The Problem with Pornography

one

Our Lord’s Words

One of the most amazing things about the Gospel of Jesus Christ is its perfect and universal applicability. It really applies to everyone, in every time and place. And sometimes it seems as though Our Lord told His contemporary audience things that would only fully apply thousands of years later.

For instance, when Jesus said, “If anyone looks at a woman lustfully, He has committed adultery in his heart” (Matthew 5:28) – it’s as though He was looking ahead to our time, and age saturated, dominated by pornography.

It’s as though He was warning us, in this time, against corrupting our hearts through adultery with our eyes.

two

Love or Selfishness

Either sexuality is made for love, or it’s made for pure selfishness.

Now nobody really wants to say that sexuality is for pure selfishness. It would be scary to say that anything is for pure selfishness. Being purely selfish, in any context, is basically the same as being a sociopath. And everyone knows that can’t be moral.

Sexuality is obviously designed for love. That’s why it’s more satisfying to engage your sexuality with someone else than just to gratify yourself alone. It’s why we call it making love. And you can’t love unless you are giving to someone else.

People talk about “loving yourself” but you can’t have real sexual love by yourself anymore than you can really swing-dance by yourself. It’s not how the whole thing is designed to work.

Now pornography is pretty much pure sexual sociopathy. You are simply using another person to satisfy yourself, and you’re doing nothing for them, since the other person isn’t even there.

So to summarize it: pornography is a sociopathic use of a faculty designed for love. How sad is that?

three

Surprise and the Downward Spiral

Our sexuality is designed to be a response to the other person’s goodness and beauty. And beauty always involves an element of surprise. In men, if this surprise is missing, they can’t respond sexually. You can only get excited at what’s surprising, when you get too used to something, when it becomes too familiar, you aren’t able to engage in the act.

Now pornography is unnaturally shocking, startling, provocative, which means that normal sexuality begins to look tame. Boring.

This is why so many men have lost the ability to respond to their wives. It’s one of the first effects of pornography. Because these men have lost the ability to respond with surprise to a woman’s natural beauty. And pornography, like any other addiction to what is surprising, or thrilling, is subject to the law of diminishing returns. The porn addict constantly needs weirder, more shocking, more pervert stimulation to get that surprise he’s going for.

There is no limit, no end to the hellish free fall of pornography. You can wake up one morning and find you have desires beyond your worst nightmares. You have to break this. You have to save yourself, and your family, and the women of the world, from this sexual sociopathy.

Four

Our Lord’s Words

Again, Our Lord gives us the way out. He gives a formula for getting over pornography that applies perfectly to our time. He says, “If your eye causes you to sin, cut it out.”

That means, figure out in what circumstances you yield to pornography, and then cut those circumstances out of your life.

Addiction is always situational. So figure out what situation you need to amputate in order to break this thing.

Let me be clear: if you have a problem with pornography, you will not be able to resist temptation. So your only chance is to avoid temptation itself .

The Our Father, remember, doesn’t say, “Help us resist temptation,” but “Lead us not into temptation.” Jesus doesn’t say, “If your eye causes you to sin, use your willpower.” He says amputate your eye. Do something to prevent the temptation from happening.

St. Philip Neri says that the battle against impurity is only won by cowards, that you can only survive if you run from the temptation, not if you fight it. And St. John Chrysostom says you will never stop getting burned if you keep putting straw into the fire.

So figure out what situation you need to delete from your life. And ask God to help you be prudent and courageous in amputating whatever circumstances you need to.

five

Prayer

Finally, we have to beg God for His help. Pornographyh is destroying this society. It’s ripping the backbones, the strength and the courage, out of nearly all our men. The devil has probably never gotten his claws into so many men, and women too, especially at such a young age.

This is obviously not something we can beat on our own.

St. Alphonsus Liguori said that “as soon as a temptation against chastity presents itself, the remedy is to turn instantly to God for help, and to repeat several times the most holy names of Jesus and Mary, which have a special virtue to banish bad thoughts of that time.”

I would add that we might invoke St. Joseph, the model of a chaste man who did right by his family.

With their help, we can beat this demon. They can pull us out of this pit of hell. They can bring us back to love, and peace, and beauty.