I've referenced before a book a friend gave to the husband and me as a wedding gift titled "The Origins and Role of Same-Sex Relations in Human Societies" that traces the prevalence and acceptance of homosexuality in societies around the globe until the arrival of Christian missionaries. Thereafter, sexual neurosis and shame of things sexual became the norm in most instances after the missionaries had planted their poison. While, things are changing, for far too many people, the shame and neurosis continues. Especially among the evangelical crowd that has the highest incidence of porn use even as its members going around feigning piety and robing themselves in religiosity. As Salon reports, a new documentary of evangelicals addicted to porn shows the damage done by the shame that is part and parcel of far right Christian sexual mores. Here are highlights:
[T]he documentary “Heart of the Matter,” which shows, in its own words, “what it is like to be Christian and addicted to pornography and sex.” Well, here’s the top-line summary: shame. Deep, cavernous, as in Grand Canyon-size, sexual shame.
The entire film takes place on a barren white stage with interview subjects seated on stools, ready for their confessions. One man says of his porn-watching, “I’d feel some relief and then immediately thereafter a deeper level of shame, a deeper level of guilt, a deeper level of self-loathing.” Says a younger man who appears in the documentary with his mom, who caught him looking at porn: “You just start feeling like a pervert. You start feeling like an alien inside your own house.” Well, yeah, I probably would have felt like a pervert too if my parents had gone nuclear when discovering my adolescent porn-browsing history.
The documentary frequently speaks about porn in the language of addiction. Wives talk of husbands “relapsing,” one man even says of himself, “I slipped into relapse seeing a pornographic movie.” Dan Gray, co-founder of Lifestar Network, a ministry devoted to healing “compulsive sexual behavior,” says, “Much like a young person who turns to alcohol or marijuana to manage their stress or their anger or some of their loneliness, they will turn to sexual behavior in order to create the same kinds of dependency on the internal drugs.”
The documentary frequently speaks about porn in the language of addiction. Wives talk of husbands “relapsing,” one man even says of himself, “I slipped into relapse seeing a pornographic movie.” Dan Gray, co-founder of Lifestar Network, a ministry devoted to healing “compulsive sexual behavior,” says, “Much like a young person who turns to alcohol or marijuana to manage their stress or their anger or some of their loneliness, they will turn to sexual behavior in order to create the same kinds of dependency on the internal drugs.”
My heathen’s takeaway from the film was that, yes, people can have very unhealthy relationships to both pornography and sex. But there’s one thing that’s more toxic than even that, and that’s sexual shame.
Personally, my analysis is that these folks resort to porn because they are in bad marriages and stuck with sexually frigid spouses - think Betty Bowers, America's best Christian, or The Family Foundation's Victoria Cobb. The result? No sexual outlets and/or remaining trapped in dead end marriages even as religious brainwashing continues to keep them conflicted in shame sex which is a normal part of humanity.
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