I drive by a XXX Adult Superstore every day on my way home from work. Every day there are cars parked out front. Three cars, four, five, six. It doesn’t matter what day of the week. It weighs down my heart every time I see it. What’s the motivation? “Oh hey, it’s Tuesday, I need to go pick up the latest Playboy.” “Hmm, the wife’s going to be out of town this weekend. Perfect chance to get that new video I heard about!”
I am very solid in my convictions against pornography, and I read an article online today that made me mad enough to spit and sad enough to crumple to the floor in desperation. Is there no way to defeat pornography? Will it forever be a juicy “secret” shared by millions, more and more young boys and wide-eyed girls being scarred and destroyed by it every day?
The article I read was posted on the mainstream news site MSN.com but originated on a tech/gadget site called Gizmodo. Entitled “How to hide your digital ‘collection,’” it gives exquisitely detailed instructions on how to make a stash of pornography disappear into the depths of your computer. The article was placed front and center on the website and accompanied by a photo of a man peering furtively over the top of his computer. “There's no need for it to be a discoverable part of your digital life, or, god forbid, your digital legacy,” reads the article. “Here's how to make sure your private collections are in order, and out of sight.”
The joking, laid-back tone of the article really gets to me. I know that it’s much more popular to be funny than serious in online forums, and this has tragically erased nearly every ounce of seriousness or real conviction from most online discussions. Online is where people talk, and online is where it seems like people don’t ever really care.
But you know what? A spouse or loved one doesn’t have to see documented evidence of an addiction to know that it’s there. It’s evident in the way they act, the way they treat people, the things they laugh at and the way they carry themselves. A person either become less interested in real intimacy with their spouse or want it too much and in a distracted, distant way. Someone can make love while their mind is a million miles away, but you can always tell. It hurts to be used, and it’s almost as bad as a spouse who never touches you at all.
That article – and millions of other ads, brochures and endorsements – plays the subject matter off as no big deal. Their tips will help the badgered user when “…keeping your…family from discovering your bizarre-but-harmless-but-still-pretty-bizarre video collection.” I have experienced the passenger side whiplash of a porn addiction and there is absolutely nothing about it that is harmless. The discovery – or, more often, the confirmation of fears - that a loved one spends days and nights clicking through images of naked, twisted bodies hits you like a cannonball to the chest.
You can’t breathe.
You can’t think straight.
You consider either starving yourself into a fake state of beauty or eating your way into oblivion. What will it matter, when you’re already too ugly for anyone to care about anyway?
You are horrified at the thought of seeing more and yet feel pulled to know everything they’ve seen. If you try to look deeper, to prepare yourself to confront them with everything, you realize that’s impossible. There’s just too much. No one ever just looks at just one site, reads just one erotic story, watches just one explicit video. The web of pornography is enormous and hideously tangled.
You want to scrub yourself until you bleed, though it still won’t be enough. Nothing can get rid of the fact that you know, that you will have to confront them, that you feel sick at the thought.
Grammy-winning artist John Mayer said in a recent Playboy interview that he doesn’t want to be in any more real relationships because he thinks it will never live up to the porn he’s seen. He views hundreds of images a day, always looking for the one that’s better, hotter, wilder, more forbidden. But his search is ultimately fruitless. He’s already lost touch of reality. Can you imagine that? He is so immersed in it that he’s unwilling to reach out to another human, to take a chance on that crazy little thing called love. He’s so deep in fantasy that he can no longer grasp what’s real.
There can be recovery from a pornography addiction, but our planet is fighting as hard as it can to say it isn’t so. We are constantly bombarded and enticed. We are told that it’s harmless, natural, and fun.
The Gizmodo article closes by pointing out that all the work of hiding your addiction can be avoided if you stop downloading it and just view it online instead. “Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even Internet Explorer have private browsing modes, which don't accumulate history, cookies, or local caches of any kind. Use them. Your digital self will thank you,” it says. But your real self won’t. It doesn’t matter if it’s an addiction that’s hidden or shared with everyone you know.
It’s destroying lives.
