The trailer for “Fifty Shades Darker” is showing in theaters. USA Today calls it “sexier and more dangerous than the original.” The original movie showed at least twenty full minutes of sexual explicit scenes. Time reports that it led more women into pornography. The sequel is apparently even more explicit.
Why is this such bad news? The answer is simple: pornography is more dangerous than our society knows.
Psychology Today notes that frequent viewing of porn is related to elevated depression, anxiety, and loneliness. Women who discover their partner’s involvement in porn experience “tremendous amounts of fear and anxiety.”
The Journal of American Medical Association: Psychiatry warns that the more pornography a person watches, the less gray matter, connectivity, and activity they have in their brain. Studies show that boys who consume pornography daily demonstrate more interest in deviant and illegal types of porn. Frequent Internet pornography consumption among couples leads to a decrease in sexual satisfaction and a tendency to adopt pornography scripts. According to the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, 56 percent of divorces involve one party having an obsessive interest in pornographic websites.
Then there’s the effect of porn on children. A study of arrested child porn possessors found that 40 percent had sexually victimized children. Child pornography has become a $3 billion industry; approximately 30 million children have been sexually exploited in the last 30 years.
Now virtual porn is here. Companies like Kink.com, Naughty America, and Pornhub are using virtual reality headsets to make pornography more realistic and addictive than ever before.
Jesus clearly taught that lust is destructive and must be avoided at all costs (Matthew 5:27–30). However, our society is way past the day when most Americans believed in objective moral truth such as the Bible. Our culture has replaced logic with personal experience. Most are convinced that truth is whatever we discover it to be.
The problem with approaching pornography in this way is simple: by the time you discover how addictive and damaging it is, the damage has been done. Pornography will take you further than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost you far more than you wanted to pay.
Every time.
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