Soft Porn vs Marital Ecstasy

‘I don’t look at real women. I only look at hentai – anime, manga and computer generated graphics. They aren’t real women. No one gets hurt.’

That’s scary. You look at this stuff for sexual thrills and it isn’t even human. How perverted is that? In even homosexual attraction, the person is at least human. Even in bestiality, the object of one’s lust is at least a living being. Every time you view such stuff you are perverting your sexuality. And each time, you make it harder to ever return to normality.

The problem is that porn always perverts one’s sexuality. Sex is meant to be about relating intimately with a person, not with an image. Finding the sight of one’s wife erotic is healthy, but voyeurism – mere looking being the ultimate – is a perversion.

I fell in love. Evidence seemed to be mounting that God might intend us to marry. I was thrilled, but try as I might, I couldn’t rid myself of my disappointment that my friend’s figure was not what I considered ideal. I was horrified at my reaction. Many men would love her figure and in my younger days I would have been delighted with her physically. Over the years a less-than-sanctified imagination, had shaped, or rather, misshaped, my notion of physical beauty. This had developed so insidiously that I had no idea it had grown into a monster that now refused to submit to love or reason. It spoilt my appreciation of a wonderful woman. Had it turned out that God intended us to marry, I expect I would have been kicking myself over and over, year after year, for the way I had let this thing grow like a cancer in my mind, eating into my ability to physically enjoy my wife.

Men vary greatly as to the physical qualities they prefer in a woman. Different races are usually most attracted to their own racial characteristics. Even within a race, some men prefer round-faced women, some prefer the gaunt look, some are attracted to very thin waists, some would rather plump ones, some go for bosomy women, some prefer more boyish figures, some go for skinny legs, some find big thighs sexy. For some, ‘feminine’ means no more than five foot tall. Some find hugging anyone who is short and less than a size 16 about as satisfying as hugging a shadow. And so we could continue. In theory, this variability in men’s preferences could match the natural physical variability among women, so that every man could have the thrill of marrying what to him is the sexiest woman alive, and every woman could thrill in the knowledge that in her husband’s eyes no one could match her beauty.

Working strongly against this, however, is the fact that the world takes one particular figure, pronounces it beautiful and does its utmost to condition everyone to accept its arbitrary standard. (Just how arbitrary it is, is seen by the fact that beauties in one era would be rejects in another. For instance, Marilyn Monroe, a size 14, would today be considered far too fat.) With the world doing its utmost to brainwash people as to what is beautiful, both men and women are being set up for great and needless disappointment. It is obvious that few women will meet the narrow criteria the world establishes, and those few will be so popular that few men will have a chance of winning their affection.

Suppose from before you were born God had a specific woman planned for you to marry and he intended to shape your desires such that even before you laid eyes on her, your longing was for someone her exact height, figure, eyes, hair, etc. Imagine how exciting it would be to marry the woman who in your eyes is the world’s most beautiful woman, and imagine what that would do to her self image and devotion to you. (Assuming she is free from previous upsetting experiences, every woman is divinely designed to reach her sexual peak in such security; soaring to heights of uninhibited abandonment, sexual responsiveness, playfulness and creative lovemaking beyond anything the average man thinks his wife capable of.)

But suppose instead of letting God shape your desires, you let the world concrete into your brain a conception of beauty quite different to the one your loving God intended you to have. You could end up longing for feminine characteristics nothing like those of the woman God knows you will marry.

Each time that instead of looking away, you allow yourself to sexually enjoy the sight of someone, you are robbing yourself of future marital pleasure because that person will most likely have physical characteristics different from the woman you will end up marrying. Whenever you permit yourself to enjoy an erotic sight you are sexually programming your brain. Little by little your conception of beauty alters, until finally it is irreversible. The other tragedy is that continued exposure to nudes causes a man’s sexual response to become more and more jaded until it is only abnormally endowed figures that could have the slightest effect upon him.

As remarkable as it seems, for a nine or ten year old boy brought up in a protected environment, seeing any naked woman, no matter what her figure or age, is a highly erotic experience. She could be a withered 90 year old and his circuits would be on overload. If this boy grew up refusing to sexually enjoy the images the world assaults him with, but continually letting Jesus mold him, he would be headed for marital ecstasy that few people in our society have any conception of. All his sexual energy would be focused on one person, rather than have it dissipate by having wasted it on a thousand sights.

If, on the other hand, he decides to get sexual excitement ahead of time, he could start looking at porn. He would be happy looking at any women exposing themselves. But those he is served up, all have similar figures. In his normal activities, he comes in contact with many other body shapes, but they are not in a state of undress and hence less exciting. So the association between sexual excitement and a certain body shape, grows stronger and stronger. Moreover, he keeps hearing people denigrate other body shapes – "fat is ugly," etc. – and he lets these voices drown out the Spirit’s whispers. He learns to feel ashamed of an appreciation of any body shapes not fitting the current fashion.

A similar scenario would occur if he regularly excited himself imagining nude women. Unless he were led of the Lord in his imagination (not likely in such circumstances!) he would probably develop an appetite for a certain body shape that doesn’t match God’s marriage plans for him.

Letting the world permanently program your sexual response would tragically diminish the pleasures God had lovingly planned for you. It would weaken the marriage bond, and cheat your wife of the joy and security that was her right of knowing that in your eyes she is stunning. You could even overlook God’s marriage choice for you simply because you have been blinded to her beauty. You could end up walking away from God’s best.

It’s amazing how many single guys delude themselves into thinking that by dabbling in porn, filling the coffers of the flesh trade, they are only biding their time until they marry. The moment they marry they’ll be satisfied and that will end their lust for nudes. That’s as smart as eating drugs because you are hungry and then supposing your craving for drugs will vanish when you find wholesome food. If there were the merest wisp of truth in the ridiculous notion that a wife could satisfy someone’s craving for porn, then a fully explicit photo of one normal-looking woman would be all that anyone wants. Playboy would have published one, single-paged edition and gone out of business. Everyone knows that one photo merely increases a man’s desire for another, and another, and another. And seeing normally endowed women only increases the yearning to see abnormally endowed women.

Face it: looking at porn is not just selling your soul to a never-aging half woman, half illusion, it is lighting the match to an unquenchable burning for an endless lineup of technology-human hybrids.

Skin magazines train a man to get bored with a woman after a few seconds. Do you think anyone could go from that to being excited by the same body for 30 or 50 years? Someone with an eye for women has devoted years to nurturing an appetite for such enormous variety that such a person would be lucky if a thousand wives could hope to bring him life-long satisfaction. And they most certainly would fail if the thousand were all roughly the same age because they wouldn’t remain youthful – something else dealers in human flesh train their suckers to crave. And if you aren’t satisfied, who do you feel sorry for, yourself or your wife? Who do you blame, you or your wife? And who is really the sexually inadequate partner?

‘Rejoice in the wife of your youth,’ says the Word of God, ‘ . . . let her breasts satisfy you at all times and always be captivated by her love’ (Proverbs 5:18-19). What chance has a porn junkie got of fulfilling his marital obligation?

Anyone letting porn wrap its slimy tentacles around his brain is sentencing himself to marital mediocrity, and – in the opinion of the ultimate expert, the Creator of sex – condemning himself to a sexually dysfunctional marriage.

If flesh merchants hope to maintain a corrupted man’s interest for more than a few more than 30 seconds they must make their merchandise put on some sort of performance – a strip show, or whatever. This is something many wives don’t like doing for their husbands. Unlike kissing, for example, in which the one activity excites both parties, it is not mutually stimulating. More significantly, however, it is not the private moment between a wife and her husband that it seems. Unless her man has suddenly lost all memory, she might as well be lined up alongside hundreds of the world’s most ‘beautiful’ women, with her husband’s eyes roving back and forth to see how his wife compares. Wives face the very real fear of being forced to endure the humiliation of being compared with all the hundreds, or thousands, of touched up images of models that their husband has ever seen. And if his wife won’t play the game like those who do it for money, he feels cheated, conveniently forgetting all the privacy and the uniqueness of the marriage relationship he has cheated his wife of.

Men despise the very thought of trying to compete with a vibrator. It’s humanly impossible to produce a sensation exactly like that of a machine. Though men hate to admit it even to themselves, if a woman has become infatuated with the unique sensations of a vibrator, even the most virulent lover has lost before he starts. He could try offering things a vibrator cannot do, such as love and emotional fulfillment, but a woman enthralled with a vibrator could be married to the world’s greatest lover and go to the grave with her most exciting memory of raw sexual pleasure being that produced by a machine. Likewise, the most physically beautiful woman in the world cannot compete with porn. Were she to discover the fountain of youth and miraculously remain stunning into her seventies; were she such a freak that she could compete with, and win, when compared with such unnatural things as airbrushed photos, computer generated graphics, plastic surgeons’ creations, and hours of photo sessions, or filmed choreographed sex acts in which all but a fraction is dumped to save the best – even then she doesn’t have the slightest chance. To compete with porn she would have to get a totally different body every few minutes.

God entrusted the gift of sex to humanity to establish and maintain a lifetime bond between a husband and wife. In our day, Christian marriages are crashing like in perhaps no other time in human history. ‘I hate divorce,’ say God in Malachi 2:16. ‘So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!’ warns Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:12. Dare we, living in such precarious times, with so much at stake, risk doing anything that could ever so slightly weaken the marriage bond?

In his extravagant love God had prepared a magnificent marital banquet for us, but most of us told ourselves we couldn’t wait, and we ruined our appetite by gorging ourselves on third rate junk food. Most of us have already irreversibly damaged our sexual response, but we can at least halt the slide. And if we repent, the Lord in his grace might restore a little of what has been lost, but God is certainly under no obligation to compensate for our selfish stupidity in opening ourselves up to satanic manipulation of our desires.

This webpage is part of a series looking at the little hurdles a man must mount before he can enjoy soft porn with God’s blessing. The beginning of the series