Pornography In the Marriage: Where to draw the line?
I wrote this article for the Marine Corps Air Station, Yuma Desert Warrior (the station newspaper):
In the June 30th edition of this paper, the Tell Us Your Opinion question was “Pornography in the marriage: Where to draw the line?” This is a topic of discussion that we bring up in our PREP marriage classes and is, I believe, a topic of vital importance to the health of Marine Corps marriages. In responding to issues, it is common to give the BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front). BLUF: “Pornography has no place in marriages and is destructive in marital relationships.” Bear with me as I unpack the BLUF (from a male perspective).
Romance, love and sexual pleasure are God’s good gift to us. Lust is the opposite of the purity of romance, love and sex as originally intended. Lust can be defined as deformed sexual desire and as an excessive desire for one’s own sexual pleasure. Lust is self-centered and is focused on one’s own self-gratification. Lust has been rehabilitated in our culture. There is a prevalent belief that the only damaging thing about lust is suppressing it. Society has divorced sex from morality and sees it as just a physical need to satisfy and as long as it is consensual, it is just harmless fun.
Entire books have been written on the topics under discussion in this article, space only allows me to provide a brief summary. Within the marital bond, sex is good, lust, not so much. Pornography creates a warped perception of people, relationships and sex. Pornography teaches unrealistic and inappropriate sexual experiences, it decreases satisfaction with monogamy and lowers family loyalties, it objectifies and degrades women, it encourages promiscuity, and it increases susceptibility to sexually acting out in ways harmful to others. Additionally pornography objectifies men and women, portraying them as sex objects whose worth lies in the size and shape of their body parts. It should be noted that men tend to be very visual, and when they look at a nude woman, they spend more time looking at her body and less time looking at her face – the focus is on her body parts – she is an object to be viewed and consumed.
Pornography leads men to have unhealthy views of women. Women are not valued for who they are as people, they are seen as objects meant to satisfy our desires. The best book that I have read on the issue of pornography is Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain by William M. Struthers. In the book, he writes on neural pathways. Like a path is created in the woods with each successive hiker, so do the neural paths become wider as they are repeatedly traveled with each exposure to pornography. They become the automatic pathway through which interactions with women are routed. All women become potential porn stars in their minds. They unknowingly have created a neurological circuit that imprisons their ability to see women rightly – as images created with value as people, not as objects to be used.
Finally I remind the reader of the emotional connection that is supposed to exist only between husband and wife. When we give ourselves over to pornography, we create an emotional connection with an object of illicit desire. We rob our spouse of the oneness that is essential in keeping the relationship mutually fulfilling.
BLUF: “Pornography has no place in marriages and is destructive in marital relationships.”
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