The Solution to Porn Addiction

In his book the Metaphysics of Sex, the Italian philosopher Julius Evola wrote:

“In periods of decadence such as the present one, sensuality develops in the dissociated form of simple pleasure. As a result, sex becomes a kind of drug, and the addiction to it is no less profane than actual drug addiction.”

I admit it, I have watched pornography. I have been viewing it since I was 13 and found my dad’s old stash of Playboy magazines. And until recently I never cared at all, never even gave the slightest consideration about the women I was ogling. That is 22 years I’ve been unknowingly exploiting and abusing women. That is what watching pornography is–abuse of women and abuse of one’s self.

Pornography trains those, primarily men but also women as well, who watch it to view other humans as nothing more that objects, as sex toys, as pieces of meat to be used then discarded like garbage. I could not even begin to count how many women I’ve seen naked or in sexual situations over the years, and I cannot say I cared about even one of them. I would watch them, do my thing and then move on, completely forgetting them. That I never met them in person does not negate the fact that I treated them as disposable sex toys.

As I continue my journey towards perfect union with God, I am being purified by the Holy Spirit of various sins, the latest of which is sexual immorality. For the past few months I have been growing more and more disgusted with secular society and its morally repugnant behaviour towards sex, which is largely due no doubt to my prayer life, in which I ask Jesus to inspire within me an abhorrence of sin. The result being that when I have viewed pornography over the last couple of months, I have had thoughts breaking in like “That is someone’s daughter or sister”, “How do you know that she is not a human trafficking victim?” “What would Jesus say about you watching that?” More and more I have been getting turned off by pornography.

Recently, I listened to an interview from Focus on the Family with a young woman who was the victim of human trafficking. I listened to her story of how she was seduced and then threatened into prostituting herself as well as performing in porn movies. I heard how despite all the pain, abuse and neglect she went through she still found her way to Jesus. I listened to how after all she went through, she is now an advocate for ending human trafficking.

The Holy Spirit used her testimony to sear my conscience and make me truly repent of my sin, not just in an empty platitude sort of repentance, but in a deep sorrow from the soul kind of repentance, a repentance that burned away my pornography addiction.

How do I know my addiction to it is truly gone? The same way I know my drug addiction is gone. When God cured me of my substance abuse problem He changed the way I thought about drugs. I went from a pro-drug, do what you want attitude, to an almost pathological hatred of drugs and alcohol. I can’t even think about having a beer without becoming angry at the evils it inspires in humanity. In the same way, I will never be able to view porn without all of the evils it causes coming to mind. God used the testimony of another Christian to permanently ruin any future enjoyment I might have had of pornography.

Porn addiction is a serious problem for men, we are by nature visually stimulated, combined with the pleasure that accompanies its use, that makes for a powerful addiction that will drag you down into the depths of depravity. Just as with other drugs, you build up a resistance to it and need stronger and stronger doses in order to get your fix. After a while the classic Playboy nude is no longer enough, you need to start viewing more hardcore images, some men are dragged down so far that they even start searching out things that are criminal in nature.

One thing I’ve noticed about the Christian community is that we are not very good at rebuking people. We seem to think that love of one’s neighbor does not include corrective education toward sinners. We have developed a “judge not” attitude which is not healthy for the church or for society at large. Jesus said (Matthew 7:1-5) to first remove the log in your own eye then you will be able to remove the speck in your brother’s eye. And the only way to remove that log is to confess your sins; once it is gone you are free to start working on removing the speck from the eyes of others.

Men are the cause of the problem and we must be the solution, we need to start speaking out on the evils of the sex industry, we must reverse the cultural conditioning that makes us view women as objects and start viewing them as humans worthy of love and dignity.

Christian men need to take up the role of moral leadership in society and start speaking out louder and more often about the spiritual sickness that is the various kinds of sex addiction. With the commercialisation of sex and the snowball effect of loose morals, our collective views on sex are becoming increasingly warped and twisted into something of pure evil. We need to start acting now before our society ends up like another Sodom and Gomorrah.

What ideas do you have for making changes to society regarding this issue?