Unwanted

by Jay Stringer

  In seminary, Chandler experienced a lot of victory and healing with pornography. He did not want to be seduced by things that brought shame; he wanted his conscience to be clean. He met his wife in the last year of seminary, and six years later they had three kids. Chandler grew a young-adult ministry to more than five hundred people, and within a few years the church leadership was talking to him off record about becoming the senior pastor. “I wanted the position so badly, and I began talking about how out of touch the senior pastor was with the up-and-coming generation” (lust). Within two years, Chandler was hired as the new senior pastor. Life was beautiful and meaningful.

  Becoming a senior pastor was the best and worst thing that ever happened to Chandler. The growth of his church became his sole focus. He notes, “When I got into this role as the senior pastor, I stopped caring for myself. I used to jog and go to the gym a few times a week, but my schedule intensified after my promotion. I was quickly adapting to the new normal of this role: crisis. It got to be too much for me. I needed to preach forty-five-plus times a year, grow a church, and run a staff of almost one hundred people. There were some things I did well, but some things I was completely failing in [deprivation and futility]. My wife and kids wanted more from me, and I resented them for it” (anger).

  Chandler’s first use of pornography as a pastor occurred when he was alone in his office late on a Friday afternoon. Almost all of his staff had left for the day, and he was attempting to finish a sermon he had no desire to preach (futility). He logged on to Facebook and spent a half hour scrolling through his timeline (dissociation). Chandler clicked on the profile of a woman he’d had a crush on in high school. He found himself wondering what life would have been like if he had not been a pastor but instead had pursued a normal job as her husband appeared to have (dissociation).

  The moment it occurred to him he did not want to be a pastor, he felt an incredible desire to see pornography. Chandler turned his phone off Wi-Fi, went into a private bathroom, locked the door, and masturbated to pornography (arousal and dissociation).

  Chandler felt immense amounts of shame afterward but dismissed his mistake as a fluke. He prayed, asked God for forgiveness, and then returned home to watch a movie with his wife. “I felt as if I wanted to tell her or someone that I was tired and wanted something else for my life. I buried that feeling and thought it would eventually pass” (deprivation). Three weeks later, Chandler was back in his office on a Friday evening when he decided to repeat his previous mistake (arousal and resignation).

  As the months went on, Chandler felt increased amounts of resentment for all that his church and family required from him (anger). He picked apart his wife for every decision she made and openly devalued other pastors in staff meetings for their incompetence (anger). Chandler felt trapped in his job and trapped in his growing involvement in unwanted sexual behavior (futility). The worst night of Chandler’s pastoral ministry was being in a private family bathroom looking at pornography that repulsed him (perversion and degradation). “I was so ashamed. It was content I never thought I would ever be aroused by. I was a hypocrite, but my shame drove me deeper into my perversion. When I wasn’t feeling terrible, I felt numb. I spent more time on Facebook, reading blogs, really anything to distract myself from where I was in life” (dissociation).

  It was at this time that Chandler started using his work computer to look at pornography. “It was as if I let myself off the hook. I knew that if I looked on my work computer, the IT department would find out and my job would be in jeopardy. I thought about fighting it, but I gave in, thinking it really wouldn’t matter if I were eventually going to stop being a pastor [futility and resignation]. I stopped caring about what would happen to me. I was waiting for something to explode. Then one Tuesday morning in March an elder knocked on my door and said, ‘The church is going to have you take a couple of months off. We need to talk.’”

  My hope is that reading Chandler’s story prompts a more honest and courageous engagement of your own experiences, in which you annotate and name aspects you’ve long avoided. These six experiences and their hijacked forms are the constructs that answer the question “Why do I stay?” The work required to dismantle the experiences is intensely unrelenting. Though it pains me to say this, they are only part of the battle. But these elements within you are not merely self-perpetuating; they are influenced by the systems that surround you.

  FOR REFLECTION:

  Recall a time when you allowed yourself to resign to unwanted sexual behavior. What was happening in your life at the time (e.g., isolation, trying and failing at every treatment approach, etc.)?

  In what ways does your unwanted sexual behavior offer you escape and revenge?

  Have you ever had a moment where you noticed something inside you wanting to use or be used in a way that bears aggression?

  If you are a woman, where have you experienced forms of sexual coercion from men? When was the first time? The latest?

  [61] Concise Oxford English Dictionary: Luxury Edition, 12th ed. (2011), s.v. “resign.” (“From L. resignare ‘unseal, cancel’.”)

  [62] Patrick Carnes, Don’t Call It Love: Recovery from Sexual Addiction (New York: Bantam, 1992), 35.

  [63] Debra Hirsch, Redeeming Sex: Naked Conversations about Sexuality and Spirituality (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2015), 77.

  [64] The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed. (2018), s.v. “peevish,” accessed March 13, 2018, https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=peevish. (“Possibly from Latin perversus, turned the wrong way, perverse, past participle of pervertere, to turn around, corrupt.”)

  [65] Robert Stoller, Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (London: Karnac, 1986), xi.

  [66] Stoller, Perversion, 64–65.

  [67] Thought credit to Jackson Katz. For more on this topic, see Katz’s TED Talk, “Violence against Women—It’s a Men’s Issue,” 17:37, November 2012, TEDxFiDiWomen, https://www.ted.com/talks/jackson_katz_violence_against_women_it_s_a_men_s_issue/transcript.

  [68] NiamhNic, “I hadn’t thought about this much before,” Twitter, October 15, 2017, https://twitter.com/NiamhNic.

  [69] Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us about Who We Really Are (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), 121. Women searched such terms as force, brutal, and others far more graphic.

  [70] “Understanding Child Sexual Abuse,” American Psychological Association, December 2011, http://www.apa.org/pi/about/newsletter/2011/12/sexual-abuse.aspx.

  [71] Christopher Krebs, Christine Lindquist, Marcus Berzofsky, Bonnie Shook-Sa, and Kimberly Peterson, Campus Climate Survey Validation Study Final Technical Report, Bureau of Justice Statistics Research and Development Series, 73.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE SEX INDUSTRY

  Pornography as Male Violence against Women

  UNWANTED SEXUAL BEHAVIOR is shaped not only by your personal story but also by our culture. Although it’s critical to understand the apparatus of your personal struggle, I would be remiss to not zoom out to unveil at least one of the wider forces and systems that work tirelessly to keep your unwanted sexual behavior in place. We are living, arguably, in a time unparalleled in human history with the availability and normalization of erotic and violent sexual content. In other generations, rape and sexual consumption may have been tactics an enemy used when your empire or tribe was conquered, but never could an eleven-year-old google a gang-rape video, or a seven-year-old be targeted by a pornographer’s typosquatting, which lures unsuspecting children to pornographic sites based on a child’s common misspellings or typos.

  You interact with systemic forces consciously and unconsciously every day. The ubiquity and hidden dimensions of these systems must be understood, because even your most rigorous efforts to refrain from unwanted behavior could be sidelined by their power. Transformation requires that you hold the rope taut between knowing your story and anticipating the influence of these systems. T
o only address one dimension leaves you vulnerable to the other.

  There are many other systems, such as the prevalence of media and the hypocrisy of the church, that contribute to reinforcing your sexual struggles. But for the purpose of this chapter, I will focus on the one system that I have observed my clients interacting with the most throughout their recovery process: the sex industry.

  Before we dive in, let’s quickly recognize that the sex industry is so alluring because of what the addiction treatment community refers to as the 3 As:

  Anonymity

  Affordability

  Availability

  Think for a moment about how this relates to the sex industry’s content. Most people believe that their Internet searches are anonymous, and therefore they are uninhibited in their sexual indulgence. An Internet connection may require a monthly bill, but this is relatively affordable, especially when you consider how necessary the service is for other areas of your life. And finally, the Internet is available to us twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There is almost nothing in the world that is as constant and accessible as the ability to check our e-mail, update Facebook, or pursue pornography.

  Anonymity, affordability, and availability reveal how ineffective a mere desire to stop your unwanted sexual behavior would be. Forces you may not even be aware of are at work against you. To counteract these forces, heart change and practical actions will need to be pursued. Some people choose to exchange their smartphones for flip phones, some ask a friend to join them in using an Internet accountability software such as Covenant Eyes to monitor and filter pornographic content, and others join twelve-step or therapy groups to be less anonymous. These actions will not necessarily reduce your draw toward unwanted sexual behavior. Instead, they create barriers to keep the waters of sexual content from drowning you as you seek to rebuild the foundations of your life.

  Let me be clear that the sex industry is never ultimately to blame for your involvement with unwanted sexual behavior. Instead, it functions much like a squatter in a vacant home. If you are not committed to taking responsibility for the integrity of your life, there are many squatters who will be glad to take over.

  There is a deep, inextricable connection between the world of pornography and prostitution (also referred to as commercial sexual exploitation). Many of the women involved in the porn industry will also experience commercial sexual exploitation. Pornography use is more prevalent in Christian circles than buying sex. This is, of course, because of the dimensions of availability and anonymity but equally because of how easy it is to draw artificial lines in the sand showing which behavior is worse than the next. These types of distinctions blind us from seeing that our self-righteousness, just as much as the world’s unrighteousness, is responsible for the ongoing state of sexual brokenness around us. What I’ve learned is that in studying prostitution, we see with more clarity and precision what is involved in the demand for and consumption of pornography.

  A Trip to the Other Side of the World

  Several years ago, I flew to Seoul, South Korea, to visit my brother, who was teaching English. We were in a bar one night and ended up sitting next to a table of men from the United States and the United Kingdom. We ended up conversing, and they asked me what type of work I was involved in back in Seattle. I told them about my therapy practice, and unsolicited, they each went on to tell me about the sex they purchased in South Korea and Southeast Asia.

  I was astounded by what I heard. Each man spoke to seeing a deadness in the eyes of the women and teenagers that they had purchased sex from. One particularly honest man told me he went to a small village in Thailand where he was treated like a king. He was given access to any woman or child he desired. He put it like this: “I remember thinking, Who have I become? It started with a fantasy of having sex in Thailand, and by the end of my trip, I was doing horrible things I swore I would never do in my life.”

  By the time I left South Korea, I had heard story after story of men who had given in to their hijacked desires. The more they did, the more they experienced internal and external alienation. They described feeling as if their consciences had been marred by their behavior, with a few even experiencing waves of nausea in recalling their actions with the women and girls they commercially exploited. My time in South Korea cornered me with the reality that our battle is not solely against the flesh and blood of personal sexual brokenness but against the powers and principalities of this world that delight in seeing God’s gift of sex debased. Seeing beyond the petri dish of our own stories, we see the entitlement of predominantly heterosexual men that necessitated the need for the #metoo movement, the realities of children being sex trafficked, and the sex industry’s goal to eroticize the degradation of women. We live in a world of sexual violation.

  Sexual violation will be healed to the extent to which it is acknowledged. This is why it is critical to find a holistic diagnosis of the sexual madness of our time. The diagnosis must include lust, personal-trauma history, and present-day futility, but it must also address the at times deplorable dimension of the human condition. Judith Herman, professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, wrote,

  The desire for control over another person is the common denominator of all forms of tyranny. Totalitarian governments demand confession and political conversion of their victims. Slaveholders demand gratitude of their slaves. Religious cults demand ritualized sacrifices as a sign of submission to the divine will of the leader. Perpetrators of domestic battery demand that their victims prove complete obedience and loyalty by sacrificing all other relationships. Sex offenders demand that their victims find sexual fulfillment in submission. Total control over another person is the power dynamic at the heart of pornography. The erotic appeal of this fantasy to millions of terrifyingly normal men fosters an immense industry in which women and children are abused, not in fantasy but in reality.[72]

  Herman speaks to the heart of the demand issue with stunning honesty. She invites us to abandon the perspective that women in pornography are simply participating in an enjoyable career and instead see that the sex industry demands total control over the bodies of women and children in order to produce its content. It is men who must decide whether to accept a world that will continually demand the sexual degradation and possession of women.

  Violence against women is an issue of not only individual perversion but also justice. Our collective demand for this material fuels an industry in which women and children suffer violence and death in order to deliver men the corrupted desires of their hearts. Our wounds invite us to the gentle path of healing, but our perversions challenge us by asking, Is violence against women the way we wish to atone for these traumas? As Franciscan priest Richard Rohr said, “‘If you do not transform your pain, you will always transmit it.’ Always someone else has to suffer because I don’t know how to suffer; that is what it comes down to.”[73]

  Crimes against Women

  Historically, men attempted to portray prostitution and pornography as victimless. The underlying foundation of this belief is that women exist to serve the needs of men. Our language to refer to a sex buyer has classically been the word john, meaning any man. On the other hand, the language we use for women and children trapped in sexual exploitation is more derogatory: whore, ho, prostitute, tramp, and the list goes on. The message is clear: Buying sex is common for all men, but the real gender to blame for this issue is women.

  The statistics are overwhelming for women in the life of prostitution and pornography. Approximately 90 percent of these women have suffered sexual abuse, and the average age of initial involvement in prostitution is somewhere in the range of fourteen to eighteen, which in many cases is lower than the age of consent in the United States. There is something seriously wrong when we blame those in prostitution for their lifestyles, when legally they are not even old enough to give their consent for sex. This is rape.

  Additionally, 58 percent of American prostitutes will report violent
assaults at the hands of clients. As you might imagine, the great majority of sexual assaults go unreported. Sadly, 92 percent of women in prostitution report a desire to leave the life but cannot due to not having enough food or money. The homicide rate among women actively engaged in prostitution is seventeen times higher than the rate of females in the general population.[74] And after the review of multiple sources and analyzing nine different data sets, another study concluded that prostituted women “have the highest homicide victimization rate of any set of women ever studied.”[75] There is something tremendously wrong yet exposing when sexual “freedom” leads to the rape and murder of women.

  Metaphors and Smoke Screens

  Sadly, these horrendous realities are not the first things that come to mind when men think about women who have been sexually exploited and mistreated through prostitution and pornography. Instead, many men use language to distance themselves from the rape and entitlement in the violence they commit. Some sex buyers use the language of a sportsman. Online forums to help improve men’s experiences with commercially exploited sex workers say things like “Good luck out there and happy hunting” and “Don’t overfish this spot” and “Don’t abuse this one and send her into hiding—she is a trophy.” Other sex buyers refer to women and girls as “meat” and the acts of sex as the various dimensions of a meal: “I like variety, white meat and dark meat. I love it all.” Others mention ethnicity and refer to intercourse: “There was a Thai girl who wanted $150 for the entrée, but I talked her down to $50 because she was more like ground beef than filet mignon.”