Imagine this scenario. You arelaying in bed, dressed all in your P.J.s. The lights are out, maybe your sleepytime playlist is playing softly in the background. You’re fairly comfortable,but you just can’t seem to fall asleep. Roll over on your side and keep trying to drift off but your brain just won’t stop ticking away. You begin to pay attention to your thoughts, and realize you know exactly what is keeping you up. You have a problem. You have an addiction. They warned you about drugs,they warned you about alcohol. But this, they never said anything about this.You wouldn’t consider yourself an addict, but you are having a really really hard time not hopping on the internet, looking up your usual porn site and doing the deed, even just so you can fall asleep. You decide that you have to call somebody, maybe if you talk to a friend they can help you out, maybe they can coax you down from the edge so that you don’t dive into what you know to be a slippery slope. End scenario. Does that sound pretty logical to you? How many friends do you have that would actually care about this? I know I don’t have many. I would be beyond embarrassed to call any of my friends who aren’t on the same page as me concerning porn. Mostly because nobody cares. I would say that for more people than not, porn is just not a big deal. It’s not hurting anybody, right? All parties are consenting, so where is the problem?

Unlike other addictions, porn pollutes both the user and the provider. One pornography makeup artist replied with this when asked if her job has affected her personal life. “I’ve learned how to understand people that have had a hard life, and people are more desperate in life. And it helps me to understand where they are coming from when they choose to do it. It makes it hard to watch porn myself as well. Some of the girls are a little business like before they do it, and can separate the sex from their emotions. But some girls cry before they do it.” This makes me wonder how any good can come of pornography. If somebody who is actually in the industry has a hard time watching porn after seeing what goes on behind the scenes, then how can you? How can I? If even one person is reduced to tears for me to achieve an orgasm then I argue that my orgasm is not worth it, and neither is yours. Why should somebody have to separate sex from emotions so that I can feed my urges? I would say that this is the reality of pornography. If somebody could argue that the amount of money paid for sex is hard to turn down, I can’t change his or her mind. But I do choose weather or not I put my money in the pot. If somebody is selling their healthy ideas of sex, I don’t want to be the one paying them.

I remember the first time I looked at porn was because I was made fun of for not having seen it before. As a 12-year-old kid, my only thought was that I didn’t want to get made fun of for anything if I could help it. So that night I went and checked it out. I’m not sure if this happens to everybody but I felt horrible. Weather it was because of my upbringing or something else, I just had a deep sense that what I had done was very wrong. Looking back, the whole situation blows my mind. Why, at 12 years old, was I getting laughed at for not looking at porn? I’m 22 and I still should never have seen it. These other kids had obviously been introduced to it before I had, so at what age did they start? One statistic says that the average age for the first time seeing porn is 11 years old. It can be seen as a sort of right of passage; you’re weird if you haven’t seen porn. Nobody wants to be weird, so we look. We grow up with the view that “it’s just what boys do”.  A Yahoo! Answers user posted that she caught her 11-year-old son looking at porn, and asked what she should do. The top voted answer was “…That is about the age where they start getting curious. Its harmless…. sex is not something to be ashamed about.”While I am not surprised, I am disgusted that this answer was voted to be the best. If our parents view pornography as “harmless” how are we supposed to think any different?

             I do not believe that sinking feeling I had in my gut after my first time watching porn were an accident, or a product of my upbringing. As a Christian I do not believe that God is ok with me looking at pornography. I think it has less to do with the mere issue of it being a sin,and much more with the fact that it is damaging to my brain, and can become a danger to my body. It pulls us away from the plan that God has for our sexuality. And yes, I believe that God does have a plan and a purpose for our sexuality. That feeling I had when I first looked at porn was more of a sorrow than a guilt. I believe it came from the heart of God which is inside of me,I’m very sure that this moment was one that my heavenly father had been dreading, and very likely mourned. It was probably very much like a father whose son starts doing heroin and eventually ends up on the streets. Any good father would want so much more than homelessness for his boy. We are designed for better, even if we aren’t taught to think so. And here is where much of the problem lies. We as a culture do not care about pornography because we are not educated on its effects. We also didn’t care about cigarettes, even our doctors prescribed them to just about everybody for just about everything until we found that they cause cancer and can literally kill you. What will it take for us to turn around and come up against an industry that is crippling our generation? If we as a culture don’t see pornography as a problem then we will get nowhere. Until we can learn to recognize pornography for what it is, and the damage that it causes, there is very little point in trying to stop using it. After all, the seed of the problem is rooted in our own minds. We cannot kill it by simply cutting off its branches, it will never fail to grow back. If we can search that seed out and expose it for what it is, then we can work on changing our minds and coming back to a healthy view of sex. I believe that Jesus makes this feat possible. Not easy, but definitely possible.