stimulates something in us that is progressively unhealthy. It’s like a cancer eating away at us from the inside. Porn creates a world, for one, that does not exist and cannot be had. Porn stimulates a part of the brain that creates a hormonal response that becomes progressively stronger and insatiable over time. It’s the same response that gambling addicts (whatever an addict is) have. It’s not unlike a runner’s high. Those who abuse drugs know about this. We could spend time on the science, but the science isn’t the issue.
The porn fantasy world brings death to normal, healthy relationships between men and women, husbands and wives. When a man makes a choice to use porn, they are one step closer to adultery. They may ask, wish, or fantasize that their spouse engages in practices they see on screen that their spouse won’t do. They want them to replicate some action or activity they saw as they peeped in on the people prostituting themselves on camera. Bizarre and unfair comparisons often occur. Resentments are born and hatched. Intimacy at all levels does not go unaffected. The Peeping Tom develops a double life.
Going back to the hormonal or endocrine response, porn triggers something physiological in the body. This is where the addiction terminology comes in. And this is where there is the temptation to treat porn as a disease—something beyond our control.
Choices have consequences. Buy crack, heroin, meth, or even marijuana, and you have stepped through a door that leads to harm. You are willingly doing something with and to your brain and body that will lead to a physical dependence on this drug. You made a moral choice that will have consequences. The fault is yours. The responsibility is yours. As children, we learn that hot stoves burn. As thinking adults, we know that meth, crack, etc. (anything that affects our faculties and decision-making) has (at the very least) the potential for great harm. Eighty-five (85%) percent of the homeless people account for such moral, self-inflicted decisions. The same is true with porn.
Like drugs, porn, with its peculiar sexual urges, is progressive. It tends to leave its perpetrators unsatisfied and craving more. It creates an itch that can never be scratched enough. The more porn you “do” to more porn you want. Your sex drive, married or single, becomes about gratifying you, often to the harm of others. We’ll develop this more later.
Talk to anyone who’s experienced porn for any length of time. They graduate to other levels of porn. Someone once winced and called this a progression to “abnormal porn.” “Abnormal porn...” let that sink in. Is there such a thing as normal porn? What does this look like?
Perhaps they start with heterosexual porn between two adults. Maybe they go beyond this to orgiastic porn with multiple partners and same-sex participants. At first, they feel shocked, maybe a tinge of shame and self-loathing—but there’s always a thrill at some level. The abnormal becomes normal as their conscience dies, their soul becomes seared, and they need, they want, more. Many, if not most, will eventually plumb the depths of other forms of porn. They may gratify their desires vis-à-vis their own promiscuity, which is not without its consequences (STD’s, including AIDS). They, in turn, infect others. There’s always harm. There’s always... always... collateral damage.
Many perpetrators or peepers take their voyeurism to the next level. Some become peeping Tom types in a more literal and risky sense. Others graduate to child porn, bestiality, violent porn (people do violence to one another or a victim who may be sex trafficked), or some other extreme. There are worse forms, but we will stop here.
Some become pedophiles, which society and the media now try to reclassify as Minor Attracted Adults (i.e., would-be child molesters). Porn is to the body and soul like the poison arsenic, which in small amounts is seemingly not lethal, except that it can build up in the body over time to become lethal. So it is with porn.
Porn builds up in the body and soul over time. It kills the conscience, numbing it to the point it has little normal sensation or feelings. It disables the moral compass, affecting choices and decisions. One becomes morally lost. It destroys reason. It destroys relationships. Careers. Children.
In my counseling ministry, I’ve met individuals who were exposed to porn as young as 8 or 10. Because porn is so readily available on the internet and nowadays, at least in California, in more than a few public school curricula, children are scarred for life from an early age, apart from divine intervention.
One’s participation in porn, in one way or another, contributes to a variety of moral crimes. They create a market for the exploitation of victims of sex traffickers. Participation in porn funds all kinds of evil. There are extreme cases where the proclivity for porn leads the perpetrator to commit sex crimes, from peeping in windows to inappropriate contact with unwilling victims, whether little children, strangers in a crowd, or crimes of sexual violence (like rape and incest).
Porn involves death by inches, death by a thousand cuts. You are killing yourself and others through collateral damage. That’s why porn is slow-motion suicide. Is there hope? There is! Is the road easy? It’s not. It’s difficult, but difficult does not mean impossible. True enough, the wages of sin is death... but the free gift of God is eternal life (Romans 6:23). There is help. There is hope. There is Divine Intervention.
Are there Christians struggling with porn? Contrary to popular mythology and urban legend, porn is not “every man’s battle.” However, there are more involved in porn than one might imagine but fewer than we are led to believe. We must be wary of popular Christian literature inadvertently “normalizing” porn. That’s a suicidal tendency, too—a new normal. Like homosexuality or transgenderism or “Minor Attracted Adults” gaining currency as normal in our culture.
Are you struggling with porn? What can you do now? Number 1: don’t see yourself as a victim. Don’t see yourself as “sick.” You haven’t caught a cold or COVID; like a crack addict, you’ve made decisions that come back to haunt and harm. BUT... you can also make new decisions and chart a new course. But make no mistake, you are a perpetrator. All sinners are, and pornography is a sin. It is a sin against God, humanity, and “nature.” Also, know that your situation is serious but not hopeless. As the LORD asked Abraham and Sarah when He told them they were going to have a son in their old age, “Is there anything impossible for the LORD.” Similarly, Jesus remarked that with God, nothing is impossible, even if you have faith the size of a mustard seed.
The question is, do you want change? Do you really want it? In the end, it is up to you. There is help available, real help. We’ll get into this next time.