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Why porn shows too little

I was 13 when my family moved away from all of my friends. It was a strange, new culture I was living in, and I had zero friends. I cried myself to sleep every night, quickly slipping into depression. This was before I knew that you are supposed to have a relationship with God, and I constantly questioned what He was doing and if He was even real. During that year, I began chatting online with random people since I did not have any real friends. The chatting evolved into hours of full-blown sexual conversations, looking at pornographic pictures sent to me over chat, and lots of lies. I could not go one day without it. My mind was constantly mangled by sexual fantasies and perverted thoughts.

My family moved back home, and I decided to delete any sort of online app on my iPod. Since then I have not gone back, and have grown increasingly disgusted by pornography. What really happened is I truly met Christ and made Him my best friend. He transformed my life. I recognize now that the human body is beautiful, and that God created sex to glorify Him.

When you hear the word “pornography,” you may dismiss the idea as a problem for men, right? We always hear stories about men who are addicted to porn and it ruins their marriages, like in the movie Fireproof, or about teen boys getting sucked into the enticing world. But what about the women? No one talks about the female involvement in the porn epidemic—other than the poor women who are putting their bodies on display. Porn addictions are not just prevalent among men, but among women as well.

First of all, we have to recognize that borderline pornographic images are everywhere.  They are in movies, advertisements, TV shows, and magazines. But porn is not just limited to images. Our society has become desensitized to the beauty of human sexuality, and distorted sex into something that is meant only for selfish pleasure. Because of this distortion, things like cybersex, sexting, sexual fantasies and erotic novels are not always seen as pornographic. But all of them twist the purpose of human sexuality and use people as objects, classifying them as porn.

Typically, women value communication and words whereas men tend value visuals and physical attributes. That is why a woman will like a man the more she gets to know his personality, and a man will initially like a woman because he thinks she is beautiful.  In the same way, porn for women tends to involve words rather than images—although some women are also addicted to images.  The bottom line is that porn is not just a male epidemic.

This is sad because people addicted to porn lose ability to see the true beauty in every human person. I personally experienced this loss of respect, and I only looked at people as objects. But every person is created perfectly in God’s image, and it is a true gift to be able to see every person in that way. By using porn, the dignity of the human person—as God’s perfect creation—is being violated.

St. John Paul II said that there is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.  He is saying that porn cuts a person short, and does not let you see a person’s true value.  We should strive to find the beauty within each person, rather than treating them like objects. Porn may seem fun, but it destroys the value of a person.

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