Sex and Relationships as Happiness Technologies
A significant contradiction lies at the heart of modern identity. On one hand, sexuality has come to be seen as a core marker of our personal identity within the expressive culture of authenticity. Yet the extreme form of personal freedom envisioned by postmodernism has trivialized sex as a sort of happiness drug, detaching it from those social and relational contexts that traditionally gave sex its meaning and its role within our personal identity.
The combined effect of authenticity and postmodernism has created a tendency toward hypersexuality, empowering social phenomena that threaten to entrap much of a generation. To understand how this affects the formation of personal identity and relationships, we first need to briefly compare the Christian and postmodern visions of sexuality.
Defining Christian Sexuality
Christianity views human identity as holistic, in that our sexuality is an essential part of who we are. Despite attempts throughout history to place sexuality at the edge of human personhood, the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection—as well as the divine blessing of marriage—all affirm our embodied existence, including sexuality as essential and ongoing, although we will express it differently in the age to come.1 Our sexuality also goes beyond our physical form to our essential “maleness” and “femaleness.” Modern social sciences have confirmed aspects of male and female sexuality that go beyond our different bodies and reproductive capacities. Sexuality is described broadly as “everything in mind, body and behavior that arise[s] from being male and female.”2 We can draw a distinction between a person’s physical sexuality and what it means to be a gendered being more broadly—that is, our social or affective sexuality.3 Although our culture has sought to “level the playing field” between maleness and femaleness, there are critical differences between how men and women generally relate to each other.
Only when we are attentive to these differences of sexual complementarity, free from hierarchical paranoia, can we build a strong foundation for intimate relationships. The holistic nature of human sexuality means that sex engages us in something deeper and more complex than a mere physical encounter. The biblical metaphor of becoming “one flesh” in marital intimacy is consistent with Scripture’s holistic view of human identity. We are integrated socio-psycho-somatic beings, and since sex engages our whole selves, sex outside of marriage is an act of personal disintegration.
To reduce sexuality to sex is to miss this deeper essence. The greater part of sexuality is affective or social, including our fundamental need for relational intimacy across a broad range of nurturing friendships.4 Confusion in this area leads to crossover between sex and the social expression of our broader sexuality. There is, though, an important difference between “desire for sex,” which is a physical urge, and “sexual desire,” or eros, which covers a broad range of human longing, including our yearning to know our Creator.
It is important for Christians to differentiate between these two senses psychologically, emotionally, and in our practical lives.5 One important aspect in which “sexual desire” is different from “desire for sex” is in what we actually express through sex. The Christian conviction is that in sex we express a desire to join with another person in a deep and complex interweaving as “embodied souls and ensouled bodies,” to borrow Karl Barth’s expression. The complementary nature of male and female sexuality, as a composite image of God, provides both the drive and direction to express our full humanity, meaning that we are drawn beyond ourselves to each other because of our God-ordained differences.6
Postmodern Sexual Expression
In contrast to this Christian perspective, postmodern secular notions of personhood locate our essential identity in our nature as free-choosing beings. This allows us to separate actions, including sex, from our essential self. We can “self-actualize” through sexual expression, but our freedom to do whatever we want—rather than the type of act we choose or with whom we choose to do it—is the core of who we are. When postmodernism’s extreme view of personal freedom joins forces with sexual expression, three specific radical freedoms arise: the instrumentalist view of sex, the reshaping of female desire, and, perhaps most significant, the tsunami of cyberporn.
Radical Freedom 1: Unshackling Sex
Outside the church, there is little substantive basis on which to discuss sexual values today. Yet the void created by this new moral ecology is also profoundly influencing Christian ways of thinking and living. The only moral constraint our culture seems to accept in this area is that sexual expression between “adults” should be free and consensual, without any force or manipulation. If people want to have sex and the feeling is mutual, who could object? This approach, which misinterprets both sex itself and the sort of desire expressed in it, is founded on four important myths.7
First, this perspective rests on the foundational belief that sexual desire is simply the longing for a certain type of sensory, physical pleasure. Sex is said to be a natural appetite like eating, and so sexual craving merely seeks to satisfy this physical hunger; it is not anchored in any deeper and more holistic desire toward another person. According to this myth, we could just as easily satisfy this hunger in another way or with another person. By oversimplifying sex, this belief makes it coherent both intellectually and morally within the modern worldview: sex serves a clear physical purpose by satisfying a natural urge, and the lack of any moral imperative frees us from the complicated responsibilities and expectations of relationships. If the other person freely agrees to it, then we have no further obligations.
An important aspect of this myth is the conviction that there is no fallout or cost from sex with “no strings attached.” We can walk away from these encounters unscathed and undiminished. The feminist author Naomi Wolf describes a characteristic discussion about sex and relationships with students at a major university. One young woman explained, “We are so tightly scheduled, why get to know someone first? It is a waste of time. If you hook-up, you can get your needs met and get on your way.” The guys agreed. As one said, “Things are always a little tense and uncomfortable when you just start seeing someone. I prefer to have sex right away just to get it over with. You know it’s going to happen anyway, and it gets rid of the tension.” When Wolf queried whether this removes some of the mystery of sex, he looked at her blankly. “Mystery? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sex has no mystery.”8 Tragically, this jaundiced view of intimate relationships is becoming accepted within mainstream youth culture.
The second myth builds on the first. If sex is just about physical pleasure—a happiness technology—then the key to fulfillment is to maximize and intensify this sensation by perfecting technique. The key, then, is not what we express in sex but how we experience it. We become performers and consumers rather than genuine participants.
The third myth expresses the influential belief that if we “repress” our sexual urges, it will harm us psychologically. Freud gave birth to this view with his hydraulic imagery of sexual desire as a powerfully flowing internal spring that needs an outlet. We can suppress it for a while, but in the end, if we don’t give it positive expression, it will find another way out. Indeed, the longer we shut off and repress our sexual urges, the more serious the dysfunctional eruption is likely to be. Freud’s compelling imagery has had a lasting influence on Western culture. Put simply, sexual restraint is like bottling unbearable stress, whereas free sexual expression leads to health and maturity.
Finally, there is a focus within modern culture on freeing ourselves from “negative” or “unhealthy” attitudes and feelings such as guilt, shame, or regret. These feelings are deemed to come from the judgmental views of others, which we internalize and negatively associate with our sex lives. The popular response is to “demystify” sex and to enjoy it as one of life’s natural and morally neutral pleasures (witness myth 1). Much modern sex education has focused on teaching young people to reject the irrational guilt they feel in relation to sex and to do what comes naturally. Our only responsibility is to check off a few moral prerequisites, keeping sex consensual and “safe” from pregnancy and disease.
None of this would matter if sex were, in reality, trivial. But nothing could be further from the truth. Sexual intimacy engages our whole selves in a complex way that we cannot fully account for. Undermining the gravity of sex trivializes what sex symbolizes and weakens the bond it consummates—the loving, exclusive, and permanent union between a man and woman in marriage. This plays into the contingent nature of many relationships, which are sustained only if they continue to satisfy each party in the narrow terms of emotional, physical, and psychological happiness.
Radical Freedom 2: The “Liberation” of Female Desire
Another influential trend within contemporary sexuality is the changing expectations of female desire.9 Some radical strains of feminism in the 1960s saw sexual freedom as a form of female emancipation from the stifling patriarchal culture of the 1950s. Within the brave new world of the sexual revolution, men and women met together in sex as equals, freed from their traditional gender roles.10 Indeed, Tom Wolfe notes that various shades of feminism encouraged women to be just as bold and active as men when it came to sexual exploration.11 Nothing typified this more than the popular sitcom Sex in the City, which ran for sixteen years. It was a cultural revelation to watch four female friends sow their wild oats across Manhattan in a way that self-consciously resembled traditional male sexuality.
All this has radically changed the dynamics, expectations, and resilience of romantic relationships. Traditionally, female modesty was viewed as an important check on the more unruly nature of male sexual desire. An age-old bargain allowed men and women to trade sexual intimacy for different goals—men primarily to satiate sexual desire, and women to secure relational intimacy and commitment. Sociologist Helen Fisher observes that in the Western world today, as compared to earlier times and other cultures, women begin having sex earlier, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners they leave, marry later, have fewer children, and leave bad marriages in order to find good ones.12
Tom Wolfe describes the upending of sexual expectations for young women in particular. “Today,” he says, “from age thirteen, American girls [are] under pressure to maintain a façade of sexual experience and sophistication. Among girls, ‘virgin’ [has become] a term of contempt.”13 A major independent study commissioned by the UK government describes the threat posed by this early sexualization of young people, especially girls. The author concludes:
While sexualised images have featured in advertising and communications since mass media first emerged, what we are seeing now is an unprecedented rise in both the volume and the extent to which these images are impinging on everyday life. Increasingly, too, children are being portrayed in “adultified” ways while adult women are “infantilised.” This leads to a blurring of the lines between sexual maturity and immaturity and, effectively, legitimises the notion that children can be related to as sexual objects.14
This is an important trend because research confirms that women generally determine when a relationship becomes sexual. As Regnerus and Uecker conclude, “The bottom line is this: women are the sexual gatekeepers within their relationships.”15 Yet the authors also note that women don’t feel in control of their sexual decisions today because the “sexual market” they are moving within is changing and redrawing expectations. Ironically, with the so-called liberation of female desire, these expectations have become much more tailored to men’s sexual interests than to women’s.16 Indeed, playing by the rules of male desire weakens the legitimate hopes of genuine female sexuality—for love, security, commitment, and, in most cases, family. To the significant detriment of young women, the “price” for sex has become very low among young adults in America within the paradigm of the “sex-relationship bargain,” with most relationships involving sex within the first five months (70 percent for men, 62 percent for women) and a significant proportion within the first two weeks (36 percent for men, 21.6 percent for women).17
What does this bold new world actually offer young women? Modern sex education has focused on the physical risks of sex, almost completely ignoring its influence on emotional and spiritual well-being. And research reveals that despite the bold promises of Sex and the City, young women experience most of the emotional fallout of our culture’s “relaxed” sexual ethic. Whereas young men’s emotional well-being seems almost unaffected by their sexual conquests, young women experience a close connection between sexual experience and poorer emotional health.
Regnerus and Uecker have found that “a sustained pattern of serial monogamy—implying a series of failed relationships—hurts women far more than it hurts men.”18 As they observe, “‘No strings attached’ language is ubiquitous in contemporary sexual scripts, but it’s largely a fiction. For most women, the strings are what makes sex good.”19 This is borne out in the authors’ extensive interviews. The common testimony of sexually experienced college women, the researchers say, is a narrative of regret. Indeed, a 2005 study found that young women who had had multiple sex partners were eleven times more likely than virgins to report elevated depressive symptoms.20 As Regnerus and Uecker put it, “Drinking ‘medicates’ depression for many Americans yet is itself a depressant. The same may be true for disconnected sex.”21 The popular script that encourages “sex without security” just doesn’t cash out in reality, despite our culture’s enthusiastic embrace of this approach.
Radical Freedom 3: Pornography as Sex Education
We cannot talk meaningfully about modern sexuality without considering the advent of online pornography, which has allowed the sex industry to reach far beyond its natural hunting ground in red light districts or on the top shelves of local stores. For many people, Christian or otherwise, pornography is deeply influencing their vision of sexuality and relationships.22 Family therapist Jill Manning says online pornography is altering the cultural zeitgeist and the lives of men, women, and children in ways we may not fully appreciate until our society has paid significant personal and social costs.23 As one study puts it, “The influence of the internet on sexuality is likely to be so significant that it will ultimately be recognized as the cause of the next ‘sexual revolution.’”24 In particular, Manning says that the pervasive power of pornography has made it the primary sexual educator of today’s adolescents.25 Many of the young women she has worked with dislike the fact that young men use pornography, but they are conflicted about how to reject the men’s behavior while also trying to compete for their romantic attention. Young women no longer have allure and mystery on their side, as young men are inundated with unrealistic images of sexually engaged females. This has dramatically altered the flirtatious dance between the sexes.26
Yet it is of grave concern to researchers and professionals that there is so little popular discussion about online pornography’s harm to people and their relationships. Indeed, the Western world has embarked on a bold social experiment to leave pornography essentially uncensored, on the basis of the quintessentially modern idea that each person’s right to privacy and freedom of consumption sweeps away all other considerations. There is also a common belief, encouraged by the popular media, that pornography is primarily a positive force; allegedly it can relieve stress, reduce pressure on marriages caused by different sexual expectations, and even inject a sense of adventure into a couple’s sex life. The popular message is that pornography is everywhere, it is good for you, and it is good for your relationship. It is hip, sexy, and fun.
The Rising Tide of Pornography
Pornography as Pop Culture: Fast Sex for a Fast-Food Nation
The scale of online pornography today is staggering. Nielsen ratings reported that in January 2010 more than a quarter of internet users in the United States, almost 60 million people, visited a pornographic website. Incredibly, this number does not take into account the staggering amount of pornography that is distributed through peer-to-peer downloading networks, shared hard drives, internet chat rooms, and message boards.27 Time journalist Pamela Paul details the broad and increasing reach of pornography:
Americans rent upwards of 800 million pornographic videos and DVDs (about one in five of all rented movies is porn), and the 11,000 porn films shot each year far outpaces Hollywood’s yearly slate of 400. Four billion dollars a year is spent on video pornography in the United States, more than on football, baseball, and basketball. One in four internet users look at a pornography website in any given month. Men look at pornography online more than they look at any other subject. And 66% of 18–34-year-old men visit a pornographic site every month.28
Despite our culture’s easy acceptance of pornography, a growing tide of researchers, counselors, neuroscientists, pastors, and other professionals are ringing alarm bells on the basis of the devastating effects of pornography they see in their clinics, churches, and research studies. Some describe it as the “new tobacco.” Just as most people considered smoking benign before the mid-1960s, there is a similar disconnect between scientific research and popular perspectives regarding the influence of pornography.
The meteoric rise and acceptance of pornography also highlights a stunning cultural contradiction. In an age where we expect our daughters to be treated with unprecedented dignity, respect, and equality by their male peers, we have handed the sexual formation of our young people to the sex industry with its dark vision of sex and relationships. Christian leaders need to be at the vanguard of replacing these misperceptions about pornography with reality, starting within our own congregations. Yet we are tempted to ignore the issue because it lurks beneath the surface. The strong stigma of shame attached to pornography means that we will only see it if we are deeply involved in the confessional lives of others. The sad truth is that whether we see it or not, pornography has become a major issue for many people within the church.
As part of a course focused on relationships at our church in London, we conducted an anonymous survey of around five hundred young people in their twenties and thirties within the congregation. The results confirmed our suspicions about the depth to which our culture’s approach to sexuality has also become our problem within the church. Consistent with what we discovered, broader surveys show that many Christians, including pastors, struggle with pornography as a problematic habit or compulsive addiction. Indeed, we were most surprised by the number of young women who reported having problems in this area, which also is consistent with trends within the broader culture. These problems may well be exacerbated by the combination of prolonged singleness within the church and Scripture’s emphasis on sexual restraint. For many young Christians, sexual fantasy is seen as the only outlet for these strong impulses. Indeed, the apostle Paul acknowledged this bind with his pragmatic counsel that it is better to marry than to burn with lust.29 Pornography may well be an issue we would prefer to avoid, but its broad reach within the church means that we must address it in order to disciple people effectively.
The Meteoric Rise and Potency of Cybersex
To understand how online pornography has become a major problem in such a short time, we need to appreciate its characteristics and dynamics, which are fundamentally different from earlier forms of pornography from just fifteen or twenty years ago. It is now significantly more available, more neurologically powerful, and more extreme than it used to be. The relatively recent expansion of high-speed internet, wi-fi, and 4G cell networks, combined with almost no online censorship and “no cost” models for explicit content, has made multimedia pornography an integral part of mainstream culture. The three As of the internet drive consumption—availability, accessibility, and anonymity.30
Besides these developments, the type of pornography being consumed has changed in two important senses: its neurological power and its tendency toward hard-core content. As regards the increased potency of pornography, neuroscience has established that the richer the media—such as high-definition, hyperrealistic moving pictures—the more powerful the effect, particularly on the male brain. This helps to explain why contemporary pornography seems more addictive than earlier forms. Online pornography also naturally drives viewers toward increasingly hard-core forms. Automatic pop-ups and linked advertisements create a fast-moving dynamic environment, which tantalizes the user in the heat of the moment to journey into unintended and increasingly extreme areas.
This progressive dynamic means that all online pornography tends toward the hard-core, often taking people to places they had no intention of going when they set out. Clinicians make a distinction here between the decisions we make in “cold” and “hot” states. Because cyberpornography offers dynamic and open-ended choices during “hot” or heightened states, it quickly drives users to places they would reject without question in a cold state. Most people who have developed a compulsive habit in this area confirm this progressive movement from “soft-core” erotica into increasingly extreme imagery and scenarios. In this way, scenes that would initially offend or horrify them soon become acceptable and even desirable.31
Pornography and the Plastic Brain
Online pornography is particularly effective in encouraging this journey toward hard-core content because it hijacks a well-understood process in human conditioning.32 Psychiatrist and neuroscientist Norman Doidge explains this progressive journey in terms of how the brain changes through regular use of pornography. The “addictiveness” of pornography, he says, is not a metaphor; people can become addicted to behaviors as well as substances.33 All addiction involves long-term, sometimes permanent “neuroplastic” change in the brain. The power of addictive substances/behaviors lies in their hijacking of our dopamine system, so that they give us pleasure without our having to work for it.34
Dopamine, known as the “pleasure chemical,” is an important neurotransmitter and plays a significant role in permanent changes to the brain. It is involved in reinforcing natural behaviors like eating, drinking, and sex, while it is also the main neurotransmitter stimulated by most addictive drugs. Dopamine is released during sexual excitement, increasing the sex drive in both men and women and activating the brain’s pleasure centers. Dopamine’s key role in both sex and addiction underscores the magnetic force of pornography.
In terms of changing our brains, Doidge explains that the same surge of dopamine that thrills us also reinforces the attachment to the behavior that enabled us to accomplish our goal. Put simply, when sexual arousal becomes connected to viewing pornography, these two activities become strongly associated in our brains. The more we engage in the habit, the more these connections are fused together in our neural circuits. These channels in our brains become automatic pathways through which sexual interactions, whether digital or real, are routed. Repeated exposure to explicit imagery creates a one-way neurological superhighway, whereby a person’s mental life becomes oversexualized and narrow.
Doidge describes this as a “use it or lose it” brain, which means that we long to keep these maps activated once we have developed them. He summarizes this journey into addiction in compelling terms:
The men at their computers looking at porn were uncannily like the rats in the cages of the National Institute of Health, pressing the bar to get a shot of dopamine or its equivalent. Though they didn’t know it, they had been seduced into pornographic training sessions that met all the conditions required for plastic change of brain maps. Since neurons that fire together wire together, these men got massive amounts of practice wiring these images into the pleasure centers of the brain, with the rapt attention necessary for plastic change. They imagined these images when away from their computers, or while having sex with their girlfriends, reinforcing them. Each time they felt sexual excitement and had an orgasm when they masturbated, a “spritz of dopamine,” the reward neurotransmitter, consolidated the connections made in the brain during the sessions. Not only did the reward facilitate the behavior; it provoked none of the embarrassment they felt purchasing Playboy at a store. Here was a behavior with no “punishment,” only reward. The content of what they found exciting changed as the Web sites introduced themes and scripts that altered their brains without their awareness. Because plasticity is competitive, the brain maps for new, exciting images at the expense of what had previously attracted them—the reason, I believe, they began to find their girlfriends less of a turn-on.35
Pamela Paul describes in practical detail how these addictive habits played out in the real lives of several hundred men she interviewed:
Men told me that they found themselves wasting countless hours looking at pornography on their televisions and DVD players, and especially online. They looked at things they would have once considered appalling. . . . They found the way they looked at women in real life warping to fit the pornography fantasies they consumed onscreen. . . . They worried about the way they saw their daughters and girls their daughters’ age. It wasn’t only their sex lives that suffered—pornography’s effects rippled out, touching all aspects of their existence. Their work days became interrupted, their hobbies were tossed aside, their family lives were disrupted. Some men even lost their jobs, their wives, and their children. The sacrifice is enormous.36
As William Struthers explains, the one-way “neurological superhighway” created by viewing pornography has many on-ramps but almost no off-ramps. It is built for speed and hemmed in by high containment walls that make escape almost impossible. No wonder, then, that online pornography has drawn so many into its addictive snare.37
A Shadowy Harem of Imaginary Brides
All this leads us to the important question: How does pornography affect our vision of and approach to relationships?
One of the most destructive effects of online pornography is on marriages. Married men outnumber single men in internet use. Research suggests, surprisingly, that the majority of people struggling with sexual addictions and compulsive online habits are married men.38 This trend is not just harming marriages; it’s destroying them. Family lawyers are seeing a growing influence of pornography in divorces. At a meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers—comprising the nation’s top sixteen hundred divorce and matrimonial law attorneys—nearly two-thirds said they had seen a sudden increase in divorces related to the internet, with 56 percent of their divorce cases involving one party having an obsessive interest in online pornography. The association’s president noted, “Eight years ago, pornography played almost no role in divorces in this country. Today, there are a significant number of cases where it plays a definite part in marriages breaking up.”39
The real tragedy for marriages is that pornography not only hurts a relationship but also changes the individual’s sexual character, that is, his or her fundamental capacity to enter into and sustain genuine intimacy and love. The most powerful deception of cyberporn is its promise to fulfill desire while ultimately killing it. The most ironic fallout of the pursuit of sexual gratification online is that it can render the chronic user incapable of the very sexual satisfaction he or she is seeking.
Doidge relates that many of the men he treated had become so dependent on extreme explicit imagery to arouse them that they were no longer attracted enough to their wives to be intimate with them.40 At other times, as these men tried to focus on their wives, their minds would be flooded with scenes from their computer screens, like unwanted guests. Sex and pornography had become wired together in their brains. This echoes the musician John Mayer’s observation that real life can no longer compete with fantasy. Pamela Paul also recounts that “countless men” she interviewed, including those who remained avid fans of pornography, described how their habit had destroyed their ability to relate to or be close to women. The habit became impossible to control, even when they could see its destructive effects on their interpersonal relationships.41 Naomi Wolf puts it succinctly:
The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity. After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian. An orgasm is one of the biggest reinforcers imaginable. If you associate orgasm with your wife, a kiss, a scent, a body, that is what, over time, will turn you on; if you open your focus to an endless stream of ever-more-transgressive images of cybersex slaves, that is what it will take to turn you on. The ubiquity of sexual images does not free erōs but dilutes it.42
This dynamic is difficult to reverse. As one philosopher puts it, when people begin to lose confidence in their ability to enjoy sex in any other way than through fantasy, then the fear of desire arises, and from that fear, the fear of love. This is the deeper, more essential risk posed by pornography. Those who become addicted to “risk free” sex face the ultimate risk: the loss of love.
C. S. Lewis describes the ironic narrowing effect of sexual fantasy on a man’s personal identity and capacity to love. Something that promises limitless frontiers of sexual discovery and satisfaction leads instead into a dead-end canyon. As Lewis describes,
For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it takes an appetite which, in lawful [i.e., proper] use, leads the individual out of himself to complete (and correct) his own personality in that of another (and finally in children and grandchildren) and turns it back: sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides. And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman. For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival. Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity. In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself. . . . After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in.43
This is one of the core contradictions of today’s hypersexualized culture. In the quest for personal freedom, we have created small, dark prisons of our own choosing.
Changing the Rules of Engagement for Dating and Relationships
Another significant aspect of pornography is that it actually shifts our sexual preferences and practices. It shapes what men expect and what women are willing to accept as the rules of engagement for dating and relationships. Online pornography is changing the moral climate and expectations regarding sexuality, both within the church and the culture at large. Overwhelming evidence from a wide array of research studies confirms that consuming pornography re-forms male expectations of what is normal, meaning the perception of “what everybody else is doing.”
A research study among first-year college students found that regular consumers of pornography developed the impression that people were generally far more promiscuous than they actually are. This led these same users to believe that sexual exclusivity is unrealistic and that sexual inactivity is bad for one’s health. Not surprisingly, they developed cynical attitudes about love, affection, and marriage and family.44
All this would be of less concern if pornography were not becoming so broadly accepted. In one of the most rigorous and reliable studies in this area, researchers interviewed 813 emerging adults aged 18 to 26 from six colleges and universities. Two-thirds of the men agreed that pornography was “generally acceptable,” while half of the women agreed. But the genders split more significantly on usage. Of the young men, 86 percent reported that they “interacted” with pornography at least once per month, and about half watched it weekly. Of the women, 69 percent said they never watched porn, while only 3 percent said they watched it weekly.45 These findings are of particular concern because our attitudes toward sex and relationships eventually and inevitably shape our actions.
Disproportionate Impact on Young People
Although we are aware of the negative effects of pornography across the board, it is particularly harmful during the sexual formation of children and pre- or early adolescents. An important reality is that kids absorb explicit imagery differently than adults. Not only are their brains more susceptible to establishing new patterns of thought, but their minds are quite literal. Not just young children but even young teenagers are generally too unsophisticated to adequately differentiate between fantasy and reality. Sadly, they can absorb direct, unfiltered sexual lessons from pornography. They learn what women are meant to look like, how they should act, and what they are supposed to enjoy. They absorb these lessons keenly, emulating people they perceive as role models. Not surprisingly, the younger the age of exposure and the more hard-core the material, the more intense the effect on a person’s sexual formation. Boys who look at pornography excessively become men who connect arousal purely with generic physical appearance, losing the ability to become attracted by the particular features of a given partner. As a teenage boy casually explained in an interview with the New York Times, “Who needs the hassle of dating when I’ve got online porn?”46
This sexual misformation is a serious problem because of pornography’s increasingly pervasive intrusion into children’s lives. No longer like stumbling across an uncle’s stash of Playboy magazines in the garden shed, the game has changed. Smartphones and other mobile devices make hard-core pornography available in classrooms and playgrounds, as well as in children’s bedrooms and at friends’ houses. The statistics are frightening. Family therapists witness to the popularity of pornography among preadolescents, who are increasingly being treated for compulsive habits in this area.47 A 2004 study by Columbia University found that 11.5 million American teenagers (45 percent) have friends who regularly view internet pornography. The prevalence of teens with friends who consume pornography increases with age and is likelier among boys. In one study, 65 percent of boys aged 16 and 17 reported that they had friends who regularly viewed and downloaded internet pornography.
A government watchdog in Britain recently reported an alarming survey of fourteen-year-olds in one local authority (essentially a large suburb). The survey found that every boy and half of the girls had viewed pornography.48 This research supports the fear of parents, teachers, and pastors that pornography has infected the innocence of modern childhood. As Mark Regnerus says, “School-based sex education is being replaced as authoritative by uncensored and unchallenged sexual content on the internet. Parents, educators, and politicians are truly fiddling while Rome burns.”49
Concluding Thoughts: Ask No Questions, Hear No Lies
We have been slow to realize the extent to which internet pornography, as well as the broader “pornification” of culture, is changing the game in terms of sexual formation. Now more than ever, there is an urgent need to talk about sex in our churches and ministry contexts in a way that engages the spirit of the age. The distorted sexual formation and expectations offered by the internet en masse are difficult to exaggerate. They pose an enormous risk to our young people, this generation of “digital natives.”50
In many ways, internet pornography’s power lies in its invisibility. Rather than presenting itself as an obvious problem, it is more like a hidden cancer that spreads silently through each organ until we discover that the body is riddled with it. The church has tended to adopt something like a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach in this sensitive area. But our lack of attentiveness does not stop the cancer from spreading. Instead, it allows more of those under our care to fall into pornography’s cycle of shame, addiction, and despair.
The Christian vision of personhood sees each of us as a whole self—mind, body, and spirit. Sexual intimacy involves the complex and all-encompassing interweaving of two selves through artful, passionate, delicate, and exclusive communication. In biblical terms, pornography’s vision of sexuality is a corruption of this image into an idol. It offers us bread that can never satisfy, increasing our hunger as it malnourishes us.51 Naomi Wolf puts it like this:
Does all this sexual imagery in the air mean that sex has been liberated—or is it the case that the relationship between the multibillion-dollar porn industry, compulsiveness, and sexual appetite has become like the relationship between agribusiness, processed foods, supersize portions, and obesity? If your appetite is stimulated and fed by poor-quality material, it takes more junk to fill you up.52
The meteoric rise of online pornography is symptomatic of our culture’s broader hypersexuality, which has made sex central to personal identity while ironically emptying it of its deeper meaning. Such contradictory pressures pose a significant threat to modern spiritual, emotional, and psychological identity, undermining the resilience of relationships. These mixed messages have also made it more difficult for Christians to bind themselves to the practice of chastity, that is, living faithfully in both singleness and marriage.
In the moral ecology of the modern world, Christians are pulled in several directions at once. Even as we hear the biblical call to sexual fidelity, our sex-saturated culture asks two conflicting and searching questions: Why would we deny ourselves one of life’s essential experiences? And why would we go to such heroic lengths to restrain ourselves when sex is no big deal? Besides this, our culture’s hypersexuality has made it more difficult to relate to each other as brothers and sisters within the household of God. When every male-female friendship is freighted with sexual overtones, it is harder to enter into the broad network of mutually nurturing relationships that we need to support our personal identity.
1. Stanley J. Grenz, Sexual Ethics: An Evangelical Perspective (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1990), 21–27.
2. Ibid., 17.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 17, 196; see also Marva J. Dawn, Sexual Character: Beyond Technique to Intimacy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 21–22.
5. Grenz, Sexual Ethics, 21.
6. Ibid., 20.
7. Roger Scruton, “The Abuse of Sex,” in The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers, ed. James R. Stoner and Donna M. Hughes (Princeton: Witherspoon Institute, 2010).
8. Naomi Wolf, “The Porn Myth,” New York, May 24, 2004, http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/trends/n_9437/.
9. Taylor, Secular Age, 495.
10. Ibid., 502–3.
11. Wolfe, Hooking Up, 8.
12. Fisher, “Why We Love, Why We Cheat.”
13. Wolfe, Hooking Up, 7.
14. Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, Sexualisation of Young People: Review, February 2010, https://shareweb.kent.gov.uk/Documents/health-and-wellbeing/teenpregnancy/Sexualisation_young_people.pdf. See also American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls (2010), http://www.apa.org/pi/women/programs/girls/report-full.pdf.
15. Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex, 57.
16. Ibid., 58–59.
17. Ibid., 60.
18. Ibid., 143–45.
19. Ibid., 153.
20. Denise D. Hallfors et al., “Which Comes First in Adolescence—Sex and Drugs or Depression?,” American Journal of Preventative Medicine 29 (2005): 163–70.
21. Regnerus and Uecker, Premarital Sex, 161.
22. For a comprehensive overview of recent research into the personal and social impact of online pornography, see Mary Eberstadt and Mary Anne Layden, The Social Costs of Pornography: A Statement of Findings and Recommendations (Princeton: Witherspoon Institute, 2010).
23. Jill C. Manning, “The Impact of Pornography on Women: Social Science Findings and Clinical Observations,” in Stoner and Hughes, Social Costs of Pornography.
24. Al Cooper et al., “Sexuality and the Internet: The Next Sexual Revolution,” in The Psychological Science of Sexuality: A Research Based Approach, ed. Frank Muscarella and Lenore T. Szuchman (New York: Wiley, 1999), 516–45.
25. Manning, “Impact of Pornography on Women.”
26. Ibid.
27. Natasha Vargas-Cooper, “Hard Core: The New World of Porn Is Revealing Eternal Truths about Men and Women,” The Atlantic, January 4, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/hard-core/308327/.
28. Pamela Paul, “How Porn Became the Norm,” in Stoner and Hughes, Social Costs of Pornography.
29. 1 Cor. 7:9.
30. Al Cooper, Cybersex: The Dark Side of the Force (Philadelphia: Brunner-Routledge, 2000), 2.
31. Vargas-Cooper, “Hard Core.”
32. Norman Doidge, “Acquiring Tastes and Loves,” in The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (New York: Penguin, 2007), 107.
33. Ibid., 106–12.
34. Ibid. For a detailed description of how the male brain interacts with pornography, see William M. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009), 83–111.
35. Doidge, “Acquiring Tastes and Loves,” 109.
36. Paul, “How Porn Became the Norm,” in Stoner and Hughes, Social Costs of Pornography.
37. Struthers, Wired for Intimacy, 85.
38. Al Cooper, David L. Delmonico, and Ron Burg, “Cybersex Users, Abusers, and Compulsiveness: New Findings and Implications,” Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity 7, nos. 1 and 2 (2000): 5–29.
39. Paul, “How Porn Became the Norm,” in Stoner and Hughes, Social Costs of Pornography.
40. Doidge, “Acquiring Tastes and Loves,” 104.
41. Paul, “How Porn Became the Norm,” in Stoner and Hughes, Social Costs of Pornography.
42. Wolf, “Porn Myth.”
43. Letter from C. S. Lewis to Keith Masson, June 3, 1956. Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.
44. Dolf Zillmann, “Influence of Unrestricted Access to Erotica on Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Dispositions toward Sexuality,” Journal of Adolescent Health 27, no. 2 (2000): 41–44.
45. Jason S. Carroll et al., “Generation XXX: Pornography Acceptance and Use among Emerging Adults,” Journal of Adolescent Research 23 (2008): 6–30.
46. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, “Friends, Friends with Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall,” New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/30/magazine/friends-friends-with-benefits-and-the-benefits-of-the-local-mall.html.
47. Paul, “How Porn Became the Norm,” in Stoner and Hughes, Social Costs of Pornography.
48. Christopher Hope, “Entire School Year Groups Have Seen Porn, Children’s Watchdog Says,” Telegraph, April 3, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9970190/Entire-school-year-groups-have-seen-porn-childrens-watchdog-says.html.
49. Regnerus, Forbidden Fruit, 81.
50. Ibid., 60.
51. Isa. 55:2.
52. Wolf, “Porn Myth.”