A lot of men don’t seem to understand why women get so upset about pornography. They know it’s a sin, but they sort of see it like any other sin and can’t comprehend why their wives should feel so devastated. So, for the sakes of our future daughters-in-law, here’s something we can all teach our sons:

If you want your wife to be beautiful for you, then you understand how she feels about your eyes being just for her.

Why on earth would that be? It goes like this.

Men desire the sight of women’s bodies. They actually derive emotional comfort and meaning out of looking at a hot, sexy woman.

And, in just the same way, women desire to be desired. They actually derive emotional comfort and meaning out of being cherished as their husband’s one and only source of passion.

When a man disregards one of his wife’s most fundamental longings and places his desire in any woman besides his wife, his wife feels exactly the same way a man would feel if his wife were to disregard his fundamental longing for enjoyment of her body and become frumpy and frigid, rebuffing him every time he asks for sex, and going around all day in an old stained bathrobe, with unkempt hair, picking her nose, and passing gas.

The disgust is the same.

The disappointment is the same.

The feelings of being cheated, unloved, and unvalidated are the same.

Men don’t understand how much porn hurts women because they think about porn in relation to masculine needs not feminine needs. They imagine how they would feel if their wives were into it, and it doesn’t sound all that bad. But that’s because it doesn’t threaten men. Porn has no effect on how beautiful their wives are, and therefore men’s deepest desires are not put in jeopardy. A porn problem seems no worse than an anger problem or a problem with lying. And since it demonstrates an interest in sex, it can almost seem like a sign of something positive.

But for a woman, it is a betrayal of the one thing she wants most in an intimate relationship.

Our sons need to understand this. Before they get involved.

When I talk to people about pornography, I am frequently amazed (and saddened) by the number of people who just don’t get it. They don’t see porn as a big deal, don’t understand why it upsets women so much, and figure that anyone who is opposed to it must be a Victorian prude. Naomi Wolf has written a great piece that busts right to the heart of the matter, The Porn Myth. The fact is, porn makes men want real women less.

For most of human history, erotic images have been reflections of, or celebrations of, or substitutes for, real naked women. For the first time in human history, the images’ power and allure have supplanted that of real naked women. Today, real naked women are just bad porn….

…The young women who talk to me on campuses about the effect of pornography on their intimate lives speak of feeling that they can never measure up, that they can never ask for what they want; and that if they do not offer what porn offers, they cannot expect to hold a guy. The young men talk about what it is like to grow up learning about sex from porn, and how it is not helpful to them in trying to figure out how to be with a real woman. Mostly, when I ask about loneliness, a deep, sad silence descends on audiences of young men and young women alike. They know they are lonely together, even when conjoined, and that this imagery is a big part of that loneliness. What they don’t know is how to get out, how to find each other again erotically, face-to-face.

What’s her solution? Wolf can’t bring herself to actually recommend modesty, but she does a pretty good job of praising the wisdom behind it and shares a powerful vignette from a visit with an Orthodox Jewish friend in Jerusalem.

When she showed me her little house in a settlement on a hill, and I saw the bedroom, draped in Middle Eastern embroideries, that she shares only with her husband—the kids are not allowed—the sexual intensity in the air was archaic, overwhelming. It was private. It was a feeling of erotic intensity deeper than any I have ever picked up between secular couples in the liberated West. And I thought: Our husbands see naked women all day—in Times Square if not on the Net. Her husband never even sees another woman’s hair.

She must feel, I thought, so hot.

Due to the nature of the subject matter, I’m definitely not recommending this to younger readers, and I do suggest that you exercise discernment. However, given how pornography has swept our society, it would behoove us (especially those of us with sons to raise) to understand its true effects so that we can adequately warn our children. It all reminds me of what C.S. Lewis wrote in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,

Nothing spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food.

If you want to appreciate fresh fish and potatoes, stay away from the Witch’s Turkish delight. If you want a steamy sex life, stay away from porn.

It works.

Read the full article here.

Sometimes we need a wake-up call.

Let this information from the article, What Parents Need to Know About Porn and Their Kids take a moment to sink into your mind:

…according to statistics cited by the non-profit advocacy organization Enough Is Enough, the largest group of viewers of Internet pornography is children between the ages of 12 and 17. And there’s more. The average age of first exposure to Internet pornography is 11. Eighty percent of 15- to 17-year-olds have had multiple exposures to hardcore pornography. Nine out of ten children between the ages of 8 and 16 with Internet access have viewed pornographic websites, sometimes inadvertently in the course of looking up information for homework.

Now that you’re awake, go over and read the rest of the article. Don’t worry, we’ll all wait for you.

So what are we, as parents, going to do about this? How are we going to guard our children’s hearts and minds in this new era of easy access to some of the most vile, defiling images known to man?

Recently, I received an e-mail from someone who reads my blog, wondering if I could recommend a good internet filter for a Mac so her kids could play games online. She was concerned about allowing them Internet access, and rightly so! I had to admit that we don’t have any experience with filters. Since our children are very young (our oldest is only five), we have simply not allowed them to surf. We have bookmarked a few select sites that we allow them to go to. The computer is in plain sight in the living room, and I can monitor to make sure they are only going where they are supposed to. But, like I told the lady who wrote me, this is just a Bandaid. As they grow, our children are going to need a lot more than this to help them.

A filter is a good start, and I’d love to hear from those of you who use filters what you have and how it’s working for you. But, as my husband pointed out to me, all a filter is is a list of sites that the computer will not load if you click on them. There is no way that list is going to have every porn site on it. According to Enough is Enough’s statistics page, there are 420 million pornographic web pages, and every 39 minutes, a new pornographic video is made in the United States.  A friend of mine has a filter, and she says that some stuff still gets through. And furthermore, a filter is not going to stop the page title and description from coming up, so even if they can’t click on the page, our children still run the risk of reading about what’s on it.

A filter is fundamentally a sheltering tool, and as I pointed out in another post, sheltering isn’t enough. Our children need to be aware of what’s out there, how it’s likely to make them feel, and how dangerous and destructive it really is. Also, we must never let a filter lull us into a false sense of security. We still need to be diligent in checking our children’s browser histories and in asking the hard questions. And if you think your children don’t have a problem with pornography, ask yourself how you would know if they did.

Pornography addiction is rampant and skyrocketing. It affects men and women, young and old, and is a danger for both our sons and our daughters. I’d love to hear from you what your family is doing to protect your children and to teach them how to live lives of integrity online.