PORN IS FOR SUNDAYS

'Friday is the day of lowest use, because people have things to do together in their lives. Patterns for watching porn reflect patterns of being alone with your smartphone. It is something for times of emptiness. Porn's most popular watching day, therefore, is Sunday.' 

Jessica Martin, Holiness and Desire, p.69. 

THE CHALLENGE OF FORGIVING YOURSELF

'"I know that God has forgiven me, but I do not feel it inside." Why? The problem usually lies in the fact that, in spite of God's certain forgiveness these individuals have not forgiven themselves. The sin they have committed has been so great an offence to their self-image, their self-love has been so deeply hurt, that they are incapable of forgiving themselves. This especially occurs in cases where the sin is sexual immorality. If there has been a genuine confession, but the person still feels guilty, we are probably facing a psychological problem. The inability to forgive oneself is an issue more related to our self-image than our faith; the obstacle is not in our relationship with God but in the relationship with ourselves.' 

Pablo Martinez, Praying with the Grain, p.15. 

A VALID POINT?

'In my pastoral work I've started to suspect that the more someone was exposed to religious messages about controlling their desires, avoiding sexual thoughts, and not lusting in their hearts, the less likely they are to be integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually. I've also noticed that the less integrated physically, emotionally, sexually, and spiritually someone is, the more pornography they tend to consume. This is anecdotal evidence and not a scientific study. Nonetheless, I'd like to congratulate conservative Christians on their success in bolstering an industry they claim to despise.' 

Nadia Bolz-Weber, Shameless: A Sexual Reformation, p.140. 

THE MISEDUCATION OF PORN

'For both straight and gay boys, Internet pornography now offers an easily available correspondence degree with a major in sex, from a third-rate faculty with a poorly conceived curriculum.'
Walt Odets, Out of the Shadows, p.239.

LONELINESS & LUST

'Lust derives from a feeling of lack, and nothing feels more lacking than a sense of isolation. It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornopraphy omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.' 

Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well, p.173. 

PAVLOV & PORNOGRAPHY

'...pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free eros but dilutes it.' 

Naomi Wolf, 'The Porn Myth' in New York Magazine (20th October, 2003) via: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/index1.html 

THE EFFECTS OF PORNOGRAPHY

'The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.'

Naomi Wolf, 'The Porn Myth' in New York Magazine (20th October, 2003) via: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/index1.html 

HOW THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION HAS FAILED WOMEN

'Despite the promise of women's empowerment, the Sexual Revolution has given us the reverse. Is it really an advance for women that the average adolescent male has seen a kaleidoscope of images of women sexually exploited and humiliated in pornography? Is it really empowerment to have more and more woman economically at the mercy of men who leave them and their children, with no legal recourse? The adolescent girls facing the pressure to perform sex acts on her boyfriend, or lose him, what is this but the brutal patriarchy of a Bronze Age warlord? All of these things empower men to pursue a Darwinian fantasy of the predatory alpha-male in search of nothing but power, prestige, and the next orgasm. That's that's not exactly a revolution.'  

Russell Moore, Onward, p.171. 

THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP

'The best advice...for resisting lust is not to get an Internet filter (although you should do that too!), but to have good friends. If we have genuine friendships in which we learn to give and receive love in a healthy and satisfying way, we will be less inclined to wander off looking for sham substitutes and quick fixes.' 

Rebecca Konydyk DeYoung, Glittering Vices, p.178. 

THE NEW TOBACCO

'Despite our culture's easy acceptance of pornography, a growing tide of researchers, counselors, neuroscientists, pastors, and other professionals are ringing alarm bells on the basis of the devastating effects of pornography they see in their clinics, churches, and research studies. Some describe it as the "new tobacco." Just as most people considered smoking benign before the mid-1960s, there is a similar disconnect between scientific research and popular perspectives regarding the influence of pornography.' 

Jonathan Grant, Divine Sex, p.105. 

PORNOGRAPHY

'Pornography....is essentially sentimental, for it leaves out the connection of sex with its hard purpose, and so far disconnects it from its meaning in life as to make it simply an experience for its own sake.' 

Flannery O'Connor, 'The Church and the Fiction Writer' in Mystery and Manners, p.148. 

TEN MYTHS ABOUT SEX AND RELATIONSHIPS

'...ten myths that have emerged from common sexual and relationship scripts. (We are, however, not personally contesting or endorsing these myths). We can them myths not so much because they're categorically untrue. We call them myths because the empirical data from surveys and interviews suggests they aren't true most of the time. In other words, these ten myths may be believed by many emerging-adult men and women, but the evidence supporting them just isn't there.' (p.242)

1. 'Long term exclusivity is a fiction.' 'When we ask our students in class how long half of all marriages last, they fumble around for a response, guessing five years, or seven, or 10 tops. Their minds, of course, are focused on the average time-until-divorce. But the answer, which never occurs to them is a lifetime.' (p.242)
2. 'The introduction of sex is necessary in order to sustain a fledgling or struggling relationship.' 'Most relationships fail, and the sooner relationships become sexual, the greater their odds of failure.' (p.243).
3. 'The sexual double standard is inherently wrong and must be resisted by any means.' 'The double standard in sex is real and quite durable, and there's only effective way to resist it - and that is for women to attempt to feel and think and pursue sex like men.' (p.244).
4. 'Boys will be boys. That is, men can't be expected to abide by sexual terms that women may wish to set.' 'The reality, however, is that this scenario is not fixed. Men will live up to - or down to - the expectations placed upon them.' (p.244)
5.  'It doesn't matter what other people do sexually; you make your own decisions.' 'Other people's sexual choices matter. Collectively they function as a powerful constraint on our own behaviour.' (p.245).
6. 'Porn won't affect your relationships' '...porn's effect on the wider sexual market and its norms affect most Americans under 50, whether they're married or not.' (p.246).
7. 'Everyone else is having more sex than you are.' '...the average numbers of sexual partners emerging adults have are not as high as many imagine.' (p.247).
8. 'Sex need not mean anything.' 'This myth might not be a myth for you if you own a set of XY chromosomes. But if you're an XX, the odds are against it.' (p.247).
9. 'Marriage can always wait.' 'Many lose sight of the fact - or more commonly, realize too late - that there is a marriage market out there, just like there's a sexual market. It's a pool that does not grow deeper and more impressive with age.' (p.249).
10. 'Moving in together is definitely a step toward marriage.' '...cohabitation is still about uncertainty and risk management for both men and women.' (p.250)

 Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America, p.242-250.

PORNOGRAPHY

'...prolonged exposure to such uncommon erotica is known to lead both teens and adults to do several things:

• overestimate the popularity and pleasure of less common forms of sexual behaviour,
• presume that sexual exclusivity is both unrealistic and uncommon in real life,
• believe that sexual inactivity is actually bad for one's health,
• hold cynical attitudes about love, affection, and marriage/ family.'

Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in Marriage, p.94.

SEX

'"Casual sex is not about fun, or liberation, or self-esteem, or self-love, or healing the world. It is not casual at all. It is meant to be a very serious panacea for the deeper problem of epidemic loneliness which pervades modern culture. Man, having divorced himself from nature and the family, is left with the problem of an unpleasant solitude. The pornography empires and glory holes have been erected on the foundations of terrible loneliness, which they attempt to assuage with the superficial imitation of intimacy.

This loneliness is the product of the reduction of the family to a contract of mutual convenience, an arrangement that can be dissolved the moment one of the partners failes in his responsibility to meet the other's self-defined needs. It has lost its covenantal power to overcome the original solitude of Adam, the solitude of which God once said, "It is not good that man should be alone."'

Melinda Selmys, Sexual Authenticity, p.190.  

PORNOGRAPHY

'Because of the way that the male brain is wired, it is prone to pick up on sexually relevant cues. These cues trigger arousal and a series of neurological hormonal and neurochemical events are set in motion. Memories about how to respond to these cues are set off and the psychological, emotional and behavioral response begins. As the pattern of arousal and response continues, it deepens the neurological pathway, making a trough.

The neural system trough, along with neurotransmitters and hormones, are the underlying physical realities of a man's sexual experience. Each time that an unhealthy sexual pattern is repeated, a neurological, emotional and spiritual erosion carves out a channel that will eventually develop into a canyon from which there is no escape.

But if this corrupted pathway can be avoided, a new pathway can be formed. We can establish a healthy sexual pattern where the flow is redirected towards holiness rather than corrupted intimacy. By intentionally redirecting the neurochemical flow, the path toward right thinking becomes the preferred path and is established as the mental habit. The path to recovery relies on the very rules that govern how the wounds were initially created. By deepening the "holiness" pathways, we are freed from deciding to do what is right and good as they become part of our embodied nature. That is part of the process of sanctification.'

William M Sruthers, Wired for Intimacy, p.106.

PORNOGRAPHY

'Sexually acting out in response to pornography creates sexual associations that are stored as hormonal and neurological habits. These associations are seared into the fabric of the brains. These memories can then be pulled up at any time and replayed as private sexual fantasies. In sexual fantasy, the neurological circuit is replayed, further strengthening it. The result is an increase in autonomic sexual arousal, which requires an outlet. These memories and fantasies keep him in bondage and worsen the consequences of the earlier behavior.'

William M Struthers, Wired for Intimacy, p.59.

PORNOGRAPHY

'Just as food is consumed and digested by the body, pornography is consumed by the senses and digested by the brain. In the digestive process, food is broken down so that it can supply the body with energy. Waste products are excreted to ensure the health of the organism. Similarly, pornography is taken into the brain via our senses primarily through sight and touch. However, there is no process for the "waste" products associated with pornography to be removed. Pornography and our response to it alter our brain in a way that is difficult to undo. Pornography is the consumption of sexual poison that becomes part of the fabric of the mind.'

William M Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How pornography hijacks the male brain, p.20.

SEXUAL TEMPTATION

'Modern conservative evangelicalism fuels sex addiction because it has come to focus on the externals of religion, not the affections. By externals I mean such things as confessions, dogmas, personal priorities, church growth strategies, church attendance, training courses, evangelism, Bible study groups and so on: things that are visible in a believer's life. By affections, I mean those things that cannot be heard or seen directly - fears, loves, joys, delights, fears, hates, anxieties: the currents that swirl in the waters of a believer's heart; the hidden desires that lie deep beneath our decisions...If we are going to help people struggling with sex addiction, we need to recognize that the manger in which their sin is cradled is not the intellect, but the heart, the seat of their desires. They therefore need something more than mere information: they need to be wooed by the true and pure lover that their heart secretly seeks.'

www.stilldeeper.com in Tim Chester, Captured by a Better Vision, p.75.

PORNOGRAPHY

'Porn is providing the sex education for a generation of young people, setting their expectations for sex and marriage.'

Tim Chester, Captured by a Better Vision: Living porn-free, p.13.

PORNOGRAPHY

'Why is it that someone visits a pornographic website? Is it simply out of curiosity? Sometimes maybe. Much more often it is because of a deep sense of personal pain or worthlessness. A feeling of loneliness and need. It is an attempt to find something to dull the pain. Almost every kind of compulsive behaviour is an attempt to anaesthetize a deep personal pain. Unless you reach the core of that pain you won't really deal with the behaviour. So if you want to deal with lust, don't think the love of God is irrelevent. It is right at the heart of what you need.'

Julian Hardyman, Idols, p.56.