The problem of pornography

Recently I had dinner with a friend who teaches in a private (secular) high school. He mentioned at one point how much he worried about his students, who were heavily into watching pornography. Notice the placement of the comma in that sentence. Porn is so ubiquitous and normalized among the (well-off) kids in his school that it's considered the usual thing to partake of it. My friend went on to say that the situation was the same at the well-known (and relatively conservative) Christian university he'd attended. Among the male students, he said, "The question really wasn't, 'Do you use porn?' but rather 'Do you feel guilty about the porn you use?'"

He said he worked in a counselor's role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here. Porn helped make him who he was. After our conversation, I went into the Dallas Morning News online archives, and researched this guy, Greg Goben. He really was a Southern Baptist golden boy, from the time of his youth. Here's an excerpt from the 1988 news story reporting his guilty plea:

A sobbing Goben, questioned during the hearing, said viewing pornographic films and magazines contributed to his behavior.

"Yes, it's going to cost me my family,' Goben said at one point.

Asked if he viewed pornography before committing the assaults, Goben said yes. After the hearing, Gillett said Goben told him that he began going to see pornographic films with fellow football players at Louisiana Tech University and continued the practice when he moved to Dallas after graduation.

The hearing included testimony from a victim who said a man broke into her bedroom early one morning in September.

"He told me that we were going to make my face all up and that he was going to shave me and that he had brought a movie for us to watch and we were going to do all of those things,' the woman said. "And that if I did everything he wanted me to do, he wouldn't kill me.

You probably heard about serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy's jailhouse confession to Dr. James Dobson (who is a psychologist -- many people don't know that) about the role pornography had in shaping the monster he became. Excerpt:

JCD: For the record, you are guilty of killing many women and girls.

Ted: Yes, that's true.

JCD: How did it happen? Take me back. What are the antecedents of the behavior that we've seen? You were raised in what you consider to be a healthy home. You were not physically, sexually or emotionally abused.

Ted: No. And that's part of the tragedy of this whole situation. I grew up in a wonderful home with two dedicated and loving parents, as one of 5 brothers and sisters. We, as children, were the focus of my parent's lives. We regularly attended church. My parents did not drink or smoke or gamble. There was no physical abuse or fighting in the home. I'm not saying it was "Leave it to Beaver", but it was a fine, solid Christian home. I hope no one will try to take the easy way out of this and accuse my family of contributing to this. I know, and I'm trying to tell you as honestly as I know how, what happened.

As a young boy of 12 or 13, I encountered, outside the home, in the local grocery and drug stores, softcore pornography. Young boys explore the sideways and byways of their neighborhoods, and in our neighborhood, people would dump the garbage. From time to time, we would come across books of a harder nature - more graphic. This also included detective magazines, etc., and I want to emphasize this. The most damaging kind of pornography - and I'm talking from hard, real, personal experience - is that that involves violence and sexual violence. The wedding of those two forces - as I know only too well - brings about behavior that is too terrible to describe.

JCD: Walk me through that. What was going on in your mind at that time?

Ted: Before we go any further, it is important to me that people believe what I'm saying. I'm not blaming pornography. I'm not saying it caused me to go out and do certain things. I take full responsibility for all the things that I've done. That's not the question here. The issue is how this kind of literature contributed and helped mold and shape the kinds of violent behavior.

JCD: It fueled your fantasies.

Ted: In the beginning, it fuels this kind of thought process. Then, at a certain time, it is instrumental in crystallizing it, making it into something that is almost a separate entity inside.

JCD: You had gone about as far as you could go in your own fantasy life, with printed material, photos, videos, etc., and then there was the urge to take that step over to a physical event. Ted: Once you become addicted to it, and I look at this as a kind of addiction, you look for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Like an addiction, you keep craving something which is harder and gives you a greater sense of excitement, until you reach the point where the pornography only goes so far - that jumping off point where you begin to think maybe actually doing it will give you that which is just beyond reading about it and looking at it.

JCD: How long did you stay at that point before you actually assaulted someone?

Ted: A couple of years. I was dealing with very strong inhibitions against criminal and violent behavior. That had been conditioned and bred into me from my neighborhood, environment, church, and schools.

I knew it was wrong to think about it, and certainly, to do it was wrong. I was on the edge, and the last vestiges of restraint were being tested constantly, and assailed through the kind of fantasy life that was fueled, largely, by pornography.

Notice in this interview a couple of things. Bundy isn't blaming porn for making him a sex killer. He says it's his own fault. But he also points out that constant exposure to pornography wore down the "very strong inhibitions against criminal and violent behavior" that kept the antisocial impulses within him in check. The point isn't that every person who develops a porn habit will turn into Greg Goben or Ted Bundy. That's absurd. But it seems inarguable to me that no good can come of pornography, and whatever weaknesses we struggle with in relation to sexual and emotional health will be amplified by porn. Put another way, can anybody imagine that using pornography makes you a better or more emotionally healthy person?

We live in a pornified culture. So how do we raise sane, healthy children in this cesspool? What do you think? I haven't thought much about it at all, as a father. I never had any interest in porn, absent looking at a few dirty magazines as an adolescent. It creeps me out. When I was in college, neither I nor most of my close friends were religious, but none of us used porn -- or if any of them did, they kept their habits a secret, because they understood it to be shameful. Now, there's no shame in it in our culture. This teacher's stories made me think that I need to figure out how to plant seeds in the souls of my children now, to grow within them a sane sense of personal purity and respect for the human body -- both their own and those of others -- that cause them to turn away from porn when it is presented to them, and to stay away from people who use it. Because in this vile Late-Roman culture in which we live, there's no way to avoid it. As long as personal computers and the Internet exist, the temptation will always be there.

Any advice or thoughts you all have from your own experiences and observations, please share them.