EASY access is not always good, especially to people that do not have the cognitive capacity to choose between bad and good. Pornography is one mental cancer that affects minds and minors.
This is an interview I (JN) has with Sheralyn Cloete (SC) while attending the AbR Media Conference in Kigali, Rwanda.
She was one of the speakers, and her topic was on porn.
This is an uncomfortable subject and as such, the intention of this article is to help people break away from porn.
JN: Pornography is on the rise with the rise of the internet. The simple question is: What is pornography?
SC: I think this is a very interesting discussion to have and I think there are lots of different definitions you can look at.
The Collins Dictionary’s definition is probably the one that I like the most because it talks about pictures, films, writings, so that can include books then, which are intended to stimulate sexual excitement.
If it’s pictures, it can even include drawings.
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Films, and you know, now even on Spotify, it can be audio — people do descriptive pornography.
So it can be writings, it can be films, it can be different mechanisms, different things.
But what’s very important is the why. And it is created to stimulate sexual excitement.
Pornography is something that has been created with the idea of turning people on.
And that means then that it could be varied in terms of if the person has clothes on or not.
In many cultures, being topless is not going to stimulate sexual excitement because it’s part of cultural practices, but in some cultures that will.
Whereas when you — and sometimes then you see a music video or something like that where everybody is fully clothed, but you know that the intention of the director, how it has been filmed, the angles chosen, how people are dancing — is to stimulate sexual excitement.
JN: So from a psychological point of view and probably a spiritual point of view, what could be or what are the dangers of pornography to the mind and to the hormones, obviously, and how someone would behave sexually?
SC: So we’ve got harm to our health, and that’s both physical and mental.
Then we've got harm to our relationships, and that can be our relationship with ourselves and relationship with others, harm to our faith, and then we have to consider harm to lives on the other side of the screen — harm to the people who create it.
And so if we go to health, there are issues around addiction, and now it's difficult because there's debate.
Is this problematic porn use? That’s the correct term — PPU, problematic porn use. Or is this addiction?
And there’s lots of different opinions on the matter.
What matters more than that is that there’s dependency, whether the term is correct or not.
There’s dependency, there are neural pathways, it’s changing how people’s brains work to make them in a way that they have an increased tolerance, so they need to use porn more often.
They need to use more disturbing, more violent, more destructive porn, or dependency in that they struggle to function without porn, and maybe even risk-taking behaviours begin to happen.
So this is an example of — and this has happened in quite a few parliaments around the world — but maybe people who are in parliament looking at porn, or someone who’s at work, and in their lunch hour, sneaks in some porn, because you know what?
They’re dependent on it, and so they start taking risky behaviours to get that fix of porn.
Then also, there are many, many studies that have shown that people who are using porn have not as good mental health as other people — so more depression, more feelings of isolation, more feelings of worthlessness and purposelessness — and so it affects our mental health.
Then our physical health — there’s something called porn-induced erectile dysfunction, which means that people have reframed their body in such a way that they’re only able to respond to porn rather than a real-life sexual partner.
Then we’ve got our relationships. I talk a about relationships where it can make people insecure in their own body, because even for men, nobody looks like the men in pornography, and for women, nobody looks like the women in pornography.
So we can be insecure, or we can be shallow, meaning that we start judging other people based on their looks, and we objectify them rather than their value that God has made them with.
We also start engaging with people in a transactional way — so porn teaches us, give me, me, me, me — it teaches us to be quite selfish, and then we can enter relationships quite transactionally.
What can I get out of this, rather than thinking about, how can I be in a relationship where it’s give and take?
Again our faith — we can have doubt, particularly if we’ve been praying about this — we also have guilt, or we have shame, because we know this is not the best for us.
We know that there is another plan for our lives, and so what we’ve got to be reminded of is the God who loves us, the God who is calling us to something better, the God who’s full of grace, but also the God who’s saying, I want the best for you, and this is not it. So yes, your behaviour needs to change so that you can have wholeness.
Then there are lives on the other side of the screen.
Now, I think it’s important to note that there are some voluntary porn people — people who are in porn because they want to be.
But when you are a porn viewer, how do you know that the person you are watching is doing this of their own free will?
How do you know that that person hasn’t been a victim of trafficking, or isn’t in a desperate situation, that they haven’t been exploited, that this isn’t somebody’s abuse, or rape, or filmed without consent, or if this person is still consenting to being online?
On the other side, there are porn producers, people — actors — who have come out of it, who talk about how even though they were making money, they would go home and feel devastated, and worthless, and brokenhearted.
And so if we want to be people of justice, and people who care about other people, we also have to be sure that what we’re consuming — that we aren’t having pleasure from someone else’s pain.
JN: How can one then rewire their neural pathways to shift the neural paradigms?
SC: So, I think some of the things we need to do is that we need to be able to name it, and own it — own that this is a problem — admit our need for help, and then maybe our help is going to be different for different people.
If you imagine a bowl of jelly — a jello that’s been set hard — and it’s been now turned upside down, and you start dripping water on that jelly, eventually it’s going to dig holes into that jelly, you know, the water, and there’s going to be deep gouges.
Now, if somebody has only had a few drops, those pathways are not going to be as bad, and a little bit of support, a little bit of accountability, a little bit of prayer, a little bit of education is going to be enough for that person to rewire those paths.
But if somebody has been pouring water on that jelly for a very long time, and those are now deep canyons, that’s going to require a lot more — maybe professional support even.
And so, I mean, we have our app, the Control Alt Delete app — that can be a great first step for many people, no matter if they’ve just started, or it’s been a long time — it could be a kickstarter. And then I would say peer support — so support groups, those kinds of things.
So, we also do online support groups, but for some people it will need to be individual therapy.
And so it will be a different need for a different person, but I would say we need spiritual truths to rewarm our hearts, but we also need psychological paths to help our brains.
JN: So, you know, there are people that are powerless. We’ve got children whose intellect or their mental wiring is not yet strong enough to make a choice, but somehow it affects them. So, how do you deal with a child that has been affected or influenced by porn?
SC: I think it’s very challenging, I’m not going to lie. And it also, again, would be about the amount of exposure.
You know, it is always easier to build a whole child rather than fix a broken one in many ways.
And so if we can do a lot of prevention and have discussions, when they have that first exposure they can speak to us and that porn loses its power very quickly.
And so having that prevention and those conversations before is very helpful.
But once we’ve got to a point where a child has been doing porn for a long time, there will need to be professional help in many cases.
And so I don’t necessarily want to give too much advice to a child because every situation is going to be different — that child will be different. So I would say that professionals need to be involved.
JN: Finally, what’s your motivation to the reader, or to someone who has been affected by porn? What would you say to them as a final word?
SC: That there’s hope. That there’s another story. Whether you’ve been trapped and feel like you’re drowning because of your own porn use, or drowning because of a family member’s use — God wants to write another story. He has a better story for you.
You know, the valley of dry bones — that’s what some people feel like. That porn has left them surrounded by dry bones.
But God came — and what did He do? He put flesh on those bones as Ezekiel was prophesying life. And so there can be a different story.
We’ve seen many, many people who now have a different story — who are free from the use of porn, who feel healed after their family’s use of porn.
And not only can God raise up that army with flesh and bones, but He breathes His Spirit into them and gives them new life and new hope. There is support, there is hope, and God’s light is shining in that darkness.
