When I was formulating a worldview of sex and sexuality – thinking about women and how to relate to them – I had a lot of help from Playboy. Starting very young, I was exposed to the explicit images of pornography from friends of mine whose fathers dabbled in the dark side of sex. This is an odd thing to think, but you have to remember that this was before the advent of the internet when explicit images of women were sought and bought quite purposefully and intentionally. That is to say it shouldn’t have been that easy to come by. But it was.
I don’t remember a lot of images that have passed before my eyes. I will have trouble detailing the particulars of what my coworkers were wearing today. I can’t even recall what color the bridesmaids wore in the wedding I officiated this past Saturday. But I don’t think I will ever forget the image of my first centerfold. I know what color the woman’s hair was, the sheet, the pose, the whole thing. She was holding a book and if the book had had a title, I probably would have been able to tell you that too. And I wasn’t even in middle school. The power of the pornographic image is unmistakable.
In this age, it has become almost accepted that men (and women, too) will look at pornography. My job as a pastor is to tell you that looking at pornographic images is bad. But most people don’t feel bad when they look at pornography. Most people look at pornography because it feels good. It is an entirely solitary way to experience what God meant for us to experience together. Sex and sexuality, from a Christian perspective, is never something experienced alone. The loneliness of the man and the Lord declaring something “not good” tells us that he was lacking something to complete the experience of humanity. That he needed more than just a sexual partner is absolutely true. But it is also absolutely true that he needed a sexual partner. Sex, as it turns out, isn’t a solo flight.
Yet porn, in its alluring way, has offered us just this – solo sex. It comes in any flavor, with anybody, doing anything imaginable, and mostly for free and without the pesky involvement of something I like to call “other people”. The effect on sex and sexuality is devastating. Naomi Wolf, a feminist critic I’m told, makes this comment. “The onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women…. For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”
The disturbing reality is that pornography supplants that which God said was good. It is the lie of Satan in the place of the truth of God. Sex is meant to be shared with someone, yet in this hyper-sexualized society, we are trending away from sex with others to just sex with ourselves. Now, to be sure, there is still plenty of sex happening in the world both right and wrong, but I’ll bet the scales are tipping in regard to the ratio between real sex and the watered-down lie which we’ve accepted as normal.
The kicker is that pornography deadens the impact of reality. The need it is supposed to fulfill actually ends up getting the back seat (figuratively speaking). When porn is available, why go through the trouble of real people in the context of a real relationship. The irony is that something intensely sexual is killing sex. When you participate in pornography, you are supplanting the Lord and his will for your body. You are trading in the good for the rotten. The thing that God created for our intense enjoyment now becomes a little more like a children’s roller coaster. It looks like the real thing, but the drops aren’t as good – and there’s certainly no loopty-loop.
But therein lies the real power of Satan’s lie of pornography. Just like in every sin, we start to believe that the cheap knock-off is better than the real thing. The drive to achieve mind-blowing sex begins to look easier if sex isn’t even in the picture. It’s the classic mud-pie in lieu of the beach scenario. Pornography deadens the senses to such a degree that we begin to lose the ability to enjoy or even be tuned in to real sex. It would be like looking at images of the Grand Canyon so much that we don’t care anything about the real thing. But that illustration doesn’t work, does it?
The thing about going to the Grand Canyon that is so exciting is that ethereal experience that assaults every sense and is hard to capture in words. It’s the enormity of it. The eyes can’t fully take it in at once and the mind cannot easily grasp it because there is nothing that compares to it. An image of the thing does it no justice. Ah! But wait! Maybe our illustration does work after all. Pornography is a useless, distorted, depersonalized image of sex. The image can’t do justice to the real thing. Sadly, we love ourselves so much and have become so lazy that we have gladly traded the real thing, with all its mind-boggling beauty, for the empty image. Seemingly, all because we’d rather love ourselves than someone else. Sound familiar? We haven’t believed God for the promise of fulfilled and perfect sex.
Instead, we’re so caught up in the lie that real women just become bad porn.
This blog post brought to you by:
Real Sex: the naked truth about chastity by Lauren F. Winner
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