A casualty of porn

A few weeks ago, Kurt Willems provocatively asked whether porn can be used responsibly. Responding to a student of his who thought porn was fine, especially for educational purposes, he points out that for Christians “sexual expression is supposed to be reserved for the context of love and/or marriage alone.” He continues,

As soon as we move in this direction (which for Christians is always covenantal) it becomes a logical impossibility to observe sex for educational purposes between two parties that do not love each other, or even better, that are not committed to one another in the bonds of marriage. Porn always deconstructs love.

Furthermore, based on Jesus’ teachings on lust (that it equals adultery), porn also “deconstructs” the love between a married couple.

Good points. I agree.

What worries me the most about porn is the dehumanising effect it has on those who use it. By reducing sex to mechanism, porn reduces those who perform in its films and pictures to props. That is obviously detrimental to the souls of those who use porn and to their relationships, especially with their spouse, but also with people in general. Sexual desire is a powerful thing and by feeding it dehumanising material, you condition yourself to desire sexually in a dehumanising manner.

But what about those who perform in porn? What does it do to their souls to be consistently (professionally!) dehumanised?

A couple of days ago, Gawker provided a excruciatingly vivid example of just what dehumanisation does to a person. They report,

A webcam girl being bombarded with requests to “stop breathing” and kill herself in exchange for “donations” breaks down in tears during her livestream.

“You’re horrible, horrible people,” she cries. “If I had a choice never to come back here, I would never, ever come back here again.”

As the harassment continues, the cam girl becomes increasingly emotional. “God forgot about me. He forgot I existed,” she says through tears. “God doesn’t care. I want to die.”

A camgirl, for those who don’t know, is a girl who performs and broadcasts live on her webcam various degrees of sex acts (like stripping, masturbating, etc.) in exchange for money, gifts and, I guess, the attention.

Not all attention is good attention though.

The video is hard to watch (and probably not safe for work, given the language, general situation and, if you mind, cleavage – also, it’s extremely loud!). But it’s a powerful and painful example of what dehumanisation does. Both to those who watch and dehumanise, and those who perform and are dehumanised. As such, it’s also a powerful reason for not using porn. You don’t want that done to you, nor do you want that done to anyone else.

You don’t want to make anyone think God has forgotten them.