Warning: This may break your heart

...and maybe your life.  It's the subject of porn.  I've written and linked about it here before.  This is a subject that seriously impacts women, men and families, so I'm taking time to share a few more thoughts and resources on the subject.  Please don't blow this off. The links below deserve your attention.

My first experience with porn came as a child, when neighborhood boys showed me their stash of Playboy magazines in an old garage. I don't think I was older than 8 years old. Neither were they, sadly.  You may think porn was all harmless back then, right?  Then ask me why the incident is still burned into my brain.  Most children can recall their first initiation with porn. I wonder what my father would have done had he knew?  I never told him or my mother about it. Had I done so, maybe those boys' parents would have done something right by them.

Today, the scourge of porn continues its quiet take down of American society. With so many other things you have to worry about today, do you really need to address this as well?  Yes. You do. We all do.  We cannot become de-sensitized in thinking this is no big deal.

Porn erodes modesty, denigrates respect between men and women, lowers the dignity and value of human person to a utilitarian object, and steals time and trust between spouses, friends, parents and children. And that's just the beginning.  

A porn addiction can lead to sexual assault, arrest, loss of income or employment, other additions, violence, murder, or suicide.

Through the years, as a former youth minister, and later as a mother, I've dealt with porn surfacing in the lives of the teens I know and love. And some of that was back before the internet was in so many homes and linked via our smart phones.  Really, don't get me started: my own children have lived on college campuses where internet porn is rampant in dorms, despite firewall protections against it.

Parents: software that blocks porn is good, but nothing is perfect. You must check your family's computer histories to verify what sites your children and teens are visiting. Like the old saying goes: "Trust, but verify."

Vigilance. Concern. Love. Call it what you will. We must put a hedge of protection around our vulnerable youngsters, while at the same time, appropriately acquainting our older children with the dangers.

Here is some important reading:

"The Weight of Smut" by Mary Eberstadt  (Must reading!)

Is Pornography Addictive? On Wed MD.

PornNoMore.com - Catholic support for recovery from porn.

Breaking Free Blog, from Covenant Eyes - help for internet integrity and keeping away from porn, plus porn recovery tools.

Here's a CNN video interview with a sociologist from Wheelock College, Gail Dines about "Has Porn Has Hijacked Sexuality". Dines is author of a book, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality.


Warning: Mature subject matter, viewer discretion advised!

Important and serious reading: Porn's effect on Women

This is one of those posts that I think is helpful for women to read.  It is not necessarily a post related to spirituality or the Catholic faith, but it is related to the dignity of the human person, and so it important to share here.

This article is a guest post by Tiffany Leeper, the founder of Girls Against Porn (GAP), on Breaking Free, (a blog that supports safe porn-free web surfing software, and breaking porn addiction.)  Tiffany writes of the effects of porn on women in "My Drug and His Poison: My Boyfriend was Hooked on Porn"-> This is serious reading.

What Does Woman Want?

A fascinating piece on sexless marriages and more in First Things by Mary Eberstadt, a Hoover Institute Research Fellow (at Stanford) and a Catholic Scholar.  There's also a audio interview with her here.

Note: this piece talk about some of pornography's effects on a marriage, among other things coming up in women's popular literature and magazines in the commercial marketplace.

Here's a snippet:

Something else lurks under the rocks picked up by the fashionable writing about marriage these days—something that crawls away from the light even as it squirms just under the surface of much of the new confessionalism.

“Don’t eat too many snacks, or you’ll ruin your dinner.” Every woman issuing the new literature of complaint and heartache will understand just how meaningful the saying is—at least when it applies to kids and dinnertime. Yet sexual satiety, of the kind that oozes by other names from so much female confessional literature these days, is almost never recognized the same way. In particular, pornography is the invisible ink of many of these essays and lives—obvious one minute, unnoticed the next, and the bearer of a message no one apparently sees. Understood or not, however, it appears to be leaving a mark on at least some of these publicly lived lives.

In Loh’s essay, for example, a husband—as it happens, one of those husbands no longer interested in sex with his wife—bookmarks his pornography on the computer; his wife knows all about it, even reports it to her friends who are also commiserating about their sexless marriages—and no one seems to connect the dots at all. Another writer for Salon, reflecting on Loh’s essay, similarly nudges up against this obvious if missing piece of the puzzle (in a piece called “Why Your Marriage Sucks”), noting, “I write this article from a hotel room in New York City, where nearly a dozen porn movies are on offer”—a fact the author uses to highlight what she thinks of as an irony, when it might instead suggest something else: a possible causal relation between all those movies on the one hand and, on the other hand, a loss of romantic interest on the part of those who think them inconsequential.

Or consider the critical success of a recent chick-lit book called I’d Rather Eat Chocolate. Praised in Salon and The Atlantic and other cutting-edge venues, it is the casually told story of a husband and wife whose tension over marital sex leads finally to an amicable solution: She has her chocolate, and he has his Internet pornography. Might there just be a connection between all this casual talk (and use) of pornography and all those frustrated women and disinterested husbands?

Dr. Phil, interestingly enough—among other sexperts concerned with the sexlessness of some modern marriages—has no trouble connecting the dots at all: “It is a perverse and ridiculous intrusion into your relationship,” he writes on his website. “It is an insult, it is disloyal, and it is cheating. . . . You need to tell your partner that viewing pornography is absolutely, unequivocally unacceptable in your relationship.” Why does he see what so many unhappy women do not?

The answer is that the kind of feminism these women have so unthinkingly imbibed has come at a great cost. It has rendered many of them ideologically if not personally blasé about something they cannot really afford to be blasé about. InFemale Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy chronicles the steady infiltration of pornography into female society. The pressure on women to accept pornography as an inconsequential and entertaining fact of life rises by the year—and outside the circles of the conservative and the religious, there is little cultural ammunition for any woman who wants to resist it. In fact, one of the few tony writers who does seem to grasp the destructive role of pornography in modern romance is Naomi Wolf, who chillingly observed several years ago that “the onslaught of porn is responsible for deadening male libido in relation to real women, and leading men to see fewer and fewer women as porn-worthy.” Almost none of her feminist sisters have followed suit.

All of which brings us back to the enigma of this summer’s marriage wars. Perhaps some of the modern misery of which so many women today authentically speak is springing not from a sexual desert but from a sexual flood—a torrent of poisonous imagery, beginning even in childhood, that has engulfed women and men, only to beach them eventually somewhere alone and apart, far from the reach of one another.

At least that way of looking at the puzzle might explain some of the paradox of all that female unhappiness. Between bad ideas of gender neutrality and even worse ideas of the innocence of pornography, we reach the world so vividly described by Sandra Loh and many other dissatisfied women: one where men act like stereotypical women, and retreat from a real marriage into a fantasy life via pornography (rather than Harlequin novels), and where women conversely act like stereotypical men, taking the lead in leaving their marriages and firing angry charges on the way, out of frustration and withheld sex.

It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, but it has. Enlightened people only meant to take the small- s sex out of marriage: the unwanted gender division. Along the way, capital- s Sex headed for the exits as well.