Have you smiled today? What if true sexuality wasnât porn but a unifying relationship which makes you happy?
Good question. What is Porn?Â
Pornography is âthe brutal representation of manifestations of a sexual nature, with the deliberate intention of provoking sexual excitement in a destined audienceâ. Sexual excitement is just a fragment of our sexuality.
Sexuality is a wonder and it opens up the relational dimension of our nature. We find fulfilment through having a relationship with the other. Sex is also a function of the human person; like breathing, eating, drinking, walking, thinking. Each of these functions share the same two characteristics: firstly, they have power and drive us, secondly, they put us in contact with the world and other beings.
In my point of view, sexuality is meant to give us happiness. Porn leaves us unsatisfied. This is why the market uses it; itâs an inexhaustible source! As Jesus says to the Samaritan, when talking about the water we drink: âEveryone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.â (Jn. 4:14)
Sexuality drives and animates us
Sexuality is a component of love. The urges we get from it, can be channelled, just as we can channel those from other bodily functions. Alas, porn makes us believe that we can satisfy impulses in a quick and easy way. But this is a deception.
It is possible to experience something truly amazing. All this depends on your desire of how you build your life. If we choose the beauty of a relationship, lived between two people, always discovering something new, giving of ourselves totally, weâll find heaven.
Two dangers of pornographyÂ
A danger of systematic porn use, is itâll push aside the beautiful life experience being offered to us. The other danger is universally recognised: the trivialisation and exposing of intimacy, which destroys it, but which also degrades the boundaries every person has a right to. It renders imaginable and visible what we want to keep intimate and invisible. Through fantasy, it renders acts which are forbidden in reality, possible. What do we do then, when the line between reality and illusion is erased, due to all sorts of reasons in todayâs life; drugs, the power of desire, or simply tiredness and frustration?
Inducing happiness hormones, without the happiness; stimulating desire, rather than experiencing a relationship in its fulness, what a tragedyâŠ
Even so, itâs everywhere! No, porn is not true sexuality, but it is difficult to resist the spirit of human pleasure, unless we have the help of the Holy Spirit. He is the Miracle of Love.
âApart from me you can do nothing!â John 15:5
Love is a true miracle. And pure hearts are happy (Mt. 5:8) because they will see God.
So, what do you think about it? Is porn true sexuality, for you? Weâre here to listen and help, please donât hesitate to talk to us via the chat (free and anonymous)
Watching porn, pornographic pictures or porn videos, distorts your vision and renders you incapable of having a normal relationship, with neither men nor women. It destroys love.
In relationships with our friends or in the professional sphere, the longer we continue watching porn, the more our attitude becomes focussed on sex, as our memory is âimbibedâ with erotic images. Interactions with others become ambiguous.
Within a couple, pornography destroys love. True love is the gift of yourself, is listening to the other, being delicate, tender, and attentive to the other. And our hearts can become blind, suffocated by the sadness and disgust invoked by eroticism.
Weâre conscious that, God, the Creator, has inscribed in the depths of our being a desire to be pure. An aspiration which remains in us, even when weâve done things to damage it. Itâs possible to reclaim this purity, whatever weâve got ourselves into. Firstly, through Godâs forgiveness. And then keeping it, through daily life, by guarding our hearts: this is an interior posture which consists of simply but firmly distancing ourselves from anything which could blemish our hearts (turning our eyes away, cutting a daydream short, not reading magazines, advertsâŠ). You can be certain that little by little our goodwill will win through and weâll find peace and joy of heart.
Etienneâs story
Claire and I lived the first two years of our marriage as a young âmodernâ couple: going out, seeing friends, films, the cinema⊠We wanted to see everything, know everything. Itâs like this we went to watch erotic films. We would laugh a lot going into the showing, trying to hide the fact we were a bit unsettled, disgusted. We didnât want to let ourselves feel guilty. In fact, when being intimate, it wasnât exactly Claire I was seeing anymore, and it was the same for her. The images weâd seen imposed themselves on us, subtly and slyly, and it was clear we were drifting apart.
Following a difficult and heavy family issue, we started asking ourselves questions about who we were and about the life we had. We realised these images, preserved in our memory, were suffocating our love. We decided not to go and watch these films anymore, and more generally, not to âbuy intoâ everything that was thrown at us just because it was fashionable! This enabled us to have a life that conformed more closely to what we really wanted.
What do you think? We are here for you, via the chat to listen and answer your questions:Go further:
Addiction to pornography or to masturbating regularly, even if your partner seems to ignore it, has an effect on the trust within a relationship. Shame, breaking the rules, or sinning, the subject is taboo. How can we address it differently? How do we talk about it, in all simplicity?
A man admits to his friend that heâs addicted to porn. His friend replies directly: âYour combat is essentially a question of control. You like the control that pornography gets for you. Youâd prefer to dive deep into this universe rather than run the risk of real intimacy.â Stupefied, the man recognised that it was true: âI wanted control over the way I experienced pleasure and I didnât want to face the perspective of not having my needs satisfied by a real person.â (1)
Exercising your sexuality in a solitary way is totally paradoxical. Contradictory even in the terms we use, if we accept that sexuality is made for relationship. Each one of us has a deep need for intimacy with another. To be intimate with someone, is to live in close physical and emotional proximity with this person. We have a first experience of this intimacy in the relationship with our parents. When a lack of intimacy, or a displaced intimacy with them, or with one of them, affects the child, a distrust is planted in them. The child hardens their heart, in an effort to survive it. Later, this can make them become a âdetachedâ adult, who finds it difficult to be intimate and incapable of talking about it, because it implies surrendering. An adult in this case can become narcissistic, not able of taking another person into account. The partner of someone like this is clearly bound to suffer.
Porn addiction, sign of psychological distress
Porn addiction, like sex addiction, is not in the first instance a moral problem, but a psychological problem, and sign of psychological stress. Moral convictions will not help a person in breaking out of it. Rather, they need to become aware of the reasons behind their addiction, by working on themselves, accompanied by someone who is competent.
And where is God in all this? More intimate than my own self. God can be a source of healing.
Therapy can also help you become aware of the causes behind these inappropriate sexual habits.
Sexual impulses and urges are the sign of a greater and deeper desire: that of being loved and of loving. In quenching this great and good thirst through solitary satisfaction we deprive ourselves of the inter-personal dimension of this desire, it deprives us of love. Break out of it! Get help!
So, how do we do it? Talk about it with your partner and/or talk to us using thechat’!
Porn doesnât completely block an encounter with someone else, but it does lower the chances of a having a sincere exchange. Here, weâll explain why.
Porn is time-consuming
Porn use is aimed at producing the pleasure to satisfy urges which are more often than not the result of being unhappy, stressed, feeling undermined in your masculinity or femininity, an excessive fatigue, or not looking after your body.
Consuming porn like this, firstly creates a habit or reliance, and secondly an increasingly stronger need for it, because it functions on the same principal as using drugs. The time spent consuming porn is detrimental to other activities, which get pushed aside, mathematically limiting occasions for meeting and making friends, or entertaining the possibility for something more, if things go well.
Risk of isolation and self-satisfaction
Addiction and individual pleasure, without the constraint of involving another person, can encourage us to be satisfied with the situation and not look to change. Taking the risk of meeting someone, then building a friendship or relationship with them, involves making certain adaptations to the other person. An attitude like this may be more difficult to adopt if we are used to a way of life where there is unrestrained pleasure, and as the consumer we select our merchandise, porn, in a unilateral way.
Basing the relationship principally on its sexual potential
The habit of using porn, with its âdrugâ effect, develops an increasingly greater need for it. This dependency will have an effect on the way you see the people you may meet, and what you expect from them. Theyâll end up being judged and compared to model or porn actors youâve seen and thereâs the risk of prematurely breaking up relationships, and missing out on finding your lifetime partner, when porn is not at all a reference point for real life.
What will your future partner think?
If you go on a date which launches into a relationship, whatâll your partner think? Will they be annoyed or disgusted with the comparison? And what if they accidently come across your porn consumption? If you donât manage to get out of porn before meeting someone, the best option would be to talk to them about it, so they can help you on your journey. Contrary to the image given to us by society, which insists on presenting an idealised projection of yourself, sharing your wounds often strengthens the bond between two people because itâs a sign of trust and honesty.
And this combat, that youâll face together, can give foundations to your couple, and bring something good out of something bad.
If you donât have a partner to help you face this combat, come and talk on the live chat’, weâll give you a shoulder to lean on in this fight:
Since it trains men to think of women as objects to be used instead of persons to be loved, guys speak of them as objects and treat them as objects. One longtime producer in the porn industry admitted âMy whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically donât care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldnât have when they were growing up. I strongly believe this, and the Industry hates me for saying it.â He added that the porn industry is simply âa playpen for the damned.â (1)
When men learn their concept of intimacy from videos and magazines, they may accept the idea that a womanâs no is actually a yes and that she enjoys being used. This can lead to a rapist mentality. Consider, for example, a study done in the Oklahoma City area. When 150 sexually oriented businesses were closed, the rate of rape decreased 27 percent in five years, while the rate in the rest of the country increased 19 percent. In Phoenix, Arizona, neighborhoods with porn outlets had 500 percent more sex offenses than neighborhoods without them. (2)
Ted Bundy raped and killed dozens of women. Sentenced to die in the electric chair, he requested that his last interview be with Dr. James Dobson (3), the founder of Focus on the Family. In that meeting Bundy talked openly about pornography and told Dr. Dobson that his struggles all began there. He explained that all his fellow inmates had an obsession with pornography before going to prison. Porn magazines and videos lay at the root of innumerable rapes and murders. Countless victims of child molestation also report that their abusers exposed them to pornography as an attempt to desensitize and seduce them. No one can tell the husbands, siblings, children, and parents of those violated and deceased women that pornography is harmless. Besides, wouldnât it infuriate you if a guy simply looked at a woman you loved in the same way he looked at pornography?
It should be noted that pornography addiction is not just a âguyâ problem. Many women struggle with it as well, and they experience the same consequences. They often feel an additional sense of isolation and shame because they assume that women shouldnât struggle with lust. Because of this myth, they often keep their habit secret instead of seeking help to overcome it.
While men often view pornography to see what they would like to receive, women sometimes view it wondering what they need to look like, how they need to act, and who they need to be. But such women need to realize that women were not created to be pornâthey were created to be loved. If youâre a woman who struggles in this area, youâre not alone. Many women have written blogs for us on their struggle with porn addiction, and what they did to break free.
What do you think? We are here for you, via the chat to listen and answer your questions:
(*) Source : A text by Jason Evert from his book If You Really Loved Me (Chastity Project, 2007), freely adapted for SOSporno.net/SOSporn.org. Author of many other books on male-female love, he and his wife Crystalina run the website chastityproject.com and live with their children in Colorado.
Notes
(1) Robert Stoller, Porn: Myths For The Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 33.
(2) Source : U.S. Department of Justice, Child Pornography, Obscenity, and Organized Crime (Washington, D.C., February 1988).
From a very young age I resorted to masturbation, my thoughts were orientated towards sex and it even stopped me from concentrating at school. It grew to take enormous proportions, the older I got. During adolescence, I read a book written by Billy Graham, addressing the problems encountered in youth, and it was in this book that I realised masturbation was a sin â in the sense it cuts us off from Godâs love.
Only, it was impossible for me to stop doing it. Much later, it opened the door to pornography. When I was 20yrs old, I was working nights and I stumbled across a private French channel airing an X-rated movie. It was my downfall. Little by little, I began watching X-rated movies whilst masturbatingâŠ
The arrival of the internet was a catastrophe. I wanted to go further and further and it never fully satisfied me: I even suggested that my wife join a sex club, thanks be to God she refused. I was involved in my parish, in charge of leading praise. I consulted a specialist, I also took part in a television program but it didnât change anything. I was experiencing a spiritual death and had no idea how to turn back from the dead end; this lasted 25 years.
“Jesus liberated me !”
During this time, I tried psychology and psychiatry, but to no avail (it doesnât always workâŠ). Whilst surfing the internet, I read a Christian article addressing pornography, and it orientated me towards the program âThe road to purityâ. I thought it was in English, but I found that it existed in French too. I started the program and from the very first day, I was filled with joy! Jesus had liberated me!
Today, I am free from any sexual slavery and any form of impurity. Itâs a process and the freedom is established uniquely with the grace of God, in daily communion with him.
Without this we can do nothing, only Jesus took our sin to the Cross. All we have to do is trust him because he has the power to set us free, which the world doesnât. I can finally say: the person the Son frees will truly be free. I thank Jesus, who delivered me. I thank my pastor who started this work with me. I thank my mentor and the whole team of âTo free captivesâ whom God put on my path!
So, what do you think about it? Do want to be delivered from porn? Come and talk to us via the live chatâ! (Free and anonymous listening service)On the same topic:
Why I stopped watching porn… and how, in doing so, I stopped contributing to the ugly sex industry.
Speech given at a TED event in Jaffa by Ran Gavrieli, a speaker specializing in “safe sex” topics. Viewed over 21 million times on Youtube!
Beware, he does not go into detail and some of his words that depict what is done to women in porn movies can be shocking!
* * *
I stopped watching porn for two reasons basically. The first one was that porn brought so much anger and violence into my private fantasies. And these were anger and violence that were not there originally to begin with. And I did not want it for me anymore. This was not me and, I decided to just put an end to it. Easier said than done â I got it later on.
Filmed prositution
The second reason was that I came to realize I think that only by watching porn I take part in creating a demand for filmed prostitution because thatâs what porn really is:filmed prostitution.
PornÄ stands for prostitute; graphia stands for documentation. And prostitution was nobodyâs childhood dream, it is always a result of trouble and distress.
Now, I became aware of that gradually, when I was volunteering with men and women in prostitution, some of them victims of human traffic, serving aid in brothels, under the bridge and street corners. But you donât really need to do all that in order to understand how this mechanism of porn and prostitution works.
Because porn is a genre â itâs not about erotica or healthy sexual communication. It is all about male domination of women, subordinance of women. Not only the sexual practice, but as a way of being, as a genderial hierarchy in this world.
If we would ask porn â if we were to ask porn, how does it define something as sexual? What qualifies, what defines something as sexual? Porn would laugh in our face. What defines sexual? Whatever men find arousing â men find it arousing to choke a woman â to have a brutal sex without one touch, hug, kiss, tender caress?
Well then it is sexual. It arouses men to see a woman or child cry? It is sexual. It arouses men to rape a woman; well, then it is sexual.
In every mainstream porn gallery on the web, we can find the rape category side by side with the humiliation category, abuse category, crime category and so on. And this is all as if this regular porn is not already filled with these motives. Even in its mildest version, the mildest version of porn, what porn is showing us like, I know, 80%, maybe 90% of the time is actually sex with no hands involved. This is not how we authentically desire.
Sorry, Iâll repeat that, I see your look. Sex with no hands involved. Okay.
If you and I are not going to give up watching porn, the next thing you do watch just you just notice that porn cameras have no interest in capturing any normal sensual activities such as petting, caressing, making out, touching, hugging, kissing. No.
What porn cameras are into is the penetration. So normally the composition will be a man and a woman, hopefully just one, okay. So, one man and one woman. His penis is inside her. Donât be picky. It doesnât matter where inside. Somewhere inside. His penis is somewhere inside her, okay? And in order not to block the camera for doing this extreme close up on the penetration, heâs standing with his hands behind his back most of the time.
And the woman is in this â uncomfortable position and she needs to handle the penis inside her without damaging the hair or make up or look down on her because thatâs money invested and time invested in her. Without disturbing his aggressive movement and mainly without blocking the cameras. So the result is that we got two people having sex different shapes and acrobatics or something. But theyâre having sex when the only body parts that actually touch each other are the penis and the part being penetrated. No hands involved.
Everything we look at invades us
Now I talked, I donât know, 250-300 times a year, soldiers, students, pupils. No one has ever come up to me and say, âRan, you know that part with sex with no hands thing that was my authentic desire, like when I was 11 or 12, I never wanted to kiss or touch anybody. I was not curious about that. It was all the penetration to begin with.â No one has ever said that â before porn. After porn…
In my private fantasies before watching porn, there was always a very strong narrative and the narrative was of sensuality and mutuality which means that I had always imagined what I would say to her? What would she possibly answer? What options do I have to respond?
In real life it never works like I planned, but it was super important in my mind in term of arousal, the build-up, the location, the setting, where will it be? What are the circumstances of me and her being all alone all of a sudden. How will this bodily inflaming between us will emerge step by step? It was super important. Before porn.
After making a habit out of porn, it conquers your mind and it invades your brain. And I lost my ability to imagine. Which means I found myself â and I wonât be too explicit, but trying to masturbate, just closing my eyes trying to fantasize desperately about something human and not making it because my head was bombarded with all of those images of women being violated and subordinated and forced into pretending they enjoyed diabolic sperm rituals.
So, this is pretty much the result. And we are all vulnerable to pornography. Itâs not just young people and we should be very careful, I think, with not only what we put into our bodies in terms of food and nutrition, but with the nutrition of our mind. Because everything we watch invades us.
Iâll give you a short example from non-sexual areas.
I came the other night, I came back home and my beloved one was watching some cultural junk. She was watching a karaoke show audition, the one with chairs spinning. We donât have a TV set back home, but only because it allows us to falsely present ourselves as deep and profound people. Iâve never heard of that.
Mastectomy who? Angelina? No, we donât have a TV. We watch every cultural junk possible, okay? Not me, not her, we donât contemplate about existence. We download stuff. And we download all cultural junk. So I am watching this 20 minutes karaoke show. And it was so boring and tedious. Two minutes talking, four minutes blabbering. I lost patience after 20 minutes and I went off to take a shower and the most interesting part was in the shower. Because what I found out there was myself in my most pathetic state ever. Iâm going to share it with you.
I want to feel that you accept and love me, so I have to share my most pathetic moment and you have to accept it now.
I donât know until I got over myself if it took me five, seven, ten minutes to realize that I am standing under the water in the shower pondering severely what wouldâve been my song for the auditions? Deep and profound, mind you. I wonât be doing this Rihanna or Lady Gagaâs. I will be doing Mercedes Sosaâs Como Un PĂĄjaro Libre. Iâll be doing a cover for Bob Dylanâs Blind Willie McTell. Ainât that deep and profound?
I had to realize that Iâm an idiot because I have no talent for music. More than that, I never wanted to be neither a musician nor a singer or songwriter. This was never a part of my inner world of wishes, okay? But Iâm a human being. What can I do? I was watching that for 20 minutes. It entered my brain for a while.
So if we take this example and we just try to measure or estimate the impact of 20 minutes of watching no matter what, how it invades our mind and conquers our wantings and desires.
Letâs just try to imagine or I can share it with you orally â what is the impact of 20 minutes of watching porn once or twice a week, nothing unmoderated? Itâs overtaking. And porn is in our household, whether we want it or not and I believe that it does not agree with our well-being. Because we have internet in the western world all over the place almost in every cellular phone now, weâve got 90% of 12 year-olds watching porn on a regular basis. And it has both an addictive effect and a paralyzing effect.
Itâs addictive, because it develops somewhat of a dependency on porn. And paralyzing part is because, mainly for young boys and men, porn is teaching us that as a man you are solely valued in sex by having a large penis and an eternal erection. According to porn, being a valuable sexual partner does not relate with being sensual, passionate, attentive, generous, well-coordinated. None of the above. It is all about large penis and eternal sunshine, which we donât possess.
So boys become paralyzed. And if they donât become paralyzed by watching porn, very often they turn into imitators of what they saw, which then means they become aggressors. Aggressors, even when emotion is involved. There is so much sexual abuse going on nowadays within the confines of what we perceive from the outside as beautiful teenage love stories, or healthy adult relationships. Because we donât really talk about sex, we just see it all over the place, we donât really talk about it.
So, what goes on in the confines of a certain room but these are all sexual mutations that happen.
If we talk about women, itâs not only that, but young girls and women get the message not only from hardcore porn but from a porn influenced main stream culture. Have you seen any Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga video clips or commercials? Thatâs porn with clothes on. So girls get this notion that if you want to be worthy of love, first and foremost you have to be worthy of sexual desire.
And now, the definition of sexual desire almost equals: be like a porn star. So I work in dozens and dozens of high schools and junior highs. In every single one of these schools I find girls that at a certain point agreed to be documented in an intimate situation because they wanted to please some guy that they had feelings for. And this guy misappropriated their trust. Always the same story. So he sells it on WhatsApp application or on the web, on the internet.
And normally nobody even addresses him in terms of moral. But it is always girls that suffer from shaming and mortification. They can change the school, they drop out normally. Change city, move to another city and still be haunted on social networks. They develop clinical depressions, severe eating disorders, as if we donât have enough reasons in our culture to develop eating disorders.
They become so isolated socially. So some of them â like Amanda Todd, rest in peace â some of them actually commit suicide. Because they find no more value in life or in themselves.
So, porn is not only in our house. It is a capital case. It is not a minor phenomenon in our society. It is a question of life and death sometimes. It is mainly a question of life and death for the people who participate in porn, because porn is not an embodiment of freedom of speech, freedom of occupation, blah-blah. No. Itâs an embodiment of sex-exploitation, working side-by-side with human traffic, raping, pimping, solicitation.
For every one porn star with a book contract or a production company, weâve got hundreds of thousands of women and girls who do not survive out there. Literally, they just donât make it. The sex industry just chews them up and spits them back into brothels, into hooking in the street, escorting, massage parlors with happy or unhappy ending depends who you ask. And I am not joking. This is the whole spectrum of prostitution.
So many of them do not even make it to the age of 50. I am talking about countries that the life expectancy is at 75, 76 years now. They donât make it to the age of 50. Four reasons mainly: Drugs, STD â Sexually Transmitted Diseases, being murdered by a john, a pimp, a boyfriend and the fourth reason is suicide once again.
Because if you are a prostitute, on camera or off camera, you are in the situation that we can refer to as social death. We have all sat on the dinner table with people who probably consumed prostitution that have been to a brothel once, twice at least. We never sit down to the table with a prostitute. Not with a declared one. So thatâs social death. It is not glamorous. Not at all.
And when I sit in the privacy of my room and watch porn, even without paying â No need to pay, itâs free. I hope you know that, if youâre still consuming. Whatever I am watching is creating a demand. And wherever there is a demand, there will be a supply. There is a correlation.
If I watch pornography of black, older women, somebody is going to go out and pimp black older women. Asian minors? Somebody is already trafficking Asian minors in order to film them. Israeli women, Palestinian women WASP, all American college girls. Itâs a strong in the last few years, itâs a very upcoming category.
The scum of the Earth are already out there trying to solicit and prostitute these women on camera.
So, I stopped watching porn for my personal well-being, my intimate communication, my private erotic life, reclaiming control and responsibility over my mind.
But by doing that, I actually stopped contributing to this horrible sex industry. Thatâs a good thing to do, I believe. And I would really like to propose that notion of physically and emotionally-safe sex, emotionally-safe sex. It does not mean going back to be conservative or unliberated sexually. I am all for sexual freedom. It just means that we need to put genderial hierarchy aside, subordinance aside. And bring back in, letâs just say, laughter as a critical method for intimacy.
Two souls, two humans, two souls alone in private, can they please have a laugh together? Whether they know each other for a decade or for an hour. If two souls alone in a room do not manage to have a laugh together, what good could possibly grow there? Sexual and non-sexual. Thatâs emotionally safe sex.
Iâve got so many things I want to share with you but I feel like my time is almost up.
So I just really want to ask for us to speak about these issues more because I strongly feel that our history of silence never did us any good, because silence only perpetuates more silence, when talking normally gives birth to more talking, more sharing, more identification, more awareness, more change. A small change, we have a small humble life. But a real change, a true one, emotionally safer.
Thank you for listening.
So, what do you think? Come and talk to us via the live chatâ! (Free and anonymous listening service)
Going further:
Since it trains men to think of women as objects to be used instead of persons to be loved, guys speak of them as objects and treat them as objects. One longtime producer in the porn industry admitted âMy whole reason for being in this industry is to satisfy the desire of the men in the world who basically donât care much for women and want to see the men in my industry getting even with the women they couldnât have when they were growing up. I strongly believe this, and the Industry hates me for saying it.â He added that the porn industry is simply âa playpen for the damned.â (1)
hild molestation also report that their abusers exposed them to pornography as an attempt to desensitize and seduce them. No one can tell the husbands, siblings, children, and parents of those violated and deceased women that pornography is harmless. Besides, wouldnât it infuriate you if a guy simply looked at a woman you loved in the same way he looked at pornography?
