I have always had a really odd “relationship” with porn.

Then again, I’ve always had an odd relationship with sex, in general.

Since I can remember, sexual activity has been a part of my life. I was molested by a family member. I remember reenacting sexual acts with friends (both boys and girls) that were extremely too advanced (to this day, some of us are trying to figure out how so many of us knew how to hump on or kiss all over one another at 7 and no, I wasn’t usually the “ring leader”). When I was about 9, there was a poodle that we had that I would bring into my room and let have oral sex with me (I was the receiver, not the giver). And so, I guess it would make perfect sense that as soon as I was old enough to have my own room that wasn’t an extension of my parents’ house and the lack of a curfew to match, that I would engage in sexual acts with guys who were just as curious, just as immature and just as…inappropriately attached as how I was introduced to sex to begin with.

So, when a guy that I was “seeing” (eh hem, sexing) had a porn flick on when I came over to one of his friend’s apartments so that we could have sex in a room rather than a dorm room quad (SMH), at first it was…odd. We were watching two people have sex in some bad lighting and corny music. Then, it was intriguing. We were watching two people have sex…in some bad lighting and corny music. Then it was a “seed”: *We were watching two people have sex in in some bad lighting and corny music!*

Seeds do grow. It wasn’t for several months that I returned to porn. I was in college in the 90s and so you still had to get it from porn shops and I wasn’t about to pay for it (or so I thought). But then I had a “cousin” who had a stash and I would watch it with him and his friends. Then I would freeze frame shots into my mind, go back home and masturbate (the masturbation I taught myself to do after a college professor—one who used to cheat on his wife and ended up the news for some craziness some years later—told me and some “friends” that the only way we could please our partners was if we knew how to please ourselves. Yep. He was like the serpent at the tree with *that* crap.-SMH AGAIN).

And soon, I started reenacting what I saw on porn thinking that I was getting better at sex when really I was getting further and further away from the authenticity of it. Porn is to sex what chick flicks are to relationships: false, acted and potentially toxic. You find yourself watching it with a part of your logical mind saying, “This is so not real.” And yet, there is still a part of you that wishes it were: That just like those women, your body was “flawless”. That just like those men with those women, that the guys that you’re with can make you orgasm at will. That just like the amount of porn tapes that you watch, each time, even if it’s with the same guy, or with yourself, it will be different—drastically different.

Yet oddly, once you get your release, you find yourself resenting the porn for selling you all of those fantasies in the form of big huge lies.

And so…you watch another video to make you feel better for (or at least distract you from) falling for the first one. And as the lows get lower...the more porn you need to watch so that you don’t have to think about the fact that what you’re doing isn’t only spiritually degrading (I Corithians 6:16), but mentally confusing, emotionally demaging and sexually dysfunctional—that just like those chick flicks are to make you “buy into the fantasy”, porn doesn’t “care” about you. It *uses* you. And God never intended for “sex” and “abuse” to *ever* be used in the same sentence.

I was just joking with a male friend of mine just last night about how almost six years into having no sex, my life is surrounded by so much of it. I work with X3Church, I do (pre)marital counseling (and boy, the sexual issues that come up there are a real—doozy!), I’m a doula…the list goes on. Yet, I get why God is allowing this time of no sex to be filled with so much sex simultaneously. It’s to help purge me of all of the porn so that I can better understand the *true purpose* of sex: oneness with a covenant partner (Genesis 2:24-25, I Corinthians 7), honoring God with our bodies by doing so and yes, being fruitful and multiplying (in that order-Genesis 1:26-28); the *total opposite* of what porn does.

Satan is such a jerk. Oh, and a liar (John 8:44).

So, as we intro this new monthly series, if there’s one way to encapsulate all of this, I guess it would say that if there’s one main thing that porn makes me do it’s hate it for distracting me away from the true purpose of sex, from focusing on having sex the way God intended for it to be. Porn steal, kills and destroys everything pure and sacred about sex—not so much because of *(all of) the acts themselves but the intent behind them: money, greed…total disrespect for humankind all under the guise of “harmless entertainment”.

Hmph. You do know that one definition of harm is “moral injury, evil or wrong”, right? *Sex* is harmless. Porn is anything but. And yes, there is a big difference between the two. All in all, porn was a really hard teacher (even a dictator and brainwasher, at times) and I learned that the hard way…but I do know that now.

I’d say “thank you”, but it was never so kind to me. I’ll pass.

Maybe I’ll send it a wedding invite someday, instead.

Porn could use some love in it. But that’s another blog for another time.