Effects of Porn

                Pornography is all around us.  It graces the covers of magazines at checkout stands.  It is in movies.  It comes into our homes through the Internet and movies.  The more I learn about pornography, the more I understand how damaging it is to young and old.  It is particularly damaging to marriages and future marriages.

                Billy Hallowell, a blogger, writer, speaker, and professional truth sayer, published at theblaze.com reported on a new study that analyzed how pornography affects young men.  The study was titled “Are Pornography and Marriage Substitutes for Young Men?”  The study was conducted by Dr. Michael Malcolm, a professor of economics and finance at the University of West Chester, Pennsylvania, and George Naufal of Timberlake Consultants.  Their study “found that smut has become a replacement for marriage for many of the 18-35 year old males who use it.”  The report explains how pornography causes young adult men to satisfy their sexual needs without the problems involved with marriage.

                Matt Walsh published at theblaze.com an article explaining how men “are hurting your wife and killing your marriage” in four different ways.  He listed pornography as #1.   

                “There probably isn’t a more efficient way to make your wife feel betrayed, used, and violated than picking up a porn habit.  Obviously adultery would also accomplish all of those things, but porn is adultery….

                “There are a lot of reasons to hate pornography, but one of the reasons certainly has something to do with how delusional it makes us.  Many married guys insist there’s nothing wrong with it….

                “He rationalizes that what he does and says there won’t impact people, including himself, the same way it would in three dimensions.  There’s no basis for this rationalization.  It makes no sense, yet we all fool ourselves into thinking it, for one reason or another.  Still, despite the lies we tell ourselves, a woman who discovers porn on her husband’s computer will feel just like a woman who finds out about her husband’s affair.  And that feeling will only be made worse by the fact that her husband will claim it’s `no big deal’ and much of society will echo those sentiments.

                “This says nothing of what porn does to us as men.  It becomes an addiction just like any other.  It lessens us.  It pulls us away from our families, away from our wives, away from God.  It makes us liars and hypocrites.  I think any man’s porn compulsion comes wrapped in a thick layer of guilt, but that must especially be the case for men with daughters.  … I cringe particularly when I think of older fathers who look at porn involving women the same age as their own children.  It’s perverse and disgusting.  These men are not bad people, but they are doing a bad thing – a bad thing that, to make matters worse, has been dressed up as innocent and playful.

                “It’s definitely not an easy time to be a virtuous man.  Everywhere we look there are words and images trying to grab our attention and send us into a spiral of lust and sexual greed….  It’s easy to give in, but we have to fight it.  We owe ourselves that much, and more importantly we owe our wives.  Porn is adultery.  Porn will wreck your marriage, guaranteed.”

                I know a young woman who agonized over the fact that her husband was addicted to pornography.  Her marriage was annulled three months after the wedding.  Three years later she married another young man; they have two children and are very happy.  She was smart to get out of the marriage early and before any children joined the family.

                The effects of pornography stretch far and wide.  A husband and father that uses pornography damages not only his marriage but the future marriages of his sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters.  Pornography is poison, and it destroys marriages and families.