by Jay Stringer
Abby, a graphic designer, entered therapy because of a lifelong battle with pornography. “What I’ve come to realize about my life is that anytime I try to resist sexual temptation, it only comes back stronger. I eventually just got tired of fighting it and resigned to the fact that it’s less maddening to give in. I used to hook up with men because it felt exciting. Now I seek out men when I’m feeling terrible about who I am.” People like Abby often resign to sexually acting out not because they love sex but because they are bound to the judgment of self-contempt. In describing why they pursue sex or pornography, they use such words as crazy, nymph, and mentally ill.
Strip responsibility and reciprocity from sex, and you have pornography. For this reason, many men like Daryl resign to the belief that pornography is one of the best dimensions of their lives. “Porn is the ultimate VIP experience!” Pornography is appealing because all that is required is to show up feeling defeated, angry, lustful, or entitled and be promptly served any erotic content you desire. In pornography, there is no one you must encounter in your ongoing struggle with premature ejaculation, no pain in not being chosen by a partner, no one who will ask for emotional engagement, and no one who will hold you to account for having endured the distorted desires of your heart.
Men and women often wait until crises before they confront their resignation to unwanted sexual behavior. When I meet these clients, they often shed tears as they name the insidious role of resignation. For some, the breaking point was their entrance into hard-core or child pornography. For others, it was their choice to solicit prostitution, and for others, it was the choice to begin an affair. These are heartbreaking yet remarkable sessions to witness. Their grief is the fire that thaws the frozen sea within.
Those who struggle the most to transform their sexual lives, however, are not those who have fallen the hardest; it is those who have learned how to resign to small doses of unwanted sexual behavior over a lifetime. They have resigned not to sexual extremity but to the occasional sexual struggle. Most often, they curate sexual struggles that likely will not cost them relationships or careers. The point is not to explode their lives but to slowly deaden their hearts’ ability to believe that meaningful change could ever come. If you want to know why you’ve resigned to unwanted sexual behavior, find out what life events convinced you that hope is pointless.
Resignation derails you from the necessary work of maturity. I do not believe the kingdom of darkness cares terribly much whether you drift off to pornography yearly, monthly, or nightly. It knows that once you’ve resigned to small doses of toxins in your heart, your potential to enjoy the fullness of life is compromised.
Perversion: Hijacked Lust
If I hadn’t been caught by my wife, I think I would have been arrested at some point because the porn I started looking at was getting really horrible.
ANDY
The word perversion is taken from the Latin word pervertere, meaning to turn around.[64] When we talk about sexual perversion, we are referring to forms of sex and fantasy that have been turned around, spoiled from the original goodness God created. In Jewish tradition, a man will take the Vow of Onah on his wedding day. Marriage and family therapist Dr. Tina Sellers has noted ten instructions within this vow that are of extreme relevance to our culture today. For our discussion on perversion, let’s highlight three of these instructions related to sexual intimacy:
Sex is considered a woman’s right, not a man’s (the husband is to ensure that all forms of sexual touch are pleasurable for her).
Sex for selfish personal satisfaction without regard for the partner’s pleasure is wrong and considered evil.
Sexual touch and intercourse were to be celebrated in joy and not in sadness, anger, disinterest, or self-interest.
The Vow of Onah offers a sexual ethic needed in our day. Think about what happens in our culture and marriages when sex is considered to be a man’s right, when it’s used without ensuring that all forms of sexual touch are pleasurable, or when it is used in anger or self-interest. Used in these ways, sex enters the spectrum of perversion; it turns sex away from intimacy in favor of entitlement.
Dr. Robert Stoller, who was a psychiatry professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, believed that perversion was “the result of an essential interplay between hostility and sexual desire.”[65] Stoller theorized that pornography and other sexual fantasies are vehicles that allow childhood trauma to be transformed symbolically into sexual power. He says that “at [pornography’s] heart is a fantasied act of revenge, condensing in itself the subject’s sexual life history—his memories and fantasies, traumas, frustrations, and joys. There is always a victim, no matter how disguised: no victim, no pornography.”[66]
Whereas lust is characterized by a frenetic desire to consume someone or something, perversion is driven by hostility. Few women and men I’ve worked with initially own the hostility in their unwanted sexual behavior. Instead, they say they are frustrated or lonely. But then they tell of being angry and upset with their partners, such as the case of a man who is angry at his partner for not wanting sex and uses porn after she falls asleep or the case of a woman who senses how devoted her husband is to his career and in response begins an affair with her husband’s college friend. Perversion occurs through associating sexual lust with the anger embedded in our hearts.
According to popular pornography sites, each time men log on to the sites, they spend on average about nine minutes using pornography. Nine minutes. Women spend about a minute more. It strikes me that if we truly longed for beauty, connection, enjoyment, and pleasure as much as people claimed, we would be spending far more time pursuing it. The evidence suggests something to the contrary. We pursue pornography not because we are pursuing beauty but precisely because we prefer to consume and control it. With time, pornography will become a form of restitution in which we demand that the object of our lust suffer the loneliness, anger, and confusion we do not know how to suffer.
Danny’s marriage was in a difficult spot when he decided to talk to his pastor about his pornography struggle. Danny’s wife had a history of sexual abuse and found herself either avoiding or disinterested in sex. He wanted to be connected to his wife but soon found that attempts to initiate sex or intimacy would be met with resistance and disappointment. “It felt easier to just turn off my desire for my wife. When I left it on, I walked around so angry at her and her past for dictating our intimacy.”
Danny managed this disappointment for several years, until his wife made the decision to go back to school. Although they had a marriage that was largely without sex, they found ways to create intimacy and diminish loneliness when they were together. All that changed when Danny’s wife started taking night classes. He found himself more depressed and as unmotivated as ever. He remarked, “I never thought it would be that hard. I would come home from work, and I would be alone for three hours a couple of times a week. The old feelings returned, and the need to be connected, the desire for sex, and the anger that my marriage, which was supposed to offer these things, was completely impotent to fulfill them.” For the first time since college, Danny began using pornography.
The pornography he sought out had to do with a genre that involves younger men having sex with their friend’s mothers. The scene typically involves the man being home alone when a friend’s mom “randomly” visits him. The male actor is often lonely in the scene but aroused by the mom’s pursuit and flirtation. Danny found himself increasingly seduced by these types of videos and felt an entitled energy rise up within him to have an older woman offer him what he was missing out on. What he began to address with his pastor was the loneliness and hurt that had been present throughout his life. He wept when he saw how much his good desire for connection had been hijacked and perverted by a hostile pursuit of pornography.
If you wish to stop your perversion, learn to listen to your lust. When you pay attention to it at a deeper level, sexual perversion can become your road map to healing.
Studying the specifics of your perversion will help you gain a sense of what you are truly seeking. For example, men like Danny who develop sexual fantasies in which women hold the power—be that an attractive mother figure, an employer, or someone older—tend to have a fairly predictable story.
Danny’s path to healing involved the recognition that he did not really know who he was. His depression was a symptom of this purposelessness. He was okay when his wife was around, because her presence allowed him to avoid learning how to develop into an individuated person. He later said, “I would never want the harm of pornography to reenter my family. But oh man, it showed me so much about how little I knew who I was, how little I knew how to pursue what I needed, how little I knew how to confront difficulty. I’d never say I was grateful for it, but God sure did use it to give me a life.”
Degradation: Hijacked Anger
I am worried I am going to become a monster. It used to be that I could separate porn from relationships. Now I am not so sure.
KEVIN
I’m not ready to tell you everything, but it’s just so evil.
BRITTANY
Let me state unequivocally that I believe that pornography exists predominantly due to male violence against women. When masculine anger is sexually hijacked, it moves into degradation of the feminine. The origins of the word degrade involve reducing someone to a lower rank, particularly to punish someone. Although the use of pornography may involve the curiosity to see the beauty of the female body, it will move to a hijacked desire to see women subservient to demands. Degradation functions on a spectrum. On one end is reducing a woman to less than a man, in which she quickly becomes a sex object; on the other end, a woman’s body is defaced and punished in overt sexual violation.
The fantasy world created in pornography or prostitution requires a woman to be reduced to an object or commodity. In pornography, a woman’s rank as a co-revealer of the image of God is reduced to a gender that exists to submissively serve the errant longings of men. This is why you have likely seen an escalation in severity of the pornography you watch. You may have started with a lingerie or swimsuit catalog, but pornography moves toward greater exposure, more loss of innocence, more subservience, more women, and ultimately more degradation.
Pornographers know that men move from hearts of lust to demands to possess beauty and, if they stay long enough, to the desire to see the bodies and faces of women degraded. The heartbeat of the pornographic world is to seduce men through their lust in order to offer them the ability to deface the beauty and life-giving power of women.
Pornography exposes one of the tragic dimensions of the heart of a man: his violence. The problem of male sexual entitlement and anger is a malignant though often overlooked issue. The #metoo movement was proclaimed to the nations precisely because it named what most faith leaders consistently miss: the misuse of power, control, and anger in the sexual lives of men. Although the church should be on the front lines of exposing male violence against women, it has been largely silent.
Men need to rapidly wake up to the systemic issue of our sexual violation of women. For example, we talk about the number of women who are sexually harmed but say next to nothing about the number of men who sexually harm women.[67] We refer to women, even teenagers, as sluts and whores but refer to men as lonely, johns, and horny. Language reveals not only how far men distance themselves from the problem but also where they truly place the blame for sexual brokenness. Jackson Katz, author and renowned cultural commentator, wrote,
We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenage girls in the state of Vermont got pregnant last year, rather than how many men and boys impregnated teenage girls. . . . Even the term “violence against women” is problematic. It’s a passive construction; there’s no active agent in the sentence.[68]
If male violence against women is prevalent in our intimate relationships and in our schools and organizations, surely it is metastasizing in the underground world of pornography as well.
One of the most surprising findings in my research was that women sought out more aggressive, violent, and degrading forms of pornography. Women pursued porn that featured bondage and rough or aggressive sex at a higher rate than men.
Former Google data scientist and Harvard-trained economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz also found this trend. He wrote, “If there is a genre of porn in which violence is perpetrated against a woman, my analysis of the data shows that it almost always appeals disproportionately to women.”[69]
I was shocked by these findings, until I began seeing them through the lens of male power and violence against women. The overwhelming key driver for female fantasies of aggression and violence was the desire to see someone else have more power over them. This included a desire to see someone older than they are, situations in which they were the less powerful one, and scenarios that made them feel as if they were being used.
There is a tremendous amount of mystery and complexity to female arousal, and I make no attempt to definitively state a conclusion for why women pursue sexual violence in pornography at greater numbers than men. That said, there does appear to be an association between the sexual violation girls and women undergo and the pornography they later seek out. Research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that approximately one out of four girls will be sexually abused before the age of eighteen,[70] and in one study of nine schools, the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) found that one out of five women (21 percent) was sexually assaulted after entering college.[71] Additionally, the average age of introduction to pornography is now between eight and eleven years of age.
These statistics give us a window into how men and women pursue violent pornography for different purposes. Whereas men tend to pursue pornography to find power over their shame and harm, women tend to pursue violent pornography to repeat their shame and harm. Our choice of pornography reveals the stories not only of the harm we endured but of the ways we attempt to reverse or repeat these dynamics in the present. The tragedy is that either pursuit ends in the degradation of women.
Evil seduces us to degradation to eclipse the greater God-given longings in our hearts. Pornography offers us an imitation version of the justice and rest found in Jesus alone. In pornography, a victim is chosen to suffer violation in order to offer the porn user revenge and escape. In the gospel, humanity chooses an innocent victim to suffer death. In Jesus’ atonement, we are paradoxically offered the justice and rest we most desire. Both pornography and Jesus appeal to the deepest longings in our hearts. Only one offers freedom.
We can see, then, the effective idolatry taking place in pornography use. Rather than accepting the willing self-sacrifice of a God who offers to atone for our sins, we seek out an alternative sacrifice—a victim both unwilling and inadequate—and bring our lust and anger there instead. Rather than submit ourselves to a loving God, we have submitted ourselves to (and implicated ourselves in) evil.
Healing is one of the primary ways we take back the ground that evil attempted to steal. Such healing requires confronting our pursuits of degradation. Men need the honesty to name the ways they’ve misused their power, specifically in the harm of women. Women need the honesty to confront that much of their pull toward the degradation of pornography was driven by the abuse of men. For many women, honesty is an issue of naming how much of their sexual stories were unwanted and pursuing sexual stories that bear honor, beauty, and choice.
Unwanted Sexual Behavior: The Movie
Now that we have explored the six foundational experiences of unwanted sexual behavior and the three ways our sexual lives become hijacked, let’s see this film roll from start to finish. I will introduce you to a man named Chandler, a senior pastor of a church in the Midwest. I have highlighted his experiences in parentheses at the end of important s
entences.
Prior to therapy, Chandler would have said he was born in a godly home. He recognizes now that the story is more complicated. Chandler’s dad was a construction contractor, and a pretty successful one. He put food on the table, attended Chandler’s games, and made time for the whole family to be together. Chandler told about the most glaring reality about his father: “I never had the sense my dad really liked my mom. He rarely enjoyed her and would criticize her for almost any decision she made. I was really sensitive to that. Somehow I knew that part of my task was to be a good son and become the type of man my dad could never be for my mom.”
Chandler’s mom was playful but hurting. Even though she never said so, he could tell she was struggling. What makes Chandler a remarkable pastor is also what led him to pornography: “I learned how to see and meet other people’s needs well, but I never learned how to address my own” (deprivation and triangulation).
In middle school, Chandler discovered that his dad had a descrambler on the television in the basement. It was a device that would allow him to see channels that were normally scrambled, notably Cinemax and The Playboy Channel (arousal—also notice his father’s deliberate choice to allow pornography into the home). One weekend, Chandler had a sleepover with friends and introduced them to pornography. Chandler recalls what happened when his dad came down the stairs: “My heart was beating so fast, and my dad, cool as ever, just said, ‘Chandler, I need to talk with you.’ We walked into the laundry room, and he said, ‘I don’t want you watching that stuff with your friends around. You need to apologize to them and keep the TV off the rest of the night.’” Chandler remembered feeling so relieved and confused. His father was not angry but was giving him permission to do what he wanted in private. “I didn’t need to fight it anymore. It was so strange, but I was angry that he was not angry” (resignation and anger). It did not even occur to Chandler until therapy that his father was also addicted to pornography.
