A recent post from Matt Walsh about the nature of pornography and married men. In the Christian world today, pornography is considered the ultimate sin. Not murder. Not stealing. Not lying. Not even pride. No, pornography is the ultimate sin.
This is because it is not a crime. It is freely available. And it is a damaging vice among men, especially single, young men. Of this, there is no doubt in my mind. Nothing about pornography is redeeming.
But eventually many men get married. Most Christian men do anyways, although I wouldn’t recommend state-sanctioned marriage to anyone who isn’t religious, but they usually have the whole porn baggage thing when entering marriage.
Porn usage varies with men, usually dependent on their own sex drive, but just about every sexually active man has viewed and masturbated to porn. And now he has to give that up. If he can.
When I was going through youth group, I was taught that lust was adultery before you get married. Because everyone will get married and everyone will have one partner their entire lives in this regard. In any case, I no longer adhere to this faux-Biblical worldview. You don’t need to guilt young men by telling them their cheating on their potential future spouses anyway when they are sinning against God now.
Anyway, once married, the two become one flesh (hopefully, otherwise it isn’t a very good marriage) and so the husband enjoys his wife. For a time. And then the whole allure of sex wears down a bit and he begins to look elsewhere.
It is our burden to bear. A perversion of our natural instincts to go forth and be men. Had Adam not eaten of the fruit, perhaps we would have been satisfied with just one wife until God brought His kingdom here (we wouldn’t die, of course). In any case, we now have a wife and we are to love her.
So we have to ensure that we never sin against her as well as God. Now, she is by no means more important than God, but we have sinned against God since our birth and only through the perfect sacrifice of Jesus are we able to stand before Him and praise Him and accept His grace.
The wife, however, is offended by all of this. But I wonder if she is offended because of the sin or because of the lack of attention. In other words, is she offended out of righteousness or envy?
It is no secret that porn actresses tend to be on the upper end of the scale when it comes to sexual beauty. And it is not unusual for women to be shamed by this out their own envy.
And so we have both the sins of lust and envy mixing together. But the man is condemned while the woman is considered the victim of her husband’s misguided affection.
I’m not blaming the victim. But sin is sin. To condemn one while supporting the other is worse than accepting all forms of sin as good. God despises lukewarm Christianity more so than complete and utter denial of Him.
In any case, it seems to me that women should not deny their husbands sex. It is not a solution to a man’s pornography problem, but it will help. Another thing is to not let yourself get unattractive as best you can. Keep your weight down. Nothing makes a man turn from his wife more than a woman who lets herself go physically and ends up looking like a beached whale. Your aging body will already work against you, so there is no need to add to it.
But that is neither here nor there. A woman needs to submit to her husband in all things and a husband needs to love his wife through his leadership. And while pornography distorts this Godly relationship, it should not be used to browbeat a husband by a wife. Instead, a wife should ask herself what she has been doing that drove him to this?
In very rare cases is there no answer.