What I Wish I Had Known About Porn - Well, Maybe...

Lauren Dubinsky recently wrote about her experience with pornography in the Huffington Post:

I wish that 10 years ago someone had educated me on pornography. What it is, what it does and what it reaches in and destroys in the hearts, minds and bodies of men and women.

I wish that someone would have told me that researchers have suggested it sabotages your sex life.

I wish someone would have explained how dopamine, the chemical that is released every time you experience pleasure, drives you to return to what provided that feeling before.

I wish someone would have told me that the kind of pornography you're most turned on by is usually linked to a corresponding hurtful event in your life, further injuring your brokenness.

I wish someone would have told me pornography would normalize things I wasn't emotionally or physically ready to handle in my relationships with men, making me feel like I had no options or control over my sex life, filling me with much regret and physical pain.

I wish someone would have told me I would begin to objectify men, build up images in my mind and think of sex day in and day out, to the point where I couldn't remain focused on anything else.

I wish someone would have told me it would make me feel less valuable to men and bring up insecurities for years in the bedroom.

I wish someone would have pointed out pornography can establish your sexuality completely apart from real-life relationships, causing huge problems in your intimacy with real significant others.

I wish someone would have explained what "sexual anorexia" was and that countless young men are unable to get erections because they've been watching porn since they were around 14 years old.

I wish someone would have told all the men I've dated that the porn they are watching is keeping them from being turned on by me, ultimately destroying our relationship.

I wish someone would have told me that the dopamine and oxytocin being released from my watching certain types of pornography would cause me to question my sexual orientation, which in turn cost me relationships with friends.

I'm willing to admit that for Dubinsky, if someone had sat down with her and told her all this many years before, it would have turned out better for her, but for me, would I have been any different?

Whilst I was never a compulsive porn consumer and whilst I haven't gone looking at porn for a good few years now, (some dear friends prayed with me one afternoon after a failure of mine, and by the grace of God, something broke and changed), reading articles like this make me ask the question - if I had been better informed, would I have acted differently? Would I have steered clear of porn altogether in the same way I have steered clear of hard drugs??

I think the honest answer is, no. I probably would have felt more guilty afterwards, had a greater sense of self-loathing and wasted more time worrying that I was propagating self-destructing patterns of behaviour, but I don't think I would have stopped.

In our modern romantic delusion, we think that if we humans simply have all the information at our finger tips, we will make the right choices. Of course, many do, but more don't, because at the heart of the poor choice is not an information gap, but a power struggle. The question is not "Do you understand?" but "Will you submit?" To my shame, in my teenage years, and into my 20's, the answer was too often "yes" to the former and "no" to the latter.

The only way I have seen any significant breakthrough in this area is by being captivated by the sweetness, greatness and truth of the person of Jesus Christ and flowing from that, the knowledge that this life is too great and important to be wasted. No amount of telling me how bad something is will unhook my attention from it. I need to be consumed with something wholly other.