Conservative lobbying group Family Research Council has released an extraordinarily damning report exploring the detrimental effects of pornography usage. The research includes one case of a woman who became highly addicted to internet porn after a single “wrong click” opened her young eyes to a world of sexual lies.
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“I’m not being dramatic when I say that one wrong click changed my life … I was instantly taken to a world of seeing men and women treating each other like animals, depicting abusive sex,” the unnamed female addict from Alaska said in the recently released FRC analysis.
“What I saw shocked me, but I couldn’t bring myself to click away from the site because of how the images made me feel,” she shared. “I started going back to it again and again and it quickly started to twist my perception of what was supposed to be love. The images were burned into my mind and I couldn’t get them out.”
She explained how her view of others dramatically changed, and she became frightened by the clear shift in her emotional health and general outlook since she started watching porn.
“I felt nothing; I felt like I couldn’t fully care for people, for my body, for my mind, or for my heart. I just felt numb and hollow all the time. I viewed everyone around me, including myself, as objects. Nobody really mattered except for what I saw in porn,” she added.
To those who are dealing with the very real and all-consuming addiction, the woman offered a message of hope:
“I just want to let anyone else who is struggling with porn to know that you don’t have to cry because you failed last night or today,” she stressed.
Pornography usage is at astonishing levels. As Patrina Mosley, director of Life, Culture and Women’s Advocacy at FRC explained in the report, porn sites get more visitors each month than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined. In terms of numbers, some 76 percent of 18 to 30-year-old American women report that they watch porn at least once a month.
But the report did not just highlight the damage porn can do to those who consume it. There are plenty of dangers for those who choose to enter this sordid industry.
“The pornography industry is highly unregulated, and often performers feel pressure to perform without condoms to remain employed, leaving them and others vulnerable to STD’s and infections,” Mosley noted.
Now, with an increasing percentage of young people watching porn as a form of sexual education, Mosley urged Christians to reclaim the true and beautiful sexuality that God has called us to.
“As Christians, we are the community that can turn against the tide of pornography and renew our sexual culture,” she wrote. “If you have allowed porn to become a part of your life, today can be the start of a new life — the day you decide to purify your heart and mind by refusing to watch another second of it.”
She concluded: “As more and more Christians are set free from porn and are transformed in our hearts and minds, the more we become a community that is able to set the standard for the culture at large. We have the power to determine whether or not pornography will have a market in our homes. If more and more people refuse to view porn, it will decrease the demand not only for pornography, but also for sex trafficking and prostitution.”
Through numerous studies, pornography has been proven to erode healthy human sexual function and is known to ruin relationships. According to TIME, marriages are more than twice as likely to end in divorce if one or both partners begin to consume pornographic material on their own. Private pornography use in marriage breeds secrecy, shame and relational ruin.
And if you think Christians are exempt from the snares of this societal disease, you could not be more wrong. According to an extensive 2016 research project conducted by the Barna group, some 57 percent of pastors admit they struggle with pornography, or have in the past. The figure is even higher for youth pastors, at 64 percent.
With the exponentially increasing availability of free porn, it can be easy to view it as a casual commodity that serves the simple purpose of satisfying a sexual urge. But as we now know, this could not be further from the truth. Porn comes at a tremendous cost to users and countless others. In addition to being personally and spiritually ruinous, it is also shrouded in degradation, abuse, harassment and even slavery.
Let’s remember all these aspects next time we are tempted to engage in a few wayward clicks, and let’s be honest with ourselves and others as we seek to confess and conquer this calamitous sexual addiction that continues to threaten our very lives.
(H/T: FRC)