Michel Sauret – Award-Winning Army Journalist | Independent Author Award-Winning Army Journalist, Independent Author
I want to begin by saying that I’m not an expert, but an addict. Not a therapist, but a patient. I wouldn’t call myself a victim, but an accomplice.
I’ve been addicted to pornography ever since I was a teenager. I even remember having seductive dreams as a much younger boy, age five or six. I watched the first video at a friend’s house when I was eight. When pornography hit the internet, I was eleven years old. Now I had access to it for the first time without filters. I sensed the danger in the adult playground into which I was entering. I told myself I could stop. That I could handle this.
I thought pornography was like mid-afternoon hunger. A simple craving that could be fed by a snack. Except, it’s more like a pet creature that looks vulnerable and weak at first, but as it grows it becomes more demanding. More violent.
Like other addictions, pornography is selfish. There is no service to it. It’s about taking until your creature feels fed. Until the next time it’s hungry again.
Porn is bad enough as it is because of its self-indulgent nature and its destruction of God’s image of sex. But there is an added bonus to its wickedness. It corrupts the mind and makes the heart cold. I remember through high school and college, how easily pornography distorted my view of women. For a period of time, porn made it okay not to want them or need them. I had everything I could want with just fifteen minutes of computer time. Other times, it made me aggressive toward them. Even in my mind, I objectified them to my sexual desires. It made me disinterested in their identity, their personality, their womanhood. My corrupted mind saw women as something for the taking.
There have been research studies that have linked pornography to sexual assault.
I have never raped a woman.
Thank God.
But I can see how the minds of young men everywhere, sucking up the bright and forceful images of porn to feed their fix, can turn a society to a group of sexual assailants. This is no excuse. That’s why I refuse to call myself a victim in my lifelong obsession. I’m an accomplice to my own addiction. I’ve participated in it and allowed it to change me. Turned me against God, often.
My refusal of God was the most defiant not when faced with “scientific evidence against God” but when I wanted sex my own way.
Even men outside of the church community are beginning to see the dangers of pornography and its links to rape and sexual assault.
It’s rare to hear from a non-Christian who recognizes the lie and corruption of pornography. Most men I’ve met outside of the church accept it as an ordinary release of what manhood is about. As though it were silly to fight it.
The only problem with Dan’s article is that he makes false assumptions and wrong conclusions. He argues that there are forms of pornography that are totally acceptable. He names “Feminist Pornography” among one of them. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what that is, but to say that the solution to “Masculine” pornography is “Feminist” pornography is like saying that the cure to Homosexuality is Heterosexual encounters. Or worse, Homophobia.
No.
The cure to all sexual immorality is Christ. God is the creator of sex. He desires for us to enjoy it with our spouse for the rest of our married life. But marriage doesn’t itself fix pornography or cure you from its grips. A submission to God’s design of sex cures man. Nothing else.
One helpful passage that I discovered through the help of a Biblical counselor was from Psalm 135: 15-18
The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
made by human hands.
They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.
They have ears, but cannot hear,
nor is there breath in their mouths.
Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.
Pornography is nothing but an idol carved out by the lust and contrived heart of man. By taking part in porn, we enter the vicious cycle of self delusion and self gratification. We become the false image of sex that we created. Ultimately, we worship images of women that don’t actually exist. It all serves to satisfy and bring a filthy offering to ourselves. Pornography is like all other forms of idolatry.
It is self worship.
Who else does a man worship in masturbation but himself?
It was only once I admitted how selfish I had become as as a husband and as a man that I began to view pornography for what it really is.
And it’s not until society recognizes this that we will truly rid of sexual assault. But instead we look for other reasons. Other excuses. Sexual assault and rape in society are the outpouring and the degraded symptoms of a core problem: sexual perversion and immorality.
If we want to be honest with the problem, we need to look deeper than just the violent surface of rapists and sexual assailants. There is a whole layer underneath of men whose minds and views of sex have been distorted. We need to provide healing before violence surfaces. I’m not saying that every porn addict is a rapist waiting to happen. But no man, I believe, becomes a rapist overnight. There is a natural progression that occurs in his mind before his corrupt morality brings upon destruction in the life of a true victim.
Rape is real. Rape victims are real victims. But that doesn’t mean that those who are at risk for committing rape don’t need help, too.
