Not Just a Guy’s Problem
According to statistics published by Education Database Online in 2011, of the 40 million Americans who regularly visit porn sites, 33% are women. That means that of every three visitors to pornographic websites, one is a woman. Sociologist Michael Kimmel, who studies pornography and teaches sexuality at the State University of New York at Stony Brook says,
Twenty years ago, my female students would say, ‘Ugh, that’s disgusting,’ when I brought up pornography in class. The men would guiltily say, ‘Yeah, I have used it.’ Today, men are much more open about saying they use pornography all the time and do not feel any guilt. The women now resemble the old male attitude: they’ll sheepishly admit to using it themselves.
The Beginning of a Downward Spiral
To gain a better understanding of pornography’s current influence on Christian women, Shelley conducted a survey on her website (www.FindYourTrueBeauty.com) and received responses from 241 Christian girls and women (the full survey can be found in the back of this book). Of the given sample size, 73% of the women had been introduced to pornography. 71% of those who were introduced to pornography had their first encounter with it before the age of 15. On the following page, we have provided a chart that displays the various ways these women were first introduced to pornography.
The progression into pornography usually begins with what seems to be a harmless experience. A friend tells you she found a movie or a magazine under her parents’ bed, or maybe you do an Internet search for porn out of curiosity, or you stumble across a sexually explicit scene in a novel you are reading or a movie you are watching. Regardless of which scenario you can claim as your own, the subsequent progression is generally the same for us all.
Dr. Mark R. Laaser, an addictionologist and author of Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction, suggests that “just looking at porn can never be done without consequences…. Internet porn is the crack cocaine of sexual addiction.”2 All it often takes is just a taste to get the image burned into your memory, and the next thing you know, you find yourself looking for “the hard stuff.”
Hard-core vs. Soft-core Pornography
Soft-core pornography is not as graphic or explicit, but it maintains the goal of seeking to arouse the viewer. Generally considered to be the gateway to hard-core pornography, it often leaves more to be desired for the viewer. Examples may include simulated sex scenes, nude photos with strategic cover-ups, or even written descriptions of intimate encounters. Without question, soft-core pornography has infiltrated every aspect of entertainment. Sometimes it can be so blatant that we instinctively feel the need to shield our eyes, but most often it is presented in such a subtle manner that we are completely unaware of the effect it has on us until we realize that our appetite for it has markedly increased. Internet, television, movies, music, magazines, and books have become the primary mediums for soft-core pornography.
The Internet
The largest contributor to the pornography industry, the Internet gives the easiest access to porn, while granting the viewer virtual anonymity. “Studies have shown that women find it easier to click a few buttons on the Internet to search for sexually alluring material. In the absence of a social context, pornography is more appealing to women because there are no social repercussions for using it.”3 Marketers in the pornographic industry are taking advantage of this fact and have boiled their gateway strategy down to a science. Cheryl Wetzstein’s Washington Times article, “Porn on the web exploding,” sheds some light on one particular marketing method.
If you spend any amount of time on the Internet, it’s difficult not to find yourself in the midst of a hard-core porn site – and if you do, you cannot easily leave. A practice called “mouse trapping” means that by clicking out of the site, you’ll be hit with a virtually endless series of pop-up ads for other porn sites, and the only way to stop the flood of pornography is to shut the window or turn off the web browser.
Chat Rooms
Another Internet trap worth mentioning is the chat room. The Internet Filter Review reports that women actually favor chat rooms two times more than men.5 Mark B. Kastleman, author of The Drug of the New Millennium: The Science of How Internet Pornography Radically Alters the Brain and Body, explains that “knowing what we do about the female brain, the chat room is the perfect model to attract women to the Internet.” He goes on to share that Internet pornographers have two methods for luring women into chat room relationships:
[First], the woman starts out with friendly conversation, which eventually leads to romantic talk, then to sexual conversation and hard-core sexual dialogue… the man on the other end will often lead her to the viewing of Internet porn. Exposed to such graphic images right off the bat, most women would
Television and Movies
It is almost a given that if you watch any current television show, there will be numerous sexual innuendos floating around. If you happen to miss them in the show, you are almost sure to catch one or two during the commercials. Gary Rose, CEO of The Medical Institute, shared on Focus on the Family (July 8, 2005), that the average teenager spent three to four hours per day watching television, and 83% of the programming most frequently watched by adolescents contained some sexual content. Seven years later, sexual content shows no signs of relinquishing its prominence in television or movies.
Psychological scientists at Dartmouth University recently conducted a study, “Greater Exposure to Sexual Content in Popular Movies Predicts Earlier Sexual Debut and Increased Risk-Taking,” to determine the influence of feature films with sexual content on children aged 12-14. Sometimes we tend to believe that sexual content is limited to R-rated films, but after reviewing 684 movies for scenes of activity ranging from passionate kissing to intercourse, they discovered that 68% of G films, 82% of PG, and 85% of PG-13 films contained sexual situations.8 When combined with the fluctuations of hormones that go hand in hand with puberty, sexual content encourages adolescents to seek sensation.
Personally, movies have always been my weak point. When I was in high school, I would watch R-rated movies and fantasize about casual sex with real and imagined people. By my senior year, my curiosity even led me to sneak out of my parents’ house in the middle of the night to meet a boy I met in a chat room. We had been chatting online for a few weeks, when he graciously offered to show me how to make out. I should have known that he was up to no good when he sent me a nude picture of himself and asked me for one, but curiosity got the best of me. With the images of passionate kissing sessions from movies running through my head and the expectation that I would experience something similar, I met this complete stranger in the park. Thankfully, I did not allow things to go as far as he would have liked, but I did do some things that I am ashamed of. The notion of successful casual affairs was cruelly dashed when this particular boy refused to have anything to do with me after that night.
Music
Focus on the Family reported in July 2005 that 42% of the songs on the ten top-selling CDs in 1999 contained sexual content, 41% of which were "very explicit" or "pretty explicit." The analysis of a 2007 study presented in the Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics stated that of the content of television shows, movies, magazines, newspapers, and music popular among teens, sexual content was much more prevalent in popular music lyrics than in any other medium.
Think of some of the music you hear on the radio today. Name any song from some of the most popular artists like Lady Gaga, Usher, or Nicki Minaj, and you will find an abundance of sexually explicit lyrics. The problem is not that the lyrics are dirty, but that we are gradually being indoctrinated with messages contrary to the teachings of Christ. The same pediatric study reports that “from music, adolescents gain information about society, social and gender roles, and expected behavior, and they use music to facilitate friendships and social interactions and to help them create a personal identity. It is reasonable to expect, therefore, that the messages conveyed in popular music have significant implications for adolescent socialization behavior.”
Worship music is a conduit through which messages can be shared from our heart to God’s and vice versa. We sing of our love and devotion to Him, yet we also receive His love as He illustrates His eternal devotion to complete the good work He started within us. Through worship music, I often receive new revelation of the nature of God and His feelings toward me. What messages are we getting from some of the secular songs we listen to? Most songs with sexually explicit lyrics teach women about who they should be and what is expected of them from society. In September 2011, Researchers from Brigham Young University shared that “for girls in particular, [sexually explicit lyrics] can lead them to judge their personal worth on a sexual level only, leading to poor body image, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse.” They go on to conclude that “popular music can teach young men to be sexually aggressive and treat women as objects while often teaching young women that their value to society is to provide sexual pleasure for others.” Some studies even go so far as to say that early sexual behavior can be triggered by lyrics of this nature.
Magazines
Ben Shapiro wrote in his book, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future, that the magazines millions of girls subscribe to function as gateway products both for “porn lite” publications like Cosmopolitan. When I was in high school, I had a subscription to Cosmo Girl! magazine. Upon reading the articles, I began to learn new things about sex and my body, and I became highly fascinated.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, I would even take notes and save them in a box for later. The box has long since been trashed, but I can only imagine how girls, who are not as conservative as I was at that age, would respond. Maybe instead of saving reminders for later, they would impulsively act out their newfound wisdom. This is a hard reality to shrug off, when “most of the teen magazines nowadays revolve around sexual activity,” and as Ana Garner of the College of Communications at Marquette University says, “they’re training manuals for sex.” Regrettably, these are training manuals that three-quarters of adolescent females report reading at least once per month.
Books
Another one of my weaknesses in high school was the mystery novel. Not any mystery novel, but the kind that involved lots of sex, also known as erotica. To tell the truth, when choosing a new novel, I would even flip through it first to ensure that it had sexual content before I decided to read it.
In Shelley’s survey, 41% of the women said that they read romance novels that contain sexually explicit scenes. Within the 14-18 year old age bracket, over half of the girls (53%) claimed to read these kinds of novels. Some would say that these books are considered female-tailored porn, since they appeal to what women like, whereas most pornography is geared toward men. The key to grabbing a man’s attention is to visually stimulate him, but the key to grabbing a women’s attention is to stimulate her imagination. Fantasizing goes hand in hand with erotica. With fantasy we do not need to watch hardcore pornography on the screen, because we can easily produce what we want to see in our heads. For this reason, some women would much rather read erotica than watch pornography, but we must be careful not to explain away the pornographic nature of these books. According to the definitions given at the beginning of this book, these types of literature fit the bill for pornography. They are meant to arouse the reader, and that is exactly what they do. Whether you are watching it on the screen or playing it out in your mind’s eye, you are engaging in pornography.
Triggering a Response
All of these components of media seem to serve the same purpose: to trigger a response from you. You may have already been aware of some of the influence they had in your life, or you may not have noticed how they affected your life before at all. One thing we are mostly unaware of is how these pornographic images affect our brains and condition us to want more.