Unwanted

by Jay Stringer

  Researchers have found that men who buy sex have fairly common expectations and fantasies associated with doing so. The researchers remarked, “To varying degrees, the fantasy entails that men should control the sexual encounter entirely and that prostituted women should appear happy, enthusiastic, and insatiable while serving johns’ sexual needs; the women should make men believe they find johns attractive; the women should appear to care about the men; and the women should appreciate and value johns’ economic ‘help.’”[76]

  These examples may seem extreme, particularly if you have never paid for sex. But the same things are true of pornography, which features actresses trained to perform for the appetites of men. This might include acting as if degradation, which will damage their bodies, is erotic or that random and crass strangers are completely irresistible or that they have the best job in the world because all they do all day is have sex. The tragic reality is that these women are deceived into the sex industry through force, fraud, and coercion. Along the way, they also routinely develop sexually transmitted infections, vomit between takes, and profess to their lives being ruined by lost years in the business. Pornography is not any less damaging than street prostitution; it merely distances the user from the debasement and exploitation these women undergo every day. As researcher Melissa Farley noted, “Pornography is pictures of prostitution.”[77]

  Common but Unhelpful Rebuttals

  When clients or friends open up about pornography they are involved with, what they usually quickly say is something along the lines of “I don’t get into any of that hard-core stuff. I am more into [you fill in the blank].” It could be “just pictures, not videos,” “just consensual couples having sex, not multiple men,” “just webcams of women stripping, not giving oral sex,” “just women I know are over eighteen, not younger ones.” The list goes on. We contrive these justifications to distance ourselves from the reality that we are using human beings to fill our emptiness (lust) and making them the surrogate objects of our hostility (perversion). Pornography is violence against women, and the sex industry allows us to choose the level of degradation we can tolerate.

  My response to these rebuttals is typically one of education and lament for our cultural naiveté regarding sexual violation. Pornography creates a world of sexual illusion, one where we imagine that women are there to serve and enjoy men and become subservient to their longings. Here is the reality, according to researchers who analyzed the content of more than three hundred popular pornography videos:[78]

  88.2 percent of top-rated porn scenes contain aggressive acts.

  In 70 percent of occurrences, a man is the perpetrator of the aggression; 94 percent of the time, the act is directed toward a woman.

  Only 9.9 percent of the top-selling scenes analyzed contained kissing, laughing, caressing, or verbal compliments.

  Open-hand slapping occurs in 41.1 percent of scenes.

  Sex depicted in porn movies generally focuses on men’s sexual pleasure and orgasm rather than women’s.

  Additionally, porn scenes have sexist and racist themes throughout. Websites often contain menus in which users can select specific categories of women’s ethnicities, body types, and ages. Men and women who are anything other than white are represented in stereotypical and demeaning ways. And perhaps most tragically, according to the FBI, child pornography is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the United States. Nationally, there has been a 2,500 percent increase in arrests.

  The default response toward the sex industry tends to be one of ambivalence. We know that the content we consume is troubling and negatively affects us, but it becomes so central to our lives that we cannot imagine being without it. Ambivalence toward the sex industry is a telltale sign that our struggles will not relent in the near future.

  The sex industry overrides our contradictory feelings every time. Pornography is not only arousing but also ubiquitous. The sex industry knows that the best way to ensure our continual involvement with the addiction is to provide infinite content (remember the 3As of affordability, anonymity, and availability). Pornography will be seductive to any dimension of our lives lacking a firm foundation.

  Understanding the individual and systemic reasons that necessitate your unwanted sexual behavior is a crucial precursor to writing a new sexual story. The focus of the final section of this book will move you from understanding the why behind unwanted sexual behavior to an active transformation of your life, relationships, and community.

  Although you may have begun with a desire for a formulaic step-by-step set of techniques, now you can see that such simplistic techniques would fall far short of the lasting freedom you long for and deserve. Mere techniques and formulas rarely produce lasting change, particularly if they were not rooted in the particular stories that formed your involvement with unwanted behavior. In part 1, you examined the map of the world that was handed to you, and in part 2, you explored how you recreated many of these paths as an adult. In part 3, you will find trusted wisdom and practical steps to create a new map that will take you on the journey out of unwanted sexual behavior. This journey begins, as every journey does, with preparation.

  FOR REFLECTION:

  In what ways have you seen the sex industry shape your sexual arousal or preferences?

  If you are a man, in what ways have you been complicit in sexual violence against women in our society? Think of a time when you transmitted your pain to women.

  If you are a woman, in what ways might you want to reclaim your sexuality from the influence of the sex industry?

  [72] Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic, 1997), 76.

  [73] Richard Rohr, A Lever and a Place to Stand (New York: Paulist, 2014), https://books.google.com/books?id=fH6dQgs6h4YC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_atb#v=onepage&q&f=false.

  [74] John J. Potterat et al., “Mortality in a Long-Term Open Cohort of Prostitute Women,” American Journal of Epidemiology 159, no. 8 (April 15, 2004): 778–85.

  [75] Devon D. Brewer et al., “Extent, Trends, and Perpetrators of Prostitution-Related Homicide in the United States,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 51, no. 5 (August 7, 2006): 1101–8.

  [76] Lara Janson et al., “Our Great Hobby”: An Analysis of Online Networks for Buyers of Sex in Illinois (Chicago: Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, 2013), 40, http://www.icasa.org/docs/misc/caase%20report%20online%20buyers%20of%20sex%20in%20illinois.pdf.

  [77] Dr. Melissa Farley, presentation at the Coalition to End Sexual Exploitation, Herndon, VA, April 5, 2015.

  [78] A. J. Bridges et al., “Aggression and Sexual Behavior in Best-Selling Pornography Videos: A Content Analysis Update,” Violence against Women 16, no. 10 (October 2010): 1065–85, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20980228.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TRANSFORMING SELF

  Learning to Love and Care for Yourself

  THIS FINAL SECTION IS LIKELY the reason you bought this book. I hope you can now appreciate why parts 1 and 2 were vital gateways to thinking about a path toward freedom. These sections guided you through a reflective journey of your life and some of the choices, yours and others’, that affected your relationship to sex. More than just explaining some of the deeper dynamics at play in unwanted sexual behavior, my intent was to radically disrupt your view of your own story. To ensure you are able to act upon the practical actions that lie ahead, I needed you to consider your choices from dramatically different vantage points than you likely began the book with.

  My promise is that freedom from unwanted sexual behavior is indeed possible. I have seen it happen, but never apart from men and women engaging the pain and beauty of their stories. Unwanted sexual behavior eventually becomes a hatred of the hope that exists within us that the holy longings of our hearts could ever be found. The heartaches of our lives and the schemes of evil attempt to convince us that the hope we have is only a daydream. Evil sought to trap us in unwanted sexual be
havior to ruin us, but the gospel’s great reversal is this: Sexual brokenness reveals our way to healing.

  In this chapter, we will address the transformation of self; in the next, we will explore the transformation of your primary relationships, and after that, the transformation of your broader community. Each of these areas influenced your involvement in unwanted sexual behavior, and therefore freedom will come to the degree to which they are transformed. As you begin the transformation, please know that this is not a one-week, one-month, or even one-year process.

  Who you are today is the result of decades of formation, and the best research we have says the best recovery journeys take two to three years for the participant to feel as though he has his life back to a stable place. This does not mean it will be years before you experience sobriety, but it does mean you will need to prepare to navigate the difficulties of life without the use of acting-out behavior. The actions you are about to read are ones I have found to be the most beneficial to the brave men and women who have pursued and found deep transformation.

  Preparing for a New Story

  Screenwriting coach Robert McKee said,

  When people ask me to help them turn their presentations into stories, I begin by asking questions. I kind of psychoanalyze their companies, and amazing dramas pour out. But most companies and executives sweep the dirty laundry, the difficulties, the antagonists, and the struggle under the carpet. They prefer to present a rosy—and boring—picture to the world. But as a storyteller, you want to position the problems in the foreground and then show how you’ve overcome them.[79]

  What I love about McKee’s thoughts is that nothing is wasted, not even the pain. There is no greater defeat of evil than for God to transform its violent schemes into stories that serve our joy. At the end of The Lord of the Rings, all who fought to free Middle-Earth gather in the woods to honor the hobbits. Frodo and Sam, much to their surprise, are placed on a throne to receive the people’s words of gratitude. The series’ author J. R. R. Tolkien wrote of Frodo and Sam, “Their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”[80] The pain and struggle you have endured will not be wasted; they will become the very wine of blessedness.

  Disarming the Power of Shame

  Shame is the painful experience that something you have done or failed to do has made you unwanted or unworthy of belonging. My research found that shame was the most consistent key driver of unwanted sexual behavior. Shame convinces us that we are unwanted, and we pursue behavior that confirms it. To find freedom, disarm the power of shame.

  The more you feel shame, the more you pursue pornography. It might sound obvious that shame drives pornography use, but the sheer numbers may alarm you. Men in my sample were nearly 300 times more likely to pursue pornography for each unit of shame they felt about their behavior, and women were 546 times more likely. It has to be said: Shame, not pleasure, drives pornography use.

  In addition to pornography, shame was a key predictor for several other prominent types of unwanted sexual behavior. Consider the following two graphics that describe how sexual shame affects men and women:

  One of the most enjoyable stories I’ve read in recent years came from an interview with Andy Casagrande, the cameraman of Discovery Channel’s notorious show Shark Week. Casagrande was asked what in the world he is supposed to do when a great white shark is swimming right at him. He answered that he must do something counterintuitive: swim directly at the shark with the camera. This action seems to trigger a defense mechanism in the shark. “Now they’re like, ‘Wait a second, everything in the ocean swims away from me.’ The reality is that if you don’t act like prey, they won’t treat you like prey.”

  Casagrande’s statement has a lot to teach us about disarming the power of shame: We should face it. The experience of shame is the biggest predator in our lives, and attempting to outmaneuver our “great white” memories comes naturally to most of us. We swim away from shame each time we downplay the significance of pain, embrace theologies that make amnesia or easy forgiveness of past harm virtuous, and pursue addictive behavior in which we punish our bodies a thousand times over for the cruelty originally committed against us.[81] Herein lies the problem: Shame’s power is so often derived from our flight from it. The more we run, the more it pursues us.

  The turn toward healing means we set our eyes upon the shark of shame, defying it, disarming it, and demonstrating that it must submit to the paradoxical power of vulnerability. The more we swim in the direction of shame, the more we recognize that our current struggles are often smoke screens, distracting us from the presence of more threatening experiences of it. You may have picked up this book in an attempt to solve a pornography issue but quickly learned there was more swimming around beneath the surface. Shame is certainly a terrifying beast, but each time we choose not to live as its prey, we find it less powerful than we imagined.

  The action of facing our shame echoes something God instructed the people of Israel to do when poisonous snakes threatened their civilization in the unpredictable wilderness. The Israelites were homeless, and they were receiving air-dropped rations of food. Terrified of dying and detesting their narrow choices in food and housing, the Israelites began to do what came naturally: They spoke against Moses and God for delivering them into this mess. God’s response was to escalate the direness of their situation. The Lord sent poisonous snakes to bite the people of Israel. Corpses of poisoned bodies piled up, and once again the people were distraught. In their horror and helplessness, they recognized that their complaining and slanderous speech about their leaders may have led to their current state of affairs. Moses heard Israel’s remorse and petitioned God to heal the people.

  God’s remedy was simple and almost comical: He had them fashion a bronze snake, plop it on a pole, and have the poisoned Israelites look at it. The story is fairly translucent in its allegory: The Hebrews must look at the very thing that is killing them. The Gospel of John picks up on this story in chapter 3 and recreates the story, but this time it is Jesus who gets placed on a torture stick, and people must look at him in order to be saved.[82] We are healed to the degree to which we can turn to face and name what is killing us.

  Turning to face your shame is an incredibly costly yet liberating decision, as you never quite know what stories lie above and beyond the confines of shame. The healing path ahead involves a commitment to healing the wounds that have marked your life. But that is not all. There is beauty beyond the prison walls of shame. It will cost you all that you have to find it, but it just might give you the very thing you’ve spent your life wandering to find. The ultimate defeat of shame is when the very experiences that attempted to convince you that you were unwanted become the sources of the greatest joy of being loved.

  BENEFITS OF CONFRONTING SHAME

  By confronting your shame, you are less susceptible to its power. When you are no longer silenced and disqualified by shame, you allow it to become one of your greatest teachers of redemption. When you confront rather than live as prey to shame, you discover the true victory Jesus has accomplished on your behalf through his defeat of shame and death.

  HOW TO DISARM SHAME:

  Talk to a trusted guide (a therapist, pastor, or sponsor) about the specific stories where you harbor shame. Seldom will you attempt to disclose your shame all at once (though some recovery programs do elect to have it done this way). Instead, disarming shame is about telling the stories that attempt to spoil your identity as beloved. Good guides have training in trauma and unwanted sexual behavior and commit to working to help you discover sexual health freed from shame.

  Write a story from your childhood about when shame seemed particularly present in your life. After you write it, spend time reflecting on it with a guide. As you reflect on the story, where do you feel it in your body? Did shame occur because you experienced pleasure? Di
d someone shame you, or were you all alone when something painful occurred? How do you think this story affects you today? Think of a time when you pursued sexual fantasies or behavior after experiencing shame. Dr. Mark Laaser, one of the Christian leaders in the field of sex addiction, said, “Our fantasies are not things to be ashamed of; they are in fact our greatest teachers.”[83] Allow your sexual fantasies to teach you about the parts of your story that await healing.

  Continue educating yourself about shame and its association to unwanted sexual behavior. I recommend two books from various perspectives that can help you arrive at a greater understanding of the issues you’re facing. For example, I invite my clients to read Sex, God, and the Conservative Church: Erasing Shame from Sexual Intimacy, by Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers, alongside either Dr. Patrick Carnes’s Out of the Shadows or Dr. Mark Laaser’s Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction. Another great resource on shame is The Soul of Shame, by Dr. Curt Thompson.

  Choose Joy and Develop a Routine of Delight

  Perhaps the only helpful lesson I have learned from an airline’s preflight safety instructions is that in the event of an onboard emergency, I should secure my own oxygen mask before securing others’ masks. Essentially, if I cannot breathe, what help am I to anyone else? One of my friends uses this principle with parenting: He must drink one cup of coffee in the morning before commencing his day as a dad. Those who struggle with addictive behavior struggle with deprivation; they tend to ignore issues of self-care. This goes back to your story. If you have known shame and abandonment, you are less likely to believe you deserve good care.