The Christian sex ethic says sexual relations should occur only in marriage, but that’s not the way most Americans and many Christians act. Pornography is almost rampant, and not just outside the church.
Christine Emba, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Rethinking Sex, told Russell Moore on his podcast last month that pornography now shapes what people want. If you’re a listener, go here for the 7,800 spoken words. If you’re a reader, here are 1,500 words, excerpted and tightened by human hands, not artificial intelligence, starting with Emba’s description of how pornography works:
There’s normal watching. Something appeals to you, like a jingle that sticks in your brain. Then there’s pornography, which engages our sexual instinct, one of our deepest desires and one of our most intense pleasure centers. And yet pornography is not about real relationships. It does not even attempt to show real love and real respect for the other person. We’re consuming other people’s bodies.
The average age of first exposure to pornography is between 13 and 15. The relationship between men and women they’re seeing is often violent and ugly: choking, slapping, hitting, vile language, women treated as objects to be abused. That shapes their image of what women and men do.
You’re fed categories you like or are supposed to like, and that further channels your imagination in certain directions. “Click here for blond people. Click here for younger women. Click here for something else.” Real women and men make these productions: “They are objects for my consumption, and whatever happens to them is worth it because I get to have what I want.” It’s teaching men to see women as made for my pleasure, my consumption.
That understanding of what women are for can spill out into real life and into real interactions with other people. People say, “It’s just pornography. It’s just something I’m watching. It doesn’t have anything to do with my real life.” That’s not how people work. Our brains aren’t wired like that. And our souls are not wired like that.
We have lots of debate about the language of addiction as it applies to pornography.
The scientific understanding of addiction is something you can’t control, a disease that’s affecting your life in a negative way. Some people feel withdrawal when they stop using it. But porn changes users in other ways as well.
I interviewed a young guy [who was] in a self-directed study program on a campus and didn’t know anybody. He was bored and lonely and started watching a lot of porn. He also wanted to be in a relationship and eventually get married. He found he couldn’t be physically attracted to a woman he liked because she didn’t resemble what he saw in porn. She was a live woman with flaws, and he had trained himself not to like a real woman. The solution for him was cutting out porn entirely and trying to reframe his understanding of attraction.
It worked out for him. He is now married and has a baby on the way. The first step was recognizing what porn might be. It is easy to access. It doesn’t ask anything of you. It’s always there. To go on a date you have to take a shower, get dressed, go outside, talk to someone who might turn you down, find someone else who might also turn you down. That is a lot of work. I worry about young men trapped in the “it’s not great but it’s sufficient” position—and that keeping them from going further.
Do academic studies show the danger?
Research shows that young men who watch violent pornography are less likely to intervene in situations where women call for help and more likely to blame the victim in a rape case. But it’s hard to find clear studies on pornography, because so many of them are [ideologically] motivated. Porn companies want to prove it’s fine. Religious organizations want to prove it’s bad. The research is seen as skewed by many readers, but research can show we become habituated to things. Do something enough times, and it becomes normal, inoffensive, or perhaps part of your own practice.
I’ve seen a big shift to sexless marriages—not the typical pattern of older people hormonally slowing down, but young married couples. In almost every case the reason was the man. They’d explain that sex with their wives felt awkward, too intense emotionally after porn, which is just consumption.
The pandemic made it harder for young people to go out on dates to connect one-on-one, and especially for this swath of people of the age in which they learn to do that. It made some men a lot more nervous and cautious about interacting with women. You couldn’t necessarily go out and see someone, but porn was there with smartphone access.
I hear a lot from young women who say men they run into are porn led. They’ll say, “I was texting with this guy, and he started saying wild and gross things to me over text. I don’t want to be with a person like that.”
Or they’ll say, “I slept with this person, and he immediately tried some sort of crazy, rough action on me,” such as surprise choking, which has become shockingly common over the past couple of years and is definitely coming from pornography. A landscape in which men behave toward me in the way that men behave in pornography is terrifying—so I’d rather just not engage. I’m not gonna be in a relationship. I’m not gonna date if that’s what’s out there. It pushes people away on both ends.
What should a person look for to see if it’s a healthy potential dating relationship?
This sounds simplistic, but it’s not. Does the person you’re with treat you like a person—not like an object, someone who’s there to cater to desires, but interested in you as a person, in your thoughts, your sensitivities?
I wonder if we could bring in mentorship from older people who understand what the norms were. People do not want to talk to their parents about their dating life, but an older person in their community or in their church or aunts or uncles who make themselves available could be helpful in giving feedback: “That doesn’t seem normal.” “Are you sure about this?”
In America we’re all about individualism and allowing people the freedom to make their own choices and not interfering, but guidance is really important. I don’t just walk up to somebody and say, “Do you want some guidance in terms of love and intimacy?” We have a generational divide. People hang out with their age slice in some way. It would be valuable for churches or individuals to find ways to cross barriers.
Is the discussion of porn and smartphones parallel in some way, in that people assume this is just what the world is like now and there’s nothing you can do about it?
But we can. Gen Z is actually more in favor of regulations on porn and porn access than older people—[like] age bans, as they’ve adopted in various places. There is support for pushback against the way that kind of porn has taken over the internet. That’s probably because younger people in particular have had this all their lives and they see how it has harmed them.
Do age verification and these kinds of measures actually work?
It’s too early to say, but in some states where these age-verification laws have been put in place, Pornhub, one of the largest streaming sites for porn, has just decided to not provide porn in that state. That’s a win. It’s true that people can use VPNs or other ways to get around these age-verification tools, but they are a speed bump. They put some friction in between a young person [accessing] a porn site.
Friction does something. Even if some people sneak around it, some people won’t. The law is a teacher. An age limitation and labeling make it clear that this isn’t just an innocuous thing but something you should think twice about, something you have to be old enough to watch—or maybe you shouldn’t be watching it at all.
It’s seeding the idea that this is a bit dangerous. That’s important because right now we have a discourse that says, “No, it’s fine. Go ahead. Do what you feel.” And that has not helped anyone at all.
We almost have a consensus, at least in mainstream American life, that child porn is wrong. Is that right?
But often the argument seems to be simply the abuse of the children involved, which is a major reason why it’s wrong. With AI allowing for image construction without abusing a real person, will it be more difficult for people to argue for the wrongness of child porn?They’ll say it’sa victimless crime.
I hope that is a step beyond what people are willing to take, but that argument is made. That’s horrifying and scary. You can train your attraction. I am very uncomfortable with saying, in essence, “It’s okay to train yourself to be into child-sexual-assault material as long as you don’t take it any further than that.”
