Pornography and its effects


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Pornography and its effects

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Pornography

Pornography is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purpose of sexual gratification.

Pornography may use a variety of media - books, magazines, postcards, photos, sculpture, drawing, painting, animation, sound recording, film, video, and video games.

 
Soft-core pornography

Soft-core pornography is pornographic or erotic film or photograph that is less sexually explicit than hardcore pornography. Soft-core pornography is intended to arouse and typically contains nude and semi-nude performers engaging in casual social nudity. The visual representation of genitalia (full nudity) is common in printed media and increasingly so in film and television.

Soft-core pornography also typically contains depictions of sexual activity, such as sexual intercourse or masturbation. The sexual activity is typically simulated. Soft-core pornography typically does not contain explicit depictions of vaginal or anal penetration, cunnilingus, fellatio and ejaculation.

 

Hardcore pornography

Hardcore porn refers to depicting sex acts between persons of any age, including bondage, fetishes, sex with animals.

 

Dangers of Pornography

  • Voyeurism - An obsession with looking at women rather than interacting with them. The explosion in glorification and objectification of women’s bodies promotes unreal images of women, distorts physical reality, creates an obsession with visual stimulation and trivializes all other mature features of a healthy psychosexual relationship.
  • Objectification - An attitude in which women are objects rated by size, shape and harmony of body parts.
  • Validation - The need to validate masculinity through beautiful women.
  • Trophyism - The idea that beautiful women are collectibles who show the world who a man is.
  • Fear of true intimacy - Inability to relate to women in an honest and intimate way despite deep loneliness.

Pornography pays scant attention to men’s needs for sensuality and intimacy while exalting their sexual needs. Thus, some men develop a preoccupation with sexuality, which powerfully handicaps their capacity for emotionally intimate relationships with men and for nonsexual relationships with women.

 

SDA Statement on Pornography

The Seventh-day Adventist church deems pornography to be destructive, demeaning, desensitising, and exploitative.

  • It is destructive to marital relationships, thus subverting God's design that husband and wife cleave so closely to each other that they become, symbolically, "one flesh" (Genesis 2:24).
  • It is demeaning, defining a woman (and in some instances a man) not as a spiritual-mental-physical whole, but as a one-dimensional and disposable sex-object, thus depriving her of the worth and the respect that are her due and right as a daughter of God.
  • It is desensitising to the viewer/reader, callousing the conscience and “perverting the perception,” thus producing a "depraved person" (Romans 1:22. 28, NEB).
  • It is exploitative, pandering to prurience, and basally abusive, thus contrary to the Golden rule, which insists that one treat others as one wishes to be treated (Matthew 7:12). Particularly offensive is child pornography. Said Jesus: “If anyone leads astray even one child who believes in me, he would be better off thrown into the depths of the sea with a millstone hung around his neck!" (See Matthew 18:6).

Though Norman Cousins may not have said it in Biblical language, he has perceptively written: “The trouble with this wide open pornography . . . is not that it corrupts but that it desensitises; not that it unleashes the passions but that it cripples the emotions; not that it encourages a mature attitude, but that it is a reversion to infantile obsessions; not that it removes the blinders, but that it distorts the view. Prowess is proclaimed but love is denied. What we have is not liberation but dehumanisation.” --Saturday Review of Literature, Sept. 20, 1975.

Wise, indeed, is the counsel of Christianity’s first great theologian: “If you believe in goodness and if you value the approval of God, fix your minds on the things which are holy and right and pure and beautiful and good” (Philippians 4:8, 9, Phillips). This is advice that all Christians would do well to heed.

 

Ellen White on Pornography

Letters to Young Lovers, page 60.

Pornography and Your Mind

Many of the young are eager for books. They read everything they can obtain. Exciting love stories and impure pictures have a corrupting influence. Novels are eagerly perused by many, and, as the result, their imagination becomes defiled. Photographs of females in a state of nudity are frequently circulated for sale.

This is an age when corruption is teeming everywhere. The lust of the eye and corrupt passions are aroused by beholding and by reading. The heart is corrupted through the imagination. The mind takes pleasure in contemplating scenes which awaken the lower and baser passions. These vile images, seen through defiled imagination.

 

What does the Bible say about pornography?"

Pornography is rampant in the world today. Perhaps more than anything else, Satan has succeeded in twisting and perverting sex. He has taken what is good and right (loving sex between a husband and wife) and replaced it with lust, pornography, adultery, rape, and homosexuality.

Pornography can be the first step on a very slippery slope of ever-increasing wickedness and immorality (Romans 6:19). The addictive nature of pornography is well documented. Just as a drug user must consume greater and more powerful quantities of drugs to achieve the same “high,” pornography drags a person deeper and deeper into hard-core sexual addictions and ungodly desires.

The three main categories of sin are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life (1 John 2:16). Pornography definitely causes us to lust after flesh, and it is undeniably a lust of the eyes. Pornography definitely does not qualify as one of the things we are to think about, according to Philippians 4:8.

Pornography is addictive (1 Corinthians 6:12; 2 Peter 2:19), and destructive (Proverbs 6:25-28; Ezekiel 20:30; Ephesians 4:19). Lusting after other people in our minds, which is the essence of pornography, is offensive to God (Matthew 5:28). When habitual devotion to pornography characterises a person’s life, it demonstrates the person is not saved (1 Corinthians 6:9).

For those involved in pornography, God can and will give the victory.
 

 

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