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the thing about porn

July 26, 2011 in sex, relationships, and women with 21 Comments

My life is in upheaval, in a good way. Tomorrow I head up to Granbury to help my grandmother move and will return to Conroe on the same day. Thursday I’m off to Austin to see Andie Redwine and catch my second screening of the sensational Paradise Recovered. Friday, I’ll be in Waco catching up with some amazing people and staying overnight until Saturday morning, when I will return home and pack my entire room for Baylor, because on Sunday I leave for the UK and don’t return until 18 August, the day after which I will drive to Baylor before classes start the following Monday. I have yet to pack, I’ve spent too much money on clothes, I don’t know where anything is, and the prospect of trying to situate wonderful guests post in a timely order for while I’m gone is about as daunting as writing something myself at this point. So I promised fiction today. It’s not happening. I intended to treat this week as normal. It’s not happening. So here’s the week: today’s post, Wednesday will not happen, Thursday may or may not happen, Friday will be the week in review and my farewell for now. All good? Right, then let’s talk about porn for a second …

I sent Lauren Lankford, editor of the sensational Good Women Project, my first of two planned guest posts yesterday. I won’t throw out too many of the details, but I will tell you that part of what it has to deal with is pornography and I want to tease out some of it here.

In planning that post for the past week and a half and scraping at the bottom of my soul to figure out what I wanted to say, I spent some time talking to a handful of women pretty frankly about pornography. I wanted to hear from them firsthand  what they understood porn to be, what they thought of when it came to men who viewed it, and what their reactions were  to the idea of it.

And I realized something I hadn’t quite understood before. Women don’t understand porn any more than the average guy does.

Why?

Because pornography isn’t about lust.

If it were mere lust, than it would fade like all other sins that manifest for a season and then give way to something else. Porn sticks with a guy, gets under his skin, roots in his heart. And the reason isn’t because it’s about gratifying his flesh. The reason is that pornography is ultimate affirmation without any responsibility.

An image can’t deny you, an image can’t make you support it. She’s always there, always available, always willing, and never says no. And she can be one or a thousand girls. All of them are, in turn, affirming you, making you feel powerful, making you believe that there’s not one bad thing about you. That’s the intoxication of pornography.

Porn’s power is in its ability to play as a trickster savior, to stand in the place of Christ as being the validator of a man’s soul.

So no woman can save a man from porn. She will never be pretty enough, she will never be sexy enough. It’s not about that. Porn is about dissatisfaction in a man’s heart and his desire to feel affirmed without the responsibility of being a man worth affirming.

Women, do the sisters a favor and stop betraying the sisterhood. When you willing compromise yourself in a relationship to try to hold onto a man who is more in love with his hand and a computer screen than you, you’re winning no battles and you’re not the only casualty in the crossfire. You deserve better. Don’t presume you can be something more and that will bring his interest back.

It won’t.

Porn has a power like few other sins do. It plants deep in a man’s heart and festers and rots until it hardens the very flesh of his soul. It takes Christ in full force and power to break a man from that evil. And don’t be fooled: it’s evil.

Evil is going on. And that’s the thing about porn.

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Update: You can check out more of what I have to say on this post on August 9th over at the GWP.

 

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.

  • http://twitter.com/joshstephens Joshua Stephens

    Great stuff, Preston! I’ve been reading for a while and always appreciate your insight and the Light you shed on issues that few ever care to address.
    Don’t stop writing, God’s got big plans for you!

    Have the best of days,
    Josh

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      Thanks, Josh!

  • http://www.stephindialogue.com Stephanie S. Smith

    This is such a sensitive, secret but dominant issue. Annie Dillard writes of a certain kind of butterfly in “The Writing Life” saying that the male butterfly will mate a painted cardboard “butterfly” because it’s colors are brighter than the real, living female butterfly right next to him. 

    Our human addiction to porn makes about just as much sense as being intimate with recycled fiber. It’s absurd to prefer the synthetic to the genuine. 

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      Brilliant, painful, and true.

  • http://www.prudychick.com Prudence

    Thank you for sharing this.  I admit I don’t understand it.  Well, no, in some ways I do.  But that’s for another time.

    I once heard someone say that, anything you put before God is a functional savior.  I was reminded of that reading your words here.  We take things like porn or food or even other people and make them our saviors.  What poor worthless idols they are.  They don’t fix anything and drive us further from God.

    Thanks again Preston.

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      Thank you, Prudence. As always, your words edify so easily.

  • http://www.joyinthisjourney.com Joy in this Journey

    I don’t understand it either, but this helps.

    We’re trying to figure out how and when to tell our son about it — a neighbor friend has an older brother who keeps magazines in the house. We wont’ let our son in their house, but he doesn’t understand why. Reading this may help me a little with how to talk about it with him, when the time comes.

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      Oh Joy, I do not envy you that position at all. I can’t even begin to imagine how you handle that well. But I am grateful that you protect your son. That’s not so common anymore. You know me, I’m not big on sheltered, but this isn’t anything other than preserving from harm. Let me know what ends up happening, some advice to a someday parent is always appreciated.

    • Clay

      Joy, There is an awesome book called preparing your son for every mans battle that helps you as a parent walk through this with your son. I have taken my boys through it (age 13 and 16) and its been a huge help in them understanding this topic and the right way to look at and treat women.

  • http://theoutdoorwife.com Nish Weiseth

    This is legit. A well-written, thoughtful, insightful, and powerful post. It’s like you took a scalpel and sliced open the issue and displayed it for what it really is. 

    A good word. 

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      As someone who has been reading Deeper Story for a long time, that means quite a lot Nish. Thank you.

  • Kelsey

    This is a very thoughtful piece Preston, and it clarifies a lot of confusing topics about men and porn. But, I wonder, with everyone discussing how porn tears at the man’s heart, how does it affect a woman? My theory is that not only does porn teach  women to be treated as a means to an end and how to obsess over their image, but also to trivialize sex and use it for different things, like to solve problems, revenge, just for fun, boredom, to get him to stick around etc (It’s plan b, no pun intended) . So instead of taking time to search for someone who will love her unconditionally (which is what she really needs), she learns to fill that emptiness with temporary pleasure that leaves her feeling even more empty. And that’s why we have so many messed up women today I guess…

  • http://www.thechurchofnopeople.com Matt @ The Church of No People

    Great job, Preston.  For something that no one really understands, I’d say you hit it on the head!

  • Bill

    This is good Preston.  You seem to be on to something for sure.  At the same time, I think the statement “pornography is not about lust” is misleading.  It is definitely about lust as well, even if lust is not the deepest issue going on.  In fact, I suspect lust is the most common initiator for “casual” abusers.  

    You do hint at this though when you say “if it were mere lust”, so that might be exactly what you meant.  But you contrast porn with other “lust” sins that eventually “fade away.”  We just have to remember that there are many “lust” sins that don’t fade away – sins of addiction in general.  So while porn is very serious, other vanities in the realm of consumerism (of which porn would be one), insofar as they are social sins that rob the marginalized of life, in my mind are equally if not more powerful and devastating on every front.  

    This is also one reason why it’s important not to absolutize gender difference when talking about lust and porn – not that you have necessarily.

    Something else that’s interesting to me, however obvious, is that many guys don’t need porn to be “porn” addicts.  Images from life in our culture provide more than enough material for the same kind of sin – non-pornographic movies, music videos, and the like are on the same spectrum, just not quite as far down the scale.  Yet we don’t talk about this as much, so guys sometimes get an empty sense of security because “at least they’re not looking at porn.”  And I would put the more common struggle of women with body image and hunger for romance/feeling special, etc. on a similar plane (though of course women struggle with porn and lust too, and visa versa).

    Lastly – and this is related to the previous point – there’s just a big middle ground that needs to be recognized.  It’s not ok to “flirt” with this issue, but it’s far from black and white – namely, it’s not porn vs. “not” porn.  Most guys (and girls!) are faced with the temptation of “pornography” every day.  It’s just packaged in concealed ways.  To what extent are we doing guys a favor who are lust-addicts but not porn addicts but isolating this issue so much around porn as such?  To me the degree to which we are honest about it and deal with it in community, rather than in “private” (which is an arena that arguably from a biblical standpoint doesn’t exist) is the most important thing.

    The same could be asked about the contemporary church’s message regarding abstaining from sex, which tends to lift up waiting until marriage, but completely drop the ball when it comes to working on healing the heart of the issue, being transparent about other “slipper slope” sins, and most urgently, contextualizing this command for the 21st century.  My contention is that we need a new approach to framing this subject if we want to be heard in a different way by anyone not already familiar with the language of evangelical subculture.  You might have already read it, but I thought Lauren Winner’s book “Real Sex” did a good job of this.

    To clarify, I’m really not criticizing anything you’re saying, as I suspect we would agree on most of this.  I’m simply wondering how to take the conversation is a slightly different direction, but in the same spirit that you’ve demonstrated here.      

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      I think you make a lot of good points, some of which I touch on in my upcoming post where I had a lot more room to dialogue this out.

  • http://lesykes.wordpress.com/ LS

    i wish i could say {even after what i have lived through} that i completely understood porn, but i don’t.  and the power that porn holds for destruction is unbelievable.  something that seems so ‘innocent’ snowballs into unfathomable destruction and decisions you never thought a person capable of. 

    i think you are right, though. . .i think it has everything to do with control and not having to risk the rejection or emotional giving of yourself to another imperfect human.  to me, porn is a huge symptom of a bigger heart problem. 

  • http://faithandfood.morizot.net/ Scott Morizot

    Obviously you can only share your own perspective, but a statement like, “Porn is about dissatisfaction in a man’s heart” makes me wonder what you think porn is about for the women who consume it in almost equal numbers…

    Guess that counts as pot-stirring?

    • http://www.seeprestonblog.com Preston Yancey

      Women consume, on average, a different type of pornography that is largely driven by emotional content and not pure action. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece about a fairly involved scientific study on it recently and I hope to talk about it later in August over at GWP, because there are some notable difference in how it manifests, but I do think the root cause is similar.

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  • http://twitter.com/caitlinloveowls Caitlin Faith

    Preston, this was good for my wearied spirit.