Porn is Not Love
With Valentine’s Day being celebrated this week, I started to think how nice it is to have a day solely committed to love! It’s a chance for me to tell my daughters, my granddaughter and of course, my husband how much I love them.
But, Valentine’s Day isn’t a day to think about or participate in porn. Before you ask me why on earth I would talk about porn, the movie, 50 Shades of Grey, is coming out this weekend and ladies, it is porn for women. While the book doesn’t have pictures it’s porn nevertheless, but the movie will have images that will stay in your mind forever.
Please understand something. I love having fun with my husband and enjoying life. But God strongly tells us to keep our minds away from anything that can harm or quench the Holy Spirit in those of us who are believers.
I’d like for you to read what Dr. Jennifer Degler, Ph.D., Psychologist and CWIVES Founder (www.jenniferdegler.com) said:
Why You Shouldn’t Read or See 50 Shades of Gray
“It deeply saddens me to learn that millions of women and teenage girls are reading 50 Shades of Grey. I am grieved by the number of Christian women on Facebook who describe how they couldn’t put the book down and are anticipating reading the next book in the series. Simply put, if you are a Christ follower, don’t read this book. It is female erotica, meaning that it is written to entertain and turn you on sexually. It is pornography without the photographs. If you wouldn’t want the men in your life to view pornography, then apply the same standard to yourself.
If you begin reading female erotica, you will likely develop a taste for it. As Lysa Terkeurst says, “We eat what we crave and then we crave what we eat.”
I know this to be true in my own life. As a fifth-grader, I began reading at least one Harlequin romance novel a day. My family went to the library every two weeks, and I would fill a brown grocery bag with romance novels. After a while, I grew bored with the tame, repetitious story lines and moved on to the romance novels with racier covers and plot lines. By the time I was in middle school, I was reading adult popular fiction filled with explicit sexuality. If those books were given a movie rating, they would be at least an R by today’s standards, and many of them would be rated X even though they were not classified as female erotica. My appetite for this type of book was voracious. My brain was addicted to the rush I got when I read the racy parts of the books.
Words, and pictures, create powerful images in our minds. I was never exposed to pornographic photos as a child, but that didn’t matter because the mind can create more vivid images than a camera could ever capture. And I wanted to experience what I read about and imagined. Long, sad story short: my high school and college years are filled with foolish choices that I regret tremendously. It has taken me years of personal and spiritual work to untangle the mess I made in my own brain.
God is gracious to turn our mess into our message and our pain into our purpose. Out of my sexual brokenness, God guided me to create CWIVES, a ministry to help married women value, initiate, and enjoy sex with their husband. My heart’s desire is for wives to love sex and to experience the oneness God designed for sex to produce. I want wives to want sex, but reading female erotica is not the answer. Yes, it will likely turn you on, but turn you on to what? Answer: to increasingly sexually explicit books. Not to your husband. You will be more drawn to erotic material than to sex with him. The same process happens with men when they feed themselves a steady diet of pornographic images. They begin to crave the images more than sex with their wife.”
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For those of you, who have read the books, please know that I am in no way shaming you. I love to read and might have picked up the book myself since it’s a best seller. But I hope that on this Valentine’s Day you instead think about how God wants us to show love. What is detailed in the book and movie is not God’s way. And I’m sure when Adam saw Eve, he wanted to tenderly show how much he loved her in a way that would honor and elevate her.
Here are some verses that I hope will inspire you:
“I will set no worthless thing before my eyes.” Psalm 101:3
“Only conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” Phil. 1:27
“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. And the world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God abides forever.” I John 2:16-17
“But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh.” Galatians 5:16
“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, rather than according to Christ.” Colossians 2:8