Can Someone Tell Me How Porn Is Good for Them - BlogIt is Gloria Steinem who once said “Pornography is the instruction. Rape is the practice, battered women are the practice, and battered children are the practice.” I couldn’t help but to think about that as I read a story about a 13-year-old boy who raped his eight-year-old sister. Not because he was angry. Or malicious. Or a “bad boy”. It was because he had seen porn on his Xbox and “decided to try it out”. And when you read stories like that, does it not make Ms. Steinem’s words resonate, quite loudly?

Although a lot of us are used to pastors and Christian organizations talking about the detriment of porn, they are not the only ones. In fact, Oprah did a feature entitled “The Negative Effects of Porn” and it cited the following five things:

1.Porn is a drug that leads to addiction.

2. Porn is a form of sexism.

3. Porn portrays all women in one of four degrading, dehumanizing categories. They’re either a “greedy gold-digger,” “mindless playmate,” “insatiable nymphomaniac” or “one who craves pain.”

4. Porn makes men get bored with their own wives.

5. Porn cultivates a single standard of beauty that no real women can live up to.

And actually, because so many of those focus on women and how they are victimized by porn, being that the highest rate of porn watchers continues to be men, I’m going to add a few of my own:

6. Porn reduces men to having sex on instinct rather than with emotion.

7. Porn hinders men from enjoying sex from a healthy spiritual place.

8. Porn teaches men to not only treat women as sex objects but to treat their own bodies in the same fashion. Even though they also are to see themselves as temples of the Holy Spirit. (I Corinthians 6:16-20 – Message)

And here’s the thing, as I was reading through the article about the teenage boy who honestly is a victim along with this sister, I found this one sentence to be, oddly fascinating: “When children see porn, they have no context for what it is used for. There is pressure on children to be sexualized, particularly on younger boys, to start having sex.”

OK. I get that. But honestly, when we as adults watch porn, do we know what context to put it in ourselves? I mean, if porn results in addiction, lack of intimacy, decreased satisfaction, desensitization and feelings of despair—why do so many of us try and tell ourselves that “it won’t hurt us”?

There are so many articles which cite that children are too young for porn or porn in large doses is not the healthiest but honestly, the further I am away from it, I can’t find one redeeming quality that it has. Not one. I used to joke around and say that at least when I watched it, I couldn’t get pregnant or an STD. That was until the Lord was like “There are Sexually Transmitted Diseases and then there are Spiritually Transmitted Diseases.” (Tweet This) Touche’. Touche’.

So, although this is a bit of an odd post, I’m curious to hear your thoughts. Being that there are so many negative things that have been proven (PROVEN) to come from porn usage and yet there are millions of individuals who continue to engage in it anyway, can any of you share some of the good things that come from watching porn?

Sometimes, in order to break free, it’s not about seeing how negative something is, but how much it actually lacks in positivity in the process.