A word to my sons about porn

You are just little boys. You play with action figures and Legos. The highlight of your week is when we have Lucky Charms for breakfast. You ask me if Transformers really exist. You are a long way from having to shave. But if the statistics can be believed, it probably won’t be long until you have your first exposure to pornography.

I can’t tell you how this breaks my heart. I don’t know how it will happen, but I imagine you will be confused. You will enjoy something that you also know you shouldn’t be enjoying. You will feel shame and you’ll have to decide if you’re going to talk to me about it or not. Please talk to me.

I know you see me as your mom, but I am also a woman. I want to speak to you on behalf of the woman who will someday be your wife, the little girls who will be your daughters, the sisters of yours who are growing into women before our eyes.

For all the hype around porn, it really isn’t that complicated. Porn is marketing. Porn is trying to sell you something. It’s trying to sell you an idea of who women are. Porn is lying. The more you believe the lie it sells to you, the less you will be able to enjoy the truth. (And there’s so much more I want to tell you about the lies porn is telling you about YOU and your worth and your value as a man. A conversation for another time. Along with the conversation I need to have with your sisters about what porn will mean to them.)

Porn wants you to believe that women don’t age. Women don’t have cellulite. Women have the bodies of little girls with the sexual appetites of grown women. Women want all manner of degrading and scary things done to them even if they say they don’t. Please don’t believe those things. They will set you up for a lifetime of unrealistic expectations and unhealthy attitudes towards women. You are feeding into a society that tells your sisters they need eating disorders and boob jobs to be acceptable. You are paying money to an industry that will encourage your daughters to prove their worth by sending naked pictures to their boyfriends to be passed around at school. YOU are doing this when you give porn your money, your time, your heart and mind.

You may think you need porn to understand how women work. You may hear this is educational and normal and healthy. How else will you understand how to please a woman if you don’t figure out how all this stuff works?

My sweet boys, sex is not that complicated. If you get married you will find you have the best and only teacher you’ll ever need. Your wife. She will tell you what she wants and she is a unique individual creature to be valued and heard. She knows what makes her feel safe and loved. And it works both ways. Before I married your dad, my mom said to me, “There’s nothing in Cosmopolitan Magazine that your husband can’t teach you. Don’t let them tell you what he wants, let him tell you.” I know— gross, Grandma. But she was right.

Your wife doesn’t need you to be more “experienced” or knowledgable about these issues. When you invest your energy in studying the curves of women who have bodies created by science and photoshop, you are robbing from your own ability to enjoy your wife. That is no gift to her. When you spend hours viewing men who have made their career selling themselves as sexual masters, you are going to feel inadequate. You have to remember– porn will only continue to make money as long as it continues to make you believe you need it. You don’t need it. And it’s hurting you.

If you want to create a beautiful sexual expression of love with your wife, there are things she needs from you. She needs to feel confident in her body. She needs to feel safe with you. She needs to feel free to express her desires. She needs to feel respected if she says “no” to something. Porn undermines all of those things. Every. single. one.

Porn will never turn you down. Porn will never have a fight with you. Porn will never ask you to put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher instead of on the counter. Porn will never get old, get stretch marks, or gain ten pounds. Porn will never have a headache. It can seem like the perfect companion when life with a real woman seems too complicated or when you feel rejected and angry.

But porn asks a lot in return. The pleasure is all yours, but so are the shame and consequences. Porn will always tell you that happiness is around the corner of the next beautiful woman, the next forbidden experience, the next escalation. In the pursuit of the happiness porn promises, it can take your productivity and your resources. It can take your ability to see women as people and not just commodities. It can take your ability to be satisfied. Ultimately, it can take your marriage and it can take your kids (except for every other weekend, alternating holidays, and a month in the summer). Porn is after your money and whatever devastation it leaves in its wake, it will expect you to clean up.

Little boys, I understand the temptation. The female body is beautiful. You were made to enjoy it in its appropriate context. Sex is fun and exciting. But sex can’t just be divorced from relationship without consequences. It is an expression of love and throughout your marriage it may serve many functions— to show affection, to express desire, to prove forgiveness, to provide solidarity in grief, to create life. While you can actually put a price tag on sex, there is no amount of money you could pay to get the full beauty of sex that’s found within the context of a healthy and loving marriage. And paying money for the cheap imitation will only harm your ability to get the kind of intimacy you actually crave. Because what you crave is to be fully known and accepted and loved. Porn can never give that to you.

If God’s design for your life does not include a wife, porn is still not in your best interest. First of all, because Jesus says it’s a bad idea (Matthew 5:27-30). And you know who agrees with Jesus about the dangers of looking at women lustfully? Science. The more we know about what porn does to the brain, the more we see how damaging it is. It makes you more calloused towards women, it is addictive, and it causes unhealthy changes in the brain. The more porn use by children like you becomes an epidemic, the more we will see the negative longterm consequences. Don’t be part of that problem. Be men who value and respect the women in their lives– your sisters, your coworkers, your friends, and yes, your mom. Be men who value themselves and treat your own body and mind with respect. Give God your sexuality and trust him to be sure your needs for love and friendship are met. Porn was never designed to meet those needs and will only leave you more lonely and unfulfilled. Contrary to all it promises, it will never even be a cure for your sexual desires.

So when you see that thing you know you shouldn’t have seen, let’s talk about it. I know you’ll feel shame, but don’t let that keep you from coming to me. You are a child and you aren’t supposed to be making these kinds of adult decisions yet. Let me help protect you. I know it may feel like a sacrifice to give up what so many other young men are indulging in, but you will be blessed in the long run. If you end up married, your wife will thank you. And maybe if it doesn’t seem too gross, she’ll thank me too.