by Jay Stringer
The draw toward pornography does not indicate that you need to get your boxing gloves out for a heavyweight fight against lust. Instead, it may be revealing the latent pursuit of purpose in your life. We often live afraid of being “caught” in our pornography use, but in reality, pornography has already caught us in futility. Rather than fighting lust or shame, let your sexual brokenness motivate you to find greater meaning in life. If you want to fight, don’t fight to eliminate desire; fight to discover meaning.
Max, an assistant manager at a local warehouse club store, started therapy after he was tested for a sexually transmitted infection. The results were negative, but his doctor encouraged him to pursue help if he sensed his behavior was getting out of control. The doctor recognized that men who buy sex tend to become reckless with their lives. Max cared less and less about the things that once mattered the most to him—his body, relationships, and career—essentially anything that had the potential of bringing goodness and meaning to life.
In our second session, Max talked openly about the trajectory of his sexual behavior that escalated into his decision to buy sex for the first time. Although not all men who watch porn will go on to buy sex, Max found his pornography use to be a significant factor in his ultimate decision to buy sex. He disclosed that scenes of women on their knees serving men were the most appealing to him. In reflecting about this, he noted, “Over the years, I have had an increased pull toward scenes that were aggressive, even violent at times. Normal sex between a man and a woman just didn’t do it for me anymore. A screen did not do it for me anymore. I needed a person.”
More than 50 percent of men who buy sex have a current sexual partner.[56] These statistics seem to imply that there is something other than loneliness or an absence of sex that is contributing to these men’s entitled demand of sexual exploitation. Much like viewing pornography, soliciting sex allows a man to enter a world that exists above the fray of futility.
I asked Max if he had any sense of what was currently fueling his behavior. He disclosed that another warehouse was opening in the area and he had been the supposed front-runner for a managerial position. In the end, another manager received the offer. An opportunity he thought would change the trajectory of his career instead became another iteration of disappointment. As far as he could forecast, his life held little purpose.
At the end of that agonizing week, he searched online for a young prostitute. He made the necessary arrangements and arrived in a hotel parking lot on the north side of town an hour later. As he waited in his hotel room, he knew exactly what he was about to purchase: the right to order a woman, really a teenager, to kneel before him and serve him precisely the way he wished. Futility fueled his entitlement and anger. Max and many men are bound to compulsive behavior because they do not metabolize their futility without turning toward a sexualized anger.
The madness of unwanted sexual behavior is that the very thing we develop to assuage a lack of power ends up becoming a powerful master over us. Futility is never content with ruining one aspect of someone’s life; it wants to reproduce, infiltrating every aspect. This is pornography’s seduction to men: Bring me your weary and defeated heart, and I will give you a world where it will all go away. In the end, pornography confiscates not only your purpose but also your heart.
Experiences 5 and 6: Lust and Anger: Unrestrained Desire and the Demand for Control
To be sure, lust is one of the most important contributing factors to sexual brokenness. But in our focus on lust, we easily lose sight of the other interrelated factor that drives our unwanted sexual behavior more than all the rest: anger.
As we briefly explored in chapter 3, despite the potential damage lust and anger cause, they are not holistically something to condemn. Lust points to a great desire for a good thing, like beauty or belonging. Anger aims at our longing for justice and restoration. Sin enters when lust is hijacked by covetousness or demand and when anger is hijacked by entitlement, contempt, or dogmatic control. Sexual brokenness can never be redeemed through futile attempts to stop lust that ignorantly disregard the insidious role anger plays in fueling it. By aiming at their partnership, however, beauty, belonging, and restoration can indeed become the foundation of our sexual lives.[57]
In Matthew 5, Jesus addresses the nature of sin. He says that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully (epithumeó: to covet)[58] commits adultery in his heart. Often overlooked, however, are Jesus’ remarks on anger that appear first in Matthew 5:22. Jesus says that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. James 4 brings these together: Lust and anger are related.[59] Jesus’ words are a tough pill to swallow. In our sin, we are not only adulterers, but murderers too.
Lust and anger are even present in my children’s lives, although the presentation is often very endearing. When my son was almost two years old, my wife and I reveled in how much he loved such a wide range of foods. It didn’t matter if it was chocolate, goldfish crackers, kimchi, seaweed, or kale—he wanted it all. One day I came home with takeout from a Thai restaurant. He saw the iconic white takeout box, and his body started dancing with excitement. I placed the food on the table, and he looked up and pointed his fingers to his tongue, saying, “Uh huh, uh huuhhh.” I opened the takeout box and offered him one piece of chicken. He exploded with anger. He fell to the ground and pounded his little fists onto the hardwood floors. “No! TALLL BITE! BIGG BITE!” As you can see, desire, if not satisfied, will often give birth to anger.
Lust and anger are the primary tributaries that flow into the river of unwanted sexual behavior. I have never met someone who struggles deeply with lust who is not also battling with unaddressed anger. You can lust for pornography, but in the background, you might be angry at your spouse for not being sexual enough. You can be angry that a friend did not invite you to a party, and almost immediately you find yourself lusting for a hookup to override the experience of betrayal. Lust is important to address, but it is like a car battery: It starts the engine, but we need anger to fuel our drive through unwanted sexual behavior.
Unequivocally, I believe male anger to be at the heart of much of the sexual brokenness and violation in our world. We will explore this concept in more detail in the following chapters. Rarely do I meet men who are consciously aware of their eroticized anger. Instead, they see their drive for sex as a mash-up of emotions such as loneliness, frustration, and disappointment.
One client put it like this:
My wife and I were eating dinner and got in a fight about something stupid. I think it was really one of those fights about who took out the garbage last. We started stonewalling, and she eventually just left the table and turned on Netflix. I was ticked and headed to the basement. Next thing I know, I was scrolling through social-media sites and ended up looking at porn on Tumblr. I hated the bind I was in. I didn’t want to be looking at porn, but I end up feeling so sexual when I am frustrated.
We can lust for sex; we can lust for food; we can lust for virtually any dimension of life. But when we do not get what we desire, we find our hearts full of anger and we demand to be filled. This is why treatment paradigms that exclusively focus on lust management (blocking software, accountability groups) and trauma-focused therapy (attachment theory, EMDR) will only go so far in maturing people. These paradigms contain dangerous “partial truths” that set people up to continue to sexually fail because the other half of the equation is left to fester in hiding.
Want to find out why you’re so compelled to pursue unwanted sexual behavior? Figure out what’s made you so angry.
Let’s take a look at how the confluence of lust and anger shaped the sexual fantasies of the respondents in my research. The most common sexual fantasy men had was the desire for power over women. Men who wanted power over women tended to fantasize about teen, petite, and college-aged women from another race and pursued fantasies in which women were portrayed as submissive. What predicted this type of sexual fantasy in men? As it turned out, there were thr
ee main factors: their relationships to shame, their sense of futility, and the strictness of their fathers.
Men who wanted power over women had the highest levels of shame, lacked significant purpose, and had fathers who were overwhelmingly strict. The writing on the wall was that men found power over women arousing precisely because it gave them an arena to find dominance amidst the difficulties they were facing in life. Lust gives men the opportunity to escape pain, but eroticized anger demands someone else be used to exact revenge on the situation or person causing their discomfort.
If we do not marvel at and honor beauty, we will inevitably bend it toward our control. As a society, we seem to be waking up to the reality of how much the beauty of women has been exploited for the sexual gain of men. In porn, we see this with even greater clarity. For many years, the most visited pornography site in the world was devoted to women stripping on webcams. A unique feature of this site was that it allowed men to tell the women what they wanted to see them perform on camera. Estimates at the time were that of the billion people using the Internet, 2.5 percent visited the site each month, equating to an astronomical thirty-two million people.[60]
Sites like this, though fairly benign according to porn standards, show how committed men are not just to lust for beauty but also to direct the lives of women for sexual entitlement. I am convinced that one of the reasons we have not seen more progress in the reduction of pornography is that it seems very few people outside of Jesus and pornographers seem to understand that the heart is seduced by behaviors that allow lust and anger to be indulged. Pornography traces the human heart’s trajectory from lust to a demand to control beauty and, if you stay long enough, to a desire to see the body and face of a woman degraded.
If you want to see your unwanted sexual behavior transformed, name anger and lust as the partners in crime they are. Too often, people of faith have been loquacious in discussing purity, lust, and even sexual addiction, but largely silent on the issue of anger and power as it relates to male violence against women. Our preoccupation with lust and our avoidance of anger may be central to why many of us have not been able to find freedom. We cannot transform sexualized anger when we have so little language, or willingness, to state that it exists.
The six core experiences of deprivation, dissociation, unconscious arousal, futility, lust, and anger reveal the why behind your current unwanted sexual behavior. These are the stories that await your engagement. Although sexual brokenness may have long seemed like an impediment to cultivating a spiritual life, it can be the very means God uses to transform you into the person you’ve always wanted to be.
FOR REFLECTION:
Recall a time you pursued unwanted sexual behavior when you weren’t caring well for yourself.
What is the primary way you dissociate? Does it serve as a “gateway drug” to your pursuit of unwanted sexual behavior?
Write down your two or three most prevalent sexual fantasies. What do you think they might be communicating?
What area of your life do you feel the greatest lack of purpose in? How will you pursue integrity and maturity within that area?
Think of a time when you found yourself pursuing lust after you were angry with some person or event.
If you are a woman, recall a time when you experienced the sexual entitlement or anger of men.
[54] Gus Turner, “After the Cavaliers Lost the NBA Finals, Cleveland Fans Watched a Lot of Porn,” Men’s Health, June 16, 2017, https://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/cleveland-cavaliers-fans-porn-nba-finals-pornhub.
[55] I am indebted to Dan Allender for this insight that I learned as a senior fellow at the Allender Center.
[56] Melissa Farley, Julie Bindel, and Jacqueline M. Golding, Men Who Buy Sex: Who They Buy and What They Know (Eaves, London: Prostitution Research and Education, 2009), https://i1.cmsfiles.com/eaves/2012/04/MenWhoBuySex-89396b.pdf. This research shows that about one-half of the study participants (54 percent) said that they were currently in a relationship. Other research from N. McKeganey found that 66 percent of buyers in Glasgow, Scotland, were married or living with a sexual partner. See N. McKeganey, “Why Do Men Buy Sex and What Are Their Assessments of the HIV-Related Risks When They Do?” AIDS Care 6, no. 5 (1994): 289–301.
[57] This lust and anger section is based on an article I wrote with Covenant Eyes: Jay Stringer, “Faith Leaders: When We Blame Lust, We Intensify Sexual Sin,” Covenant Eyes, March 5, 2018, http://www.covenanteyes.com/2018/03/05/blaming-lust-intensifies-sexual-sin/.
[58] NAS Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible with Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries, s.v. “epithumeó,” accessed March 13, 2018, http://biblehub.com/greek/1937.htm.
[59] Dan B. Allender, The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You to a More Abundant Life (Colorado Springs, CO: Waterbrook, 1999), 52.
[60] Julie Ruvolo, “How Much of the Internet Is Actually for Porn,” Forbes, September 7, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/julieruvolo/2011/09/07/how-much-of-the-internet-is-actually-for-porn/#579195935d16.
CHAPTER NINE
THREE HIJACKERS OF OUR SOULS
GOD KNEW FULL WELL WHAT SORT OF power sexual arousal would release in the world when it was designed. Therefore, the hijacking of our sexual lives for destructive purposes should not be confused with their inherent goodness. The key drivers we explored in part 1—such as triangulation, disengagement, and abuse—are the origins of how our sexual lives become increasingly vulnerable to being hijacked. What we will explore now is how terrorists of resignation, perversion, and degradation calculatingly execute their plans.
No one ever wakes up and says, “I’m willing to resign my sexual life to perversion and degradation.” Most of us, however, find that the longer we remain in unwanted behavior, the more hijacked our experience with it becomes. When the ability to maintain authority over our sexual stories is compromised, the more despair we will experience.
Most often, our sexual lives are hijacked in three areas: futility is hijacked by resignation, lust is hijacked by perversion, and anger is hijacked by degradation. As we explore these three hijackers, we will journey into the deepest parts of the swamp from which you may believe there is no escape. What I trust that you will find is that you do not need to manufacture hope to get out of this quagmire; rather, hope exists in the very dregs of your heartache. The honesty and courage that have carried you this far have prepared you for the hardest part of our journey together.
Resignation: Hijacked Futility
As a woman, I feel as though I resist forms of violence all day. With porn, I just resign to it.
VICTORIA
My wife doesn’t like sex, so yeah, I am going to mess up occasionally.
AARON
Each of these statements reveals a soul hijacked by resignation. The word resign is taken from the Latin resignare, meaning to unseal or cancel.[61] When we resign to unwanted sexual behavior, we are canceling, unsealing, our commitments to being men and women of integrity. When futility goes unaddressed, it will eventually taunt us with the message that nothing can be done to change our situations. When we attempt to change, we may even hear ourselves say, “There is too much sexual brokenness behind me to overcome. I am unwanted and beyond repair.” Rather than transform this toxic message, we find it easier to collude with it. Our lives are hijacked each time we choose indifference with the things that matter.
Your first experiences with resignation may not be overtly sexual. Instead, they come in the form of a third drink, binge watching your favorite shows, and gradually falling behind at work. These experiences are often the gateway drugs that either lower our defenses or increase our frustration. Unaddressed, they propel us into unwanted sexual behavior. Within a study of 932 people struggling with compulsive sexual behavior, 42 percent reported chemical dependency, and 38 percent reported an eating disorder.[62] Resignation is like compounding interest on a loan: It starts small and swells with time.
Explicit pornography is the tip of the
iceberg for our collective lust for content that allows us to escape our lives and deadens our desire. Debra Hirsch, author of Redeeming Sex, wrote,
No one would blink an eye at a woman bringing a Women’s Day into church, yet there would be an uproar if a man arrived with a Playboy under his arm! Aren’t both types of magazines pornographic? I put women’s magazines into the category of “social porn,” because they can be just as damaging for women as “soft porn” can be for men. Think of all the faulty notions of beauty it breeds, the covetousness it generates, not to mention the gossip that ensues. . . . Porn is porn, no matter what form it comes in.[63]
Hirsch is helping us acknowledge that in the heart of every man and woman is a desire for a version of pornography. Think about the spectrum of pornography as the difference between smoke and carbon monoxide. We’ve been trained to set up smoke alarms in our hearts for unwanted sexual behavior. This alerts us to the most obvious forms of danger: the smoke of explicit pornography or the first date of an affair. “Social porn” and other forms of thoughtless content are the carbon monoxide. It may seem odorless and colorless, but it leads to the same poisoning of passion and purpose.
The goal of the evil one within resignation is propagation. Evil is never content with futility in one sphere of life; it wants to invade all of them, particularly the places that hold the greatest potential for beauty. I do not believe that the kingdom of darkness cares terribly much whether futility starts with our sexual behavior or our careers or our families. It knows that when we resign in one area, our defenses in all other areas will follow suit. When the pattern of resignation is established, we find ourselves conceding to sexual stories we never would have wanted. The advancement is brutal and yet so simple.