Flynn Evans: The porn illusion

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Wednesday, July 16th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Before we wrap up today’s program, a quick note for listeners with children nearby…the following commentary is from a young man with grave concerns about our society’s appetite for exploitative images and videos. While he is restrained in his treatment of the topic, you may want to pause the program and come back later for this important segment.

BROWN: One problem with pornography is that it teaches men and women all the wrong things about what God has created as a covenant blessing in marriage. Here’s WORLD Opinions contributor Flynn Evans.

FLYNN EVANS: Let me state the obvious. Pornography is bad for us. Not a surprising statement here. But in a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, writer Christine Emba said it to an audience that may be shocked to hear it.

She says that many today are willing to critique the rampant exploitation within the adult film industry…and its singularly negative cultural impact. But not many are willing to admit openly that pornography is inherently harmful to those who use it. Pornography is distorting and damaging our generation’s view of sexuality.

Consumption of pornography online is practically an epidemic for men. One study from 2022 concluded that over 40% view it on a monthly basis…with a large percentage admitting they watch it weekly.

But it’s no longer just a men’s issue. Fight the New Drug is a secular anti-pornography activist group. It cites that more than 3 out of every 10 PornHub visitors in 2021 were women. A 2023 study confirmed that those numbers are growing. Yet society’s elites often promote pornography as female empowerment.

Political commentator Rob Henderson identifies that as a “luxury belief.” In his words, luxury beliefs are: [pause] “ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class but often inflict real costs on the lower classes” … especially concerning libertarian beliefs about sex and drugs.

For example, it is fashionable within the highly educated upper crust to approve of polyamory and open marriages…in principle. Yet as Henderson notes, few of its public supporters are engaging in those arrangements themselves.

Although luxury beliefs might be associated with the wealthy, they are just as much an indication of an elitist moral progressivism that knows no class boundaries. For the last 60 years, all that is said to ultimately matter for secular sexuality is “consent.” Supposedly, as long as nobody is demonstrably hurt—either physically or psychologically—anything goes.

That’s changing in the age of AI-generated pornography. It frequently violates others. It has forced the national conversation to reconsider what harm means when it comes to sex.

Pornography’s adherents have argued for years that it is harmless…that it is a “safe” way to explore personal preferences and satisfy desires. But as Christine Emba notes, porn consumers are being unknowingly shaped and influenced by exploiters and profiteers that do not have “our best interests at heart.” She adds that like the frog in the slowly boiling water, we “aren’t paying attention to how we’re making things worse for ourselves.”

We were created for committed, monogamous relationships, but we are instead tempted to believe that the tree of universal carnal knowledge is now ripe for the taking with nobody around to immediately judge us. It’s fruit that is pleasing to the eye and is sweet to the taste…but it quickly turns to wormwood and leads to death.

To question porn’s worth to society is not to undermine individual dignity and one’s essential freedoms; it is to remind ourselves what purpose sex is really meant to serve. Rather than retreating further into ourselves, it properly beckons us to know another in the integrity of a covenantal union. We see each other for who we are without shame. When we forget that we are not our own leads us to misuse sex…when it is one of God’s greatest gifts to us in this life.

Online porn’s deceptiveness seeks to keep many of us from experiencing what sex truly offers by keeping us in the clutches of a false sexual gospel. By God’s grace, true freedom still awaits for those who recognize that things were always meant to be better than this.

I’m Flynn Evans.

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