Pornography

The human body is very personal. You can look at pictures of nude women and men on a million different websites, but if you asked a girl at school to take her clothes off for you in public, she’d consider it an insult and probably think you were emotionally disturbed. There are exceptions, but by and large people prefer to keep their clothes on. It gives them a sense of privacy and dignity. Even in the most primitive cultures, people usually wear loincloths. No missionary taught them to do that, and the tropical climate doesn’t demand it. Our sense of modesty is the universal source of clothing cover.

The human body is certainly beautiful, and can be considered a work of art. Though you could argue that art shouldn’t portray nudes (and it can be difficult to explain in precisely what way a Playboy foldout is different from a Renoir painting), I do think there is a place for nudity in art celebrating the beauty and sensuality of the human body. We all know, however, that people don’t look at pornography on the Internet because they’re interested in art. They look at the pictures to get sexually excited.

God created sex to be an intensely personal communication between a man and a woman who love each other and are committed to that love. Pornography simulates that experience through a “relationship” between a person and an image. We all know it’s a poor substitute for real sex, and doesn’t substitute at all for a relationship of love. Instead it offers instant gratification. It takes time and work to win a woman’s love, to sustain it, and to enrich it over years of romance, commitment, and service. But it only takes a few seconds to look at images on a screen. There is no commitment, no love, no communication, and no mutuality. Only sexual stimulation.

Let’s be realistic. There are lots of things in the world that are worse than pornography. But we need to stay away from it. Why? Like any cheap substitute, pornography detracts from the real thing. If you get used to thinking about sex in the quick, easy, uninvolved Internet way, you’ll have a harder time mustering the energy to take it more seriously in relationships with real live men and women. Pornography is like junk food. It may seem harmless, but it’s habit-forming, and habits are powerful. And it’s ultimately destructive.

Pornography is a sad way to approach our sexual senses. It’s not how we should be relating to each other as human beings, either by posing for the pictures or by looking at them. It’s all around us in our culture, and I think it tends to make us regard each other as objects rather than people. It also arouses lust, and Jesus says (Mt. 5.28) that sexual desire affects the inside of a person. After all, Jesus says, looking at pornography (lusting) is disconnected from any actual personal contact, but it’s not disconnected from your soul. Jesus wants our eyes and our gaze to be as pure as he wants all of us to be pure.

So you’re not going to keep yourself pure with this quick-and-easy view of sex. There’s no question that, especially for guys, visual stimulations are powerful. We need to be careful what we fill our eyes, and therefore our memories, and therefore our hearts with.

Pornography takes something very real, personal, and human, and distorts it. Our sexuality was meant to be expressed in the context of a healthy committed relationship, and pornography is not that. While our sexuality is only one aspect of who we are as human beings, and it needs to be integrated with other aspects, pornography isolates that one human dimension and distorts it by magnifying and minimizing it at the same time.

To say that porn cheapens our sexuality doesn’t go far enough. Porn magnifies human sexuality, distorts it, makes it larger than reality, and isolates it for trade. It makes the magnificence of being a creature made in the image of God something as insignificant as a sheet of paper or a glob on a screen. It’s a most malicious smearing of the divine image in us. Simply put, porn is uncompromising, progressive, destructive evil.

Matthew 5:29 continues the theme: If your eye causes you to sin, sacrifices must be made to stop the sin. Lust can cut you off from Jesus. Our sinful desires have to be tamed at all cost.

These thoughts and words are directly from Tim Stafford, “Love, Sex, and the Whole Person,” Campus Life Magazine. Thank you, Tim, for truth told with such love and care.

Also some quotes are taken from the writing of T.C. Ryan (reference unknown)