Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [80]
Proverbs 27:20 says,
Hell [Sheol or Death] and Destruction [Abaddon] are never full;
So the eyes of man are never satisfied.
If we apply this principle to pornographic lust, it becomes apparent that porn and sexual sin are not going to satisfy your lust but rather inflame it for more. Lusting eyes may begin with a magazine, Web site, or video and continue to view more magazines, Web sites, or videos until they become bored. Then the person descends into strip clubs, prostitutes, or acting out with people, which eventually become boring and lead to orgies, voyeurism, exhibitionism, pedophilia, and wherever else a crooked human heart can venture. It may be hard to believe, but a stark example is craigslist, which includes a few thousand bizarre sexual requests posted for our city of Seattle alone every day under “casual encounters.” Don’t kid yourself. Sin is an on ramp to death. If you get on it and don’t repent (turn around) and exit, you will find the landscape getting darker, grosser, filthier, and deadlier. One prominent feminist wrote after surveying the top rented porn movies that at least one act of verbal and/or physical abuse of women occurred in 90 percent of scenes, with an average of twelve acts of aggression against women per scene.
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In one of many interviews conducted for this book with women who were formerly strippers, prostitutes, and porn stars, I spoke with a woman who was a prostitute for many years before becoming a Christian and leaving that life. She recounted the painful connection between pornography and prostitution and said that young women, often in their midteens, being broken in by her pimp would first be raped, then locked in a room to watch porn for days on end to learn what to do to clients. The prostitute reported that nearly every time she showed up to have sex with a client during her many years in the business, he was watching porn and demanded she do for him what he was watching on film. Perhaps most chilling are some excerpts from serial killer Ted Bundy. He roamed the streets I rode my bike on as a kid, picking up women from my neighborhood to murder. In an interview conducted by James Dobson hours before he was executed, Bundy said,
I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of 5 brothers and sisters. We, as children, were the focus of my parents’ lives. We regularly attended church. My parents did not drink or smoke or gamble. There was no physical abuse or fighting in the home. . . . [It] was a fine, solid Christian home. . . . I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography—and I’m talking from hard, real, personal experience—is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces—as I know only too well—brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe. . . . Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far—that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it.14
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Clearly, while not everyone who looks at porn will end up doing such evil things as Ted Bundy, they will do evil things even if less intently or frequently. To use an old Puritan illustration, porn is simply bait on a hook intended to lure you in. If you bite, the hook will sink into your mouth. You will get dragged into death. Some are dragged quickly, as they do not thrash on the line and fight back. Others are dragged slowly, as they do thrash on the line and fight back with such things as guilt and moralism. But unless the line is entirely cut through