Fake sex in a sex-broken world

Pride Comes Before Destruction Month Part 2

The sin of self-destruction
Pride Comes Before Destruction Month reminds us that our world has utterly rejected God’s good and gracious design for sex and sexuality, opting instead for Satanic cheap knock-offs that do exponentially more harm than whatever pleasure is derived from engagement. This is clearly the case with sodomy, exchanging the glory of Biblical sexual enjoyment for unnatural and anti-creation practices. We also see this in fornication between men and women, that, while not as fundamentally unnatural as sodomy, still swaps God’s standards for fleshly preference.

There is another sexual sin, however, that while almost all professing Christians would say is wrong, doesn’t get as much air time or condemnation as other sexual sins, and that is the sin of pornography consumption. For the purposes of being Biblical, let’s call it what Jesus calls it, and that is adultery of the heart (Matthew 5:28), which is a fitting title, because of what porn does to a person’s heart, which Biblically speaking, is the very core of a person; who they are, what drives them, and their desires.

It appears that our Lord knew full well what humans would do in the future, including recording sexual activity and making it available for others to watch lustfully. He called it a sin of the heart. This fits with how the Apostle Paul described sexual sin in particular, but I would say it is especially true of pornography. He wrote, “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body” (1 Corinthians 6:18).

All of the dark secrets
Before I get into some rather shocking facts about pornography consumption, allow me to get into some significantly more shocking facts about pornography consumers. According to Barna research, the number of adults consuming pornography is presently at 61%. The number of women consuming pornography at 44%. Over half of practicing Christians report consuming pornography frequently. 22% do so weekly, and 7% do so daily.

According to Fight The New Drug, most kids are exposed to pornography by the age of 13, and 73% of teenagers admit to having seen pornography. 53% of boys and 39% of girls believe that pornography is a realistic depiction of sex. About 1 in 3 pornographic videos show sexual violence or aggression. Many women in pornography are being exploited, have been sex-trafficked, or are threatened to remain in pornography, often being drugged in order to perform. According to a recent study out of Sweden, 88% of women involved in pornography said they experienced sexual abuse during childhood. That same study also highlighted other forms of abuse, with 96% of those same women reporting some form of assault or abuse during childhood. Truly harrowing stuff.

A lap full of flames
All of those numbers are about rates of pornography consumption and the reality of those participating in creating pornography. But what happens, if anything, to those who consume it? Again, the words of our Lord and the Apostle Paul ring true. Pornography is a sin that is against the person consuming, and it is connected to the very heart of a person. Proverbs 6:27 says, “Can a man carry fire next to his chest and his clothes not be burned?” Because God can not be mocked, the answer, of course, is no.

1. Porn changes your brain
Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to change. When you first learned how to walk, your brain forged new neural pathways, and it changed from a brain without the needed information on how to walk into a brain with that new information. Activities, particularly pleasurable ones that are intense and repetitive, cause our brains to alter in order to be more efficient at doing that same activity the next time.

Porn consumption has this effect on your brain. Watching porn, which is a pleasurable activity that is both intense and repetitive, causes a chemical in the brain called Delta-FosB to carve out new neural pathways in your brain – effectively changing your physiological brain make-up and chemistry – rewiring what you find sexually arousing and pleasurable. It can sometimes take years to undo the effects of porn on the brain, especially considering the next cup of flames porn dumps into our laps.

2. Porn is a drug
Whenever you do something that your brain perceives as good and positive, the part of your brain called a “reward centre” releases a powerful pleasure chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is what your brain releases whenever you use an addictive drug. It floods your brain with positive reinforcement and pleasure. Your brain then develops a preference for what makes it the happiest, craving the things that releases the dopamine, and then rewarding the consumption of that thing with more dopamine. It’s a feedback loop that requires you to do more of the things that makes your brain happy, mostly because after each successive experience, you derive slightly less pleasure from it. This is why people who use drugs must either up the frequency or intensity of their drug use in order to get the same dopamine release.

Porn has the exact same effect on the brain, offering the same reward, releasing the same dopamine, and creating the same feedback loop. Unlike drugs and alcohol, porn is always and instantly available, making it a more accessible and potentially more of a powerful drug than even the strongest narcotics. Porn also causes hypofrontality, a condition where the part of your brain responsible for self-control and regulating harmful activities becomes less active and even dormant. In other words, persistent porn consumption makes it increasingly difficult to stop consuming porn in ever increasing amounts, including the intensity of the porn material itself.

3. Porn deforms sex
What are some of the real-world consequences of altering your brain chemistry and consuming one of the world’s most potent drugs? To understand that, we have to better understand the adult film industry, a nearly $100 billion industry world-wide. Porn is a product, a highly edited, produced, and photo-shopped product. What it purports to sell are natural, everyday sexual situations, designed to appeal to the average person who could themselves imagine being in such a situation. However, they are actually unnatural, unrealistic sexual performances designed to fool people into inserting themselves into the scene.

Without realizing it, people who consume porn become increasingly accustomed to what they are seeing as being normative and even enjoyable. They internalize, more and more, the desire for a highly polished sexual experience, with a willing-to-do-anything partner, shot from totally unhuman camera angles. People who consume porn eventually grow so desensitized to it that they can only derive sexual arousal and pleasure from porn, and all of the fake elements that make it appealing. This means that the more porn you consume, the less you will be aroused by sex with a real person, the less you will enjoy sex with a real person, and the less you will actually desire sex with a real person. It is massively ironic that the thing that is supposed to ramp up your sex drive actually causes your sexual desire for another real-life person to evaporate.

There is countless evidence of young men in their 20’s who are experiencing erectile dysfunction. This means when an otherwise healthy man is about to engage sexually with a woman, he simply is not aroused at all. In one neuroscientific study on compulsive pornography consumers, researchers found that in 11 out of 19 subjects, porn consumption had lowered the consumers’ sex drive and/or ability to maintain arousal in real-life sexual encounters, yet were still able to respond to porn sexually. I personally know a man in his late-20’s who consumed porn multiple times a day, yet was unable to reach an orgasm with a woman in real life.

4. Porn ruins relationships
The first three fire-in-the-lap consequences lead naturally to the fourth, and it has to do with how porn affects intimacy and relationships. When you change your brain and ruin your body’s ability to engage in Biblical and healthy sexual activity, your ability to have meaningful relationships, especially romantic ones, will be massively diminished.

Dozens of studies have repeatedly shown that porn consumers tend to have lower relationship satisfaction and lower relationship quality. Porn consumers tend to experience more negative communication with their partners. They also feel less dedicated to their relationships. They have a more difficult time making adjustments in their relationships. They report lower sexual satisfaction and commit more infidelity. Research also shows that porn consumers tend to become less committed to their partners, less satisfied in their relationships, and more accepting of cheating.

If you want to ruin your marriage, consume porn. If you want to remove your ability to have a significant relationship with a potential spouse, consume porn. If you want to alter the way you view the opposite sex and continually objectify them, both consciously and subconsciously, consume porn. This, of course, is not a challenge, but a grave warning.

Hope for the sexually hopeless
Even though all of this is true, a person does not have to be enslaved to porn. Obedience is possible. God’s grace is sufficient. God’s Spirit is powerful. God’s Word is able. Countless men have, by God’s strength at work in them, removed the shackles of porn and walked in holiness and integrity. I am one of those men.

I began to consume porn before I was saved at the age of 16, and my sexual sins in this area did not simply vanish. It wasn’t until my late-teens that I finally realized that this could no longer hang around my neck as an albatross. Then finally, in my early-twenties, when I knew that I could not bring this into a potential future marriage, I had to drag this lion into the street and kill it dead. By God’s grace, for almost 20 years, this sin has had no mastery over me. How did I do it?

First, the Word of God became central. I realized that I had to make a covenant with my eyes and mind to not lust after another woman (Job 31:1). I knew that my body was purchased by Christ with a price, and I must honour Him with my body by fleeing sexual immorality (1 Corinthians 6:18-20). I understood that I had to cut off my hand and pluck out my eye, as it were, in order to obey Christ and not commit adultery in my heart (Matthew 5:27-30). I had to feel the weight of the warning that the perpetually sexually immoral person will not inherit the Kingdom of God, regardless of what they say with their mouths (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). I had to accept that if I wanted a good marriage and a healthy and Biblical sexual life with my future wife, this sin needed to be dealt with (Hebrews 13:4). I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Second, I had to be honest with what porn was, a demonic drug created by sex-traffickers and sexual abusers. I had to swallow the truth that many of the women I was watching were being drugged, raped, threatened, and had themselves been sexually abused by their fathers, uncles, or some close relative. The more I had these thoughts at the front of my mind, the more I became disgusted with porn, and myself for consuming it.

Third, I had to come to grips with the fact that God was not going to simply snap me out of my sin and make me better. I needed to exert some spiritual sweat if I was going to overcome this sin. Yes, God is at work in all of us, but yes, we have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12-13). Yes, Christ is leading me to the prize at the end of the race, but yes, I have to lace up and run to the finish line while casting off all hindrances (Hebrews 12:1-2). Yes, God will sovereignly sanctify His people, but yes, I must pursue righteousness and godliness if I am to be a good soldier for Christ (1 Timothy 6:11-12).

Finally, I needed other godly men asking me tough questions, holding me accountable, and bringing actual consequences for failure. I could not have done this alone. You cannot do this alone. We must help to carry one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:1-2). We must stir one another up to faith and good works (Hebrews 10:24-25). If I fall alone, I fall alone, but if I have a brother, he can help me get back up again (Ecclesiastes 4:10).

If you are reading this and you consume porn and are mastered by it, stop making excuses, and stop downplaying the seriousness of it. You are ruining your brain, you are ruining your body, you are ruining your relationships, you are ruining your marriage, and you are ruining your soul. You are sinning against God, you are bringing His heavy hand of discipline upon you, and unless you repent of this sin soon, you might be at risk of having a false profession of faith. Don’t hear those words as justification for you to doubt your salvation, but as a loving and stern wake-up call to get your heart in order and stop acting like a slave to sin. If you have Christ, you can do it, so just do it. The time for procrastination is over.

Porn and the rainbow
If you’ve made it this far, let me bring everything full circle. You might be thinking, “Andrew, what does porn have to do with Pride Comes Before Destruction Month?” The answer is everything. You see, it was pride that led those men to demand Lot come out of his home in order to sodomize him. They loved themselves so much that the only sexual counterpart acceptable to them was another just like them – a man. In fact, it is ultimately self-idolatry that causes people to engage in sodomy, whether men or women, because they only want more of themselves, so much so that they only desire sex with another one of them (sodomy properly understood is not just sex between men, but any unnatural sexual practice outside of one man and one woman).

Porn consumption, like sodomy, has pride at the root of it. A person who feels they deserve to consume porn, for whatever reason, is proud. Maybe because they had a particularly difficult day at work, or maybe because their spouse is not as willing to engage sexually, they think they deserve to treat and pleasure themselves. That’s pride. By watching porn and inserting themselves into the scene, saying that what they want and should have is the polished setting, beautiful and willing partner, and high production-value escapade, they are over-inflating their self-worth. That’s pride.

I say this because part of the solution is thinking Biblically about sexual sin. I do not like speaking of addictions, mostly because they take ownership of the sin away from the person. If it’s an addiction, or some sort of mental health issue, or some psychological condition, then you can’t help yourself – it’s just a part of your brain. Nonsense and lies from Satan himself. You are not addicted; you lack self-control, patience, and faithfulness. You do not have a condition; you have a sin problem and a worship problem. Of course, sin is enticing, with its promises of joy and pleasure. But if you are in Christ, you are no longer in the flesh, which means you do not have to sin. You are not a slave to your desires. You are not powerless to your addiction.

The Bible does not have a category for alcoholic. It calls people who give into that temptation drunkards. The Bible does not have a category for nymphomaniacs. It calls people who pursue their lusts sexually immoral. This is how people try to justify sodomy and pedophilia, by saying it’s just hardwired into them and a part of who they are. We reject that lie, because God rejects that lie. I’ll let the Apostle Paul have the last word.

“Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry” (1 Corinthians 10:12-14).