Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [82]
150
Julie’s porn career took off, and she was a cover girl and centerfold for the most popular porn magazines, appeared in multiple porn films, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through her pornographic web site. She does not remember much of the filming as, like the rapes, she disassociated and mentally checked out. She reported often leaving a filming set bawling her eyes out in shame vowing never to return, yet she always did.
Over the years, she bounced from abusive relationship to abusive relationship, dating men as much as twenty years older than her. She has no idea how many times she has been raped or how many abortions she has had.
This little girl who grew up in a small Baptist church, loved singing songs to Jesus, came forward for an altar call at age eleven and was baptized. Today, she is back in the arms of Jesus and involved in a wonderful church. She has been diagnosed as bipolar 1 with manic episodes that include her experiencing severe hallucinations and panic attacks. Ongoing counseling and medication has helped her, but she still cannot hold a job as the stress is too much for her to bear. She volunteers her time for ministry—helping women exiting the sex industry.
Julie is also fighting to get all the porn she has filmed over the years taken off the Internet and store shelves to no avail. Practically, this means some of her brothers and sisters in Christ reading this chapter may have recently watched it when they should have been weeping. Because she is their sister.
You can see that porn has hurt women in terrible ways. It also harms children.
Parents who have porn in their home run the risk of exposing their own children to their poison, with life-changing damage ensuing. Parents who would not allow illegal drugs or dangerous poison into their home nonetheless fail to see the same dangers in porn. But “just as food is consumed and digested by the body, pornography is consumed by the senses and digested by the brain. . . . However, there is no process for ‘waste’ products associated with pornography to be removed. Pornography and our response to it alter our brain in a way that is difficult to undo. Pornography is the consumption of sexual poison that becomes part of the fabric of the mind.”17
151
Porn also hurts daughters. Through our ministry relationships, we know many women whose fathers ceased meaningful interaction with them once they entered puberty. Because their fathers were habituated through porn to be sexually attracted to young women, once their own daughters began to look like the images they lusted after, the fathers became uncomfortable around them. Subsequently, such things as appropriate affection (for example, a kiss on the head or sitting together to watch a movie) ceased, making the young woman think there was something wrong with her that made her father reject her. Furthermore, this kind of confusing rejection leaves a daughter more vulnerable to the approval and affection of dangerous boys seeking to replace her father as the main male in her life in exchange for sex.
Rather than being ashamed as they ought to, some fathers fuel their own sinful lusts toward their daughters and their daughters’ friends.
Another troubling effect, as porn use increases among women, is the rise of the “cougar” phenomenon. This is where older women sexually desire and pursue younger men, sometimes roughly the same age as their own children.
Porn and the lust it inflames include child pornography. As far back as 2002, the U.S. Customs Service estimated that there were already more than one hundred thousand Web sites offering child pornography—which is illegal worldwide.18
The line between child pornography and adult pornography is blurring, which likely means that