The Lure of Porn

The Lure of Porn

Pornography has always been around in some form.  But today, pornography is big business.  Worldwide, it brings in annually over $100 billion!  The US ranks fourth in the world behind China, South Korea, and Japan with revenues of over $15 billion.  To give perspective, that amount is larger than the combined income of all the professional football, baseball, and basketball franchises.  It’s larger than the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC.  It is also larger than Netflix, Amazon, and Twitter combined.  There are over 24 million pornographic websites, which amount to 12% of all the websites on the internet!

Some think pornography is exclusively a male domain.  But one out of three visitors to all pornographic websites is a woman.  Christians aren’t exempt.  Fifty-Three percent of men who have attended Promise Keepers events admit to having viewed pornography during the week prior to attending.  These statistics relate to what is called “hard-core” pornography, and does not include things like Victoria’s Secret catalogs and other similar highly suggestive magazines.

Women are more tempted to to get involved in reading sexually explicit romance novels.  The three books in the Fifty Shades series were a phenomena in that all three novels were at the top of the best seller’s list for months.  They have been called “mommy porn,” for the primary audience is women in their thirties.  They highlight bondage, discipline, sadism, and masochistic sexual encounters.

The lure of pornography is a lie.  They promise sexual fulfillment, but the opposite is what happens.  Wendy Maltz in her book, The Porn Trap, tells of her journey with the use of pornography as a secular sex therapist.  She had used certain pornographic movies as an intervention to help women better understand their own sexuality.  But somewhere in the 1990’s her clients started to protest, saying that viewing the films made them feel dirty and angry.  She no longer uses porn in her practice.

Studies have shown that the more real and the more explicit pornography is today, the more it is leading to an emotional shift away from a person’s spouse.  It has become almost as powerful as an actual affair in destroying the marital relationship.  There are the lies along with the attempt to keep the use of the pornography a secret.  Another secular writer, feminist Nora Wolf says that “for the first time in human history,the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women.  Today, real naked women are just bad porn.”  And the real problem is that our society doesn’t seem to understand the impact porn has on the non-using spouse.

Next, we’ll look at what porn does to the brain.

Question:  What are some of the attitudes you have encountered regarding porn?