Generation Porn 09 & 10

 The impact of porn on lives is significant. Here are just two more reasons to stop watching / using porn.

9.             Porn wastes your time and energy (p35)

Think about a meal. You feel hungry, you consume the mean and then you feel satisfied. Twenty minutes later, you feel full and you don’t want to eat anymore. Think about porn. You feel a desire, you consume porn, but you don't’ feel satisfied. Porn doesn’t deliver. Twenty minutes later, you still feel empty and you still want more.

Porn promises so much, but doesn’t deliver. So you find yourself on an endless quest for the perfect image.  . . Hours go by.

Hours wasted. Staying up late at night and then struggling through the next day. Inability to concentrate.

Improved concentration and memory are among the most commonly reported post-porn benefits, and they may be explained by the reversal of addiction-related brain changes. (Other frequently reported benefits after giving up highspeed porn are decreased social anxiety and depression, greater attraction to real mates, seeing potential partners as people rather than sex-aids, and return to earlier sexual tastes.)

In short, porn users who quit porn and then notice improvements in concentration and memory aren't imagining those improvements. The evidence suggests the improvements come down to the reversal of addiction-related alterations in the brain.

http://yourbrainonporn.com/no-porn-better-working-memory

10.             Porn weakens your relationship with God (p10)

King Solomon’s reign was great . . . but his reign began to unravel because of his sexual sin. 1 Kings 11 tells us Solomon ‘loved many foreign women’.

Comments from porn users;

·      It has really deadened relationship with Jesus and robbed me of joy.

·      It definitely stopped me having a close relationship with God. I experienced such joy after stopping, and my prayer life has been reinvigorated.

·      When I hear the word ‘sin’ I hear it to mean pornography.

Porn also robs you of your assurance of salvation.

·      Feeling ashamed to pray for forgiveness

·      Feeling scared to read your Bible

·      Doubting someone truly saved could struggle with such a sin

Generation Porn 07 & 08

In this series I am sharing a workshop that my wife and I conducted at a Summer Camp at the end of 2014. In it we gave 12 reasons to stop looking at porn, and once again, acknowledge Tim Chester as the writer of the book which was most helpful in our preparation.

So far I have shared six reasons to stop looking at porn. They are:

1. Porn wrecks your view of sex.
2. Porn wrecks your view of women.
3. Porn wrecks women's view of themselves.
4. The porn industry abuses women.
5. Porn is a sin against your wife.
6. Porn wrecks families. 

Before I start on the next section, it is worth noting that reasons 1-6 focus on the impact of porn on other people, while reasons 7-12 will focus on porn's impact on us and our relationship to God and his people.

So, with that in mind, here are reasons seven and eight.

7.             Porn is enslaving (p32)

“Death and destruction are never satisfied, and neither are they eyes of man” Pr 27:20

There is NO truth to the saying ‘it doesn’t hurt anyone.’ It hurts you.

“I kept resolving not to do it again”, says Ahmed, “only to be out buying porn the next weekend. It felt like I needed to do it to relive he desire and get it out of the system.”

Here’s a statement from one bloke who chose to give up porn:

“I feel like the next Sir Isaac Newton or Leonardo da Vinci!

Since I quit a month ago, I've literally: started a business, taken up piano, been studying French every day, been programming, drawing, writing, started managing my finances, and have more awesome ideas than I know what to do with. My confidence is sky high. I already feel like I can talk to any girl. I’m the same guy who took 2 and a 1/2 extra years to graduate from college - because of procrastination and depression.”

Gary Wilson “The Great Porn Experiment”

Porn promises so much, but it can’t truly deliver, so it leaves you wanting more – more quantity and more extreme activity.

Chester writes: Recently I heard of a Christian leader who was caught looking at child porn in an internet café. The police were called, and no he faces a prison sentence. His marriage is wrecked, perhaps irretrievably. He has been in Christian ministry for more than thirty years. You don’t think this could be you? He never thought porn would take over his life. He never started out with an interest in child porn. But porn gradually drew him deeper and deeper in.

8.             Porn erodes your character (p34)

King David didn’t decide one day to commit murder. He was on the roof of his house and let his eyes wander. And then his heart wandered. At this point he had no thoughts of murder, but sin was desensitizing him.

When you first use porn, you have to push past your conscience. Your conscience screams at you to stop. But you block your ears and close your heart . . . Gradually you’ll find it easier to use porn, as your conscience becomes a dull echo in the recesses of your heart.

Generation Porn 05 & 06

5.             Porn is a sin against your wife (p28)

Studies of women married to porn users have found it has a devastating impact: ‘effects such as fatigue, changes in appetite and libido, and other signs and symptoms of anxiety and depression, including suicidality’.

How does she feel?

·      Am I the reason he uses porn? (I’m not attractive enough)

·      He doesn’t care about me. (If he love me, he wouldn’t hurt me this way)

·      The relationship is a farce (We pretend it’s fine, but the relationship is sick)

You will start to view sex with your wife not as the celebration of your love, but as re-enacted porn.

If you’re not yet married, porn is a sin against your future wife.  You’re already committing adultery against a wife with whom you’re not even yet married. . . and you’re gifting the devil a reservoir of temptation to use against you.

“I’ll stop when I get married” Using porn is a bad way of preparing not to use it when you are married.”

6.             Porn wrecks families (p31)

There is NO truth to the saying ‘It doesn’t hurt anyone’. It hurts families

Porn is a cancer, eating away at your marriage and your enjoyment of marriage.

“Porn wrecks marriages.” That’s the conclusion of divorce lawyer Marcia Maddox. Among the five lawyers in her office, there’s always a case involving pornography being worked on at any given time.

56% of divorce cases involved one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites

http://xxxchurch.com/stats

“Because of pornography, I was aware that mom was not the only woman you were looking at. I became acutely aware of your wandering eye when we were out and about. This taught me that all men have a wandering eye and can’t be trusted. I learned to distrust and even dislike men for the way they perceived women in this way.”

http://www.churchleaders.com/outreach-missions/outreach-missions-articles/177023-luke-geraty-open-letter-to-the-dad-looking-at-porn.html

Porn endangers children.  If it’s at home, it’s likely to be found. And what impact does it have on the kids if they discover dad looking at porn.

Generation Porn 03 & 04

Since my notes for part 3 were quite short, I decided to put 3&4 up together.

At the end of this post, I make a brief comment about a link between human-trafficking and pornography. For a painful video that helps to make that clearer, click here. Or here. Or search #refusetoclick on Facebook.

3.             Porn wrecks women’s view of themselves (p26)

The pressure on women to have bodies that match those of the movie and porn actresses is immense.

“How can a real woman – with pores and her own breasts and even sexual needs of her own . . . possibly compete with a cybervision of perfection, downloadable and extinguishable at will, who comes, so to speak, utterly submissive and tailored to the consumer’s least specification? “ Naomi Wolf “The Porn Myth” - 2003

4.             The porn industry abuses women (26)

The reality is that participants in porn movies are frequently on drugs to dull the pain. It is common for women to vomit between shoots.

. . . The purpose of high powered drugs for most porn performers is to numb themselves, enabling them to blurrily fast-forward through the punishment they’re putting their bodies through so that their minds can’t catch up with the consequences until much later, assuming they live that long.

We might think that Chester is just trying to scare us with his stories and statistics about drug use amongst porn makers. But here is something else:

Internet Porn Statistics

• Average life expectancy of a porn star is 36.2 years
• 208 porn stars died prematurely from aids, drugs, suicide, homicide, accidental and medical since 2003
• #1 suicide method among porn stars is by hanging
• 67 porn stars that we know of committed suicide  
• 66% of porn performers have Herpes, a non-curable disease.  
• 2,396 cases of Chlamydia and 1,389 cases of Gonorrhea reported among performers since 2004.  
• Over 100 straight and gay performers died from AIDS.  
• 36 porn stars died that we know of from HIV, suicide, homicide and drugs between 2007 and 2010.  
• https://www.thepinkcross.org/porn-statistics

Sex trafficking is an issue here as well.

Generation Porn 02

This is the second of twelve reasons to give up porn. There is so much more that could be said under this title than we did. But these few paragraphs are pretty confronting anyway.

1.             Porn wrecks your view of women (24)

Have you ever scored the physical features of a woman? Perhaps with your friends you’ve given a woman an eight out of ten for her breasts, or ranked women at work according to their appearance.

A number of studies have found that people exposed to pornographic material were significantly less sympathetic towards victims of rape.

The following is perhaps an extreme example, but hear the truth of it; particularly the last sentence:

“There is a girl I recruited when she was 18—a beautiful girl. I knew that she would make a lot of money. She did make a lot of money. She became successful. We shared the profits with her on the website that we made. When she would be out at parties, guys assumed that she was a “porn star” even though, at that time, she had actually not even engaged in anything sexual with another person. She was just posing nude alone and just doing videos alone. They assumed that since she was a porn star, they could take whatever they wanted from her, and she now has a child whom she will never know who the father is. She was passed out at a party one time, and they just took what they wanted.

This happened over and over again to different girls—not necessarily being raped like that, but guys just assuming when they walk up to them at a bar that this girl must be easy and willing to give whatever I want.”

(Donny Pauling, The Hardcore Truth, Covenant Eyes, p11)

Imagine you learn that someone from school / Uni appeared in an episode of Neighbours, or was on X Factor. Would that change the way you view that person? 

What if you learned that this person had done some porn videos? Would that change the way you viewed that person?

Generation Porn 01

At the PYV Summer Camp at the end of 2014, my wife Anne and I conducted a workshop on the issue of pornography. Why would we do such a workshop at a Christian Camp? If you were to ask that question seriously, I would tell you that you don't know much about Christian youth.

Anyway, I thought I should share some of that workshop more widely. So here it begins.

The twelve points here come from Tim Chester's book "Captured by a better vision" published by IVP. An excellent book that I have referred to before. There is so much more to this book than the twelve points I made use of here, but these were helpful for my workshop.

As this would be enormously long as a blog if I put all twelve points up in one hit, I'll put them up one at a time.

If you would like a pdf copy of the whole thing, click here and you should be able to get it from my dropbox folder.

Here's part 01:

 A few months ago I heard the story of a man who was on a train in another country, and after sitting down he saw a sign opposite him that said “No spitting on the train”. He said afterwards, “As I read that sign I could feel the phlegm rising in the back of my throat.”

It is our hope that you won’t just hear us say “Don’t watch porn!” Instead, we hope to tell you what will likely happen to you if you do and that you will then choose something better.

We’re going to spend some time answering your questions first of all. Then we will give you 12 reasons to give up porn. In this you will see just something of the way that Porn is re-wiring brains of your generation. Finally, we’re going to split up. Anne will talk with the girls and I will talk with the boys.

Here’s a comment I heard again this week that I want you to remember:

“Internet porn is not sex. Internet porn is as different from real sex as today's video games are from checkers.” Gary Wilson – The Great Porn Experiment (5:30)

12 Reasons to give up porn

(Taken from Captured by a Better Vision, Tim Chester, IVP, 2010)

1.             Porn wrecks your view of sex (p21)

The sex in porn is not real sex. It’s not how real people make love.

One porn actress said, “t’s not how it seems on the videos. It’s work, and we have to be in very awkward positions for guys to see the action. It’s not real sex. It’s actually like mechanical sex.”

“In real life, sexually speaking, women are crock pots [or slow cookers] and men are microwaves. But in pornography all a man does is touch a woman and she’s howling in delight. Today, pornography is so widely used by young men, they learn these falsehoods. There’s good evidence that the more porn men watch, the less satisfied they are with their partner’s looks and sexual performance.” Sex therapist Aline Zoldbrod.

Many men are getting their sex education from porn. They is where they are learning – or think they’re learning – what women want and how to ‘perform’ good sex. But it’s a rubbish education! Porn will teach you nothing about good sex. Porn only teaches you to be a porn addict.

“This is not what women enjoy. I know. I was in porn and now I’m married, and I guarantee you that marriage sex is by far, leaps and bounds, much better than porn sex.” Shelley Lumbden (Pink Cross Foundation) https://www.thepinkcross.org/pinkcross-videos/november-2011/two-ex-porn-stars-uncover-truth-about-porn  (14:30)

What does frequent exposure to porn bring?

·      A need to see more bizarre and novel material to stay interested

·      Misperceptions about exaggerated sexual activity in general populace

·      Acceptance of promiscuity as a normal state of interaction

·      Believing superior sexual satisfaction is attainable without affection

·      Finding childrearing an unattractive prospect