Broken By Sex: We're Not In Kansas Anymore
Adult Conversations About An "Adults Only" Crisis
(This is the first in a 3 part series about how sexual sin is crippling both our larger society and our Christian communities. I’m going to talk frankly about sex - but nothing I think is NSFW - because we need to have MORE not less of these adult conversations. And I think you’re adult enough to do so.)
I had a series of encounters in the last week that opened my eyes to the depth and breadth of the crisis of sexual sin that our society is awash in.
The first was with a young female friend of mine commenting that sex should be treated as a gift to share with someone and, in response to her, a mutual male friend replied that sex wasn’t a gift at all.
Now if he was sharing some Jesus’ wisdom from Matthew 7:6 that you “do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine”, I think I could see his argument. But that’s not what he was saying.
He was stating that sex isn’t holy. He did concede that it might have been holy once, but that ship had sailed a long time ago.
My second encounter was with a different young female friend who told me that having a threesome was on her bucket list. She isn’t some thirsty young thot (if that went over your head…head on over to the Urban Dictionary).
Just a regular young female who thought a threesome sounded “fun”.
Fun?
I suggested that smoking crack is fun, and she looked at me like I was crazy. A well-deserved crazy look because smoking crack is a bad idea. But she couldn’t make the connection that a threesome might equally be a poor choice.
Now before I move on to my third encounter, I think I should address the two questions that I’m certain you have so you don’t dismiss me out of hand (and please feel free to light me up in the comments below).
I’m guessing that some of my more secular or liberal readers might be wondering:
Are you some sort of sexual prude, Tim? Maybe a fundamentalist religious zealot?
And the rest of you with at least a room temperature IQ are asking:
Tim, what world are you living in? We definitely aren’t in Kansas anymore, but brother, we haven’t been there in a long time. Perhaps you should have channeled your inner Rip Van Winkle rather than Dorothy.
I promise you that I am the furthest thing from a sexual prude, and if you give this series of posts a chance, I think I’ll make that point abundantly clear. And a fundamentalist? That would be the first time someone ever accused me of that.
As to what world I’m living in, well, that is a little more difficult to explain.
I haven’t been Van Winkling for the last 30 years. I’ve seen the tide of sexual permissibility rolling in. But I think I’m like the guy who knows he has a spending problem but then is shocked when he totals up his credit card debt. I had witnessed the crisis, but never comprehended it in total.
Which brings me to my third encounter. My third encounter wasn’t merely the shock of seeing the total . It was the realization that we were bankrupt.
I attended an online Christian men’s meeting where we were sharing our struggles with addiction. I happened to share first and explained that I had made a mess of my life due to drug and alcohol abuse, that sexual vice was part & parcel of that lifestyle, and I was here to work thru all those issues.
The remaining half dozen guys didn’t have a story like mine at all.
Oh, all of them were struggling with some sort of sexual issue. But none of them had my background. All of them were “good Christians”. Raised in the church; some were elders, and one was once a pastor. They had jobs, and wives, and kids.
They were all just what I would consider “normal guys”, but each one of them had a crippling sexual addiction, be it porn or promiscuity.
Whoa! This floored me.
I had come of age as an addict, and as I mentioned, sexual mores go out the window when you’re an addict.
We were all getting high to get off, and what better way to enhance your high than sex. There’s a reason why they say sex, drugs, and rock & roll. If you’ve ever done Ecstasy and sex wasn’t the outcome, then you kind of feel like you got cheated.
But drug addicts are outcasts in the world. We are the underbelly of society; the wrong side of the tracks. We are on the outside looking in.
And that’s my point.
You had to go looking for this stuff when I was in the deepest depths of my addiction in the late 80’s and early 90’s. You had to find a coke dealer. You had to go to that rave or nightclub. You had to seek out other members of our dysfunctional tribe to get sexually degenerate with.
Not anymore. My world has bled into every home in America. And now, quite literally, the call is coming from inside the house.
What am I getting at?
Well, when addicts shoot up, they call their needle a “rig” or “works”
Guess what folks? We’ve got the greatest rig in the world in our smartphone. It dwarfs the amount of dopamine that any junkie’s works could dispense.
And if you think I am being overly dramatic in comparing narcotics to porn then go do a Google search on cocaine vs porn. Here’s a snippet of what you’ll find.
This infographic from 2014 is both informative & depressing.
Nearly everyone by age 18 has viewed Internet porn versus 16% of adults who have tried cocaine in their lifetime.
24 million claim to have an online porn addiction versus 1.6 million cocaine addicts.
And the kicker is that both porn and cocaine share the same brain impact and addiction cycle. Consider this 2011 article from Surgical Neurology International.
“A recent study supports growing evidence that compulsive sexuality can indeed be addictive. In 2007, a VBM study out of Germany looked specifically at pedophilia, and demonstrated almost identical finding to the cocaine, methamphetamine, and obesity studies. It concludes for the first time that a sexual compulsion can cause physical, anatomic change in the brain, the hallmark of brain addiction. A preliminary study showed frontal dysfunction specifically in patients unable to control their sexual behavior. This study used diffusion MRI to evaluate function of nerve transmission through white matter. It demonstrated abnormality in the superior frontal region, an area associated with compulsivity.”
“In one study, sexual experience has been shown to induce alterations in medium spiny neurons in the nucleus accumbens similar to those seen with drugs of abuse.”
And similar to drugs of abuse, pornography addiction “decreased interest in pursuing goal-directed activities central to survival”.
I could go on and on, but I’d prefer not to turn this into a book. Here then are a few more links to shine a light on how porn is impacting us:
Covenant Eyes porn statistics with a link to an extensive PDF report.
Utah State University research on the effects of porn on relationships.
The Reward Foundation article on the physical effects of porn.
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the impact that working in the sex trades is having on people. Just a mere decade ago, the chances of you knowing a prostitute or a porn actor were very slim. Maybe you knew some girl from high school that is now a stripper.
That world has changed radically with the ubiquity of smartphones with a camera & video. The ability to sext pics, the ease to upload amateur porn, and the tools to create on sites like OnlyFans is in the palm of your hand.
According to a NY Post article, “A third of Americans have shared a nude photo, and 73% do so as often as once a month”. Look at the person to your right then the person to your left, and chances are that one of you is an amateur dabbling in sex work.
But what about those making the pro jump to get paid for their sexual content?
Sounds like OnlyFans is the new post-pandemic goldmine!
But is it really?
According to this Tech Jury article, 82.4% of creators charge less than $20 a month, and the average creator has 21 subscribers and earns $180 a month.
It appears that selling your soul to the devil is pretty cheap nowadays.
And speaking of the devil…
I am Christian that believes there is a battle of good and evil going on in the world. Been going on for a long time. Go read the New Testament with that perspective and I think you’ll read it in a new light.
But I know I can get raised eyebrows when I bring up the topic of the devil or Satan.
So if that’s you, I ask that you give me a little grace in explaining how Satan is weaponizing sex. I promise I’m not a nutcase that sees Satan in every nook and cranny (I may be a nutcase, but not that type).
I think we can agree that Satan is pro-death and anti-life, and he’s fighting against Christ who is all about life: Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
So even if Satan knows that the war is lost, he’s trying his hardest to still lay waste to the battlefield.
And what type of stealth weapon can he employ to eliminate life, to not only deaden the souls of people but to interrupt the actual procreation of life?
Porn is that weapon.
You might be scratching your head and asking yourself how sex would lead to less procreation. Isn’t sex how we continue our species?
But what if porn is replacing actual physical sex?
There is a 2019 Institute for Family Study article that shows that fewer American high schoolers are having sex than ever before. The study sees this as a triumph: “These trends are part and parcel with a more general turn away from risky behavior among teens” and “Such unrelenting downward trends are cause for celebration”.
I’ll agree that it is a cause for celebration that teenagers are ditching risky behavior IF they aren’t replacing it with even more harmful behavior.
Look at the two graphs below which are from this study. It looks like the trends are relatively flat until 2013 when they start their drop. Then look at the 3rd graph from Zippia about smartphone usage. The drop in sex appears to correlate with the explosion in smartphone usage.
Is it possible that our teens are abandoning in-real-life (IRL) relationships for online ones that they find on their smartphones using Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok? And, if so, doesn’t it make sense they are abandoning IRL sex for online porn?
Additionally, the articles I referenced earlier note that all users of porn build a tolerance and need more edgy & graphic porn to stimulate dopamine release. Is it possible that IRL 18-year-old girls are not stimulating enough for 18-year-old boys?
Lastly, how bout erectile dysfunction? What happens if you do find an actual girl to have sex with, but because of your porn usage, you can’t get it up?
I’ve kept this argument for Satan weaponizing sex strictly in the arena of porn, but I could make similar arguments about casual sex, non-monogamous relationships, abortion, and the gender debates. They all put a damper on sex for procreation.
And if you can’t make the stretch to link it to Satan, I’m guessing you would agree that America’s enemies might see porn and sexual sin as our Achilles heel, and seek to weaponize it against us.
As I’ve got to wrap this up, my hope is that I’ve made a credible argument that sexual sin, led by the porn epidemic that we are awash in, is truly a crisis.
In my next post, I will try to drag sexual sin out into the light so we can know the crisis we face. And in my final post, I’ll discuss how shame is crippling the Christian community from addressing sexual sin and what we might do. But before I close, I would like to briefly touch on those two topics.
Too often the secular world believes Christians are moralizing to them about sex. Additionally, we come across as authoritarian. And the secular world responds: “its none of your business; keep your religious beliefs out of my bedroom”.
That same moralizing and judgment also drives Christians who struggle with sexual sin underground. Sexual sin is a huge minefield in the Christian world, and if you think we are bad to the secular world, it ain’t nothing compared to what we do to our own.
I can see how this article might even rub some of my secular friends and wary Christians the wrong way. Its hard to talk about sex without sounding judgmental, especially when I drag out the word sin (I’m going to really get into why sin gets a bad rap in the next post).
So, I invite you to read the next two posts with this promise:
No judgments.
If you’re an adult, go ahead and do sex however you want; as long as its with another consenting adult. You wanna be vanilla? Great. You wanna fly your freak flag? Go fly it. I’m not here to tell you how to live your life.
But if you’re like my buddy who thinks its not holy, but you suspect that it should be then stick around. And if you’re like my female friend who is uncertain about threesomes, but you suspect something is off then read on.
And to my last group, if you are someone stuck in depths of sexual addiction, regardless if you are Christian or not, I really hope you come back for the next two posts.
God bless you and remember…
Jesus loves you.
(If you are a Christian man who struggles with addiction, I recommend that you look into the Samson Society. The Samson Society is a fellowship of Christian men who are serious about authenticity, community, humility & recovery.)
Photo credit of Rip Van Winkle: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/digital-rip-van-winkle-marketing-gowthaman-ragothaman/
Photo credit of smartphone: https://prime.sg/digital-drug/