The Church's crusade against porn

[Themightytom]

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/2 ... ear-fruit/

Can the Christian crusade against pornography bear fruit?
By Ashley Fantz, CNN

Atlanta (CNN) - He is a good Christian, Michael is telling his two therapists. He goes to church most Sundays. He’s a devoted husband and father of two daughters.

“But when I would leave on business trips,” he says, “I knew I was going to get to be someone else.”

“Prostitutes, porn - I took anything I wanted.”

Sitting on a comfortable, worn couch, Michael glances out the window and sees a reflection of himself set against the parking lot of this suburban Atlanta office building. He fidgets, runs his fingers over his closely cropped blond hair and straightens his green tennis polo. He clears his throat.

Above his head hangs a poster covered in words describing feelings - angry, anxious, sad. On it is a big yellow cross.

Therapists Richard Blankenship and Mark Richardson wear solemn but empathetic expressions. Certified counselors and Christian ministers, they tell him they know how to listen and nod for him to continue.

“I’ve had a record of purity since March when I confessed to my wife,” says Michael, whose name has been changed by CNN.com to protect his privacy. “No porn, no masturbation.”

“Awesome,” Richardson says, leaning forward in his chair. “God knows you’re trying.”

This is Michael’s second week at “Faithful and True – Atlanta” a 16-week counseling program that, like dozens of others like it around the country, combines traditional psychotherapy with the Bible in an attempt to treat addictive behavior.

Blankenship, a devout Christian who once struggled with a porn addiction, says his own ordeal has helped him to treat and “graduate” nearly 500 Christian men and women with similar addictions in the last five years.

He says he has helped people achieve what he calls “sobriety,” which means resisting porn and lustful thoughts.

Though controversial in secular circles, much of the evangelical Christian world has been cheering this relatively new kind of therapy. Many believers, including many Christian leaders, consider it a powerful tool for fighting what they say is one of the modern church’s biggest problems: porn addiction.

A crusade is born

Not long ago, it was unheard of for a pastor to talk about sex from the pulpit.

Today, clergy are talking about porn.

Many evangelical pastors say they don’t have a choice. The Internet has made porn unavoidable; it’s everywhere. And porn, they say, leads to a lack of intimacy in marriage, threatening the biblical mandate to get and stay married.

In the past few years, Christian leaders have established online ministries to tackle the problem, hosting anti-porn podcast sermons and Web chats. The popular evangelical blog Crosswalk.com recently ran an article headlined “How many porn addicts are in your church?”

Christian publishers, meanwhile, have produced a wave of recent books on the subject, including popular titles like “Porn-Again Christian,” “Secret Sexual Sins: Understanding a Christian's Desire for Pornography” and “Eyes of Integrity: The Porn Pandemic and How It Affects You.”

Evangelical pastor Jeremy Gyorke recently came forward to talk about how porn has affected him. In July, the 32-year-old confessed his porn addiction in a sermon at Wyandotte Family Church, just outside Detroit.

“I’m part of a generation of Christians who grew up keeping your mouth shut about your personal life,” he says. “Goodness no, we didn’t talk about sex.”

“But now that we have a little say in the attitude of the church, we’re taking a different approach,” Gyorke continues. “We’re putting it all out there, saying you don’t have to keep secrets. Come forward and admit that you’ve made a mistake, and you can be healed.”

Gyorke said he confessed to his congregation after his wife caught him looking at porn and told him it made her feel inadequate. She wanted him to seek help and to be transparent as a man of God.

Gyorke ultimately decided that viewing any porn, even once or twice, is a problem for believers.

“It’s like a gateway drug,” he says. “You can’t just have a little look. If you look at porn, you’ve already given your heart and spirit away to someone who isn’t your wife.”

As he wrote his sermon on the matter, Gyorke felt tremendous anxiety. “I thought it would make or break me to them as their pastor,” he says.

But his flock reacted with empathy and support. Several congregants approached him afterward to say that they, too, felt that they’d acted against God by looking at porn.

Different interpretations

Though the words “porn” and “masturbation” don’t appear in the Bible, Gyorke believes the biblical verdict is clear. “Sexual immorality is mentioned a lot in the Bible, and that is what porn is,” he says.

He quotes the Gospel of Matthew: “But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

“Porn is lust, and lust is a sin,” the pastor said.

Many religious scholars say that such a view reflects just one of many interpretations.

“One school of biblical study says that desire is a problem and needs to be monitored as a serious threat to salvation,” says Boston University theology professor Jennifer Wright Knust.

But Knust points to scriptural passages that appear to endorse sexual desire, including the Song of Solomon, a poem that some scholars say depicts two lovers graphically describing each other’s anatomy in an ode to unmarried sex.

“This is not new. It’s a cherry-picking of scripture used to address what’s happening right now in popular culture,” says Knust, author of the recent book “Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions on Sex and Desire.” “The new thing is that it’s being used by so-called Christian therapists.”

Knust says the anti-porn trend in Christian therapy reflects new questions in broader society about what constitutes an appropriate relationship, about gender roles and rules, and about what marriage really means.

“People are concerned and confused, and want to know if God is speaking to us in our sexual roles,” she says. “Can we find answers in divine revelation? People have always hoped that there can be certainty in the Bible.

“There is no certainty,” she says. “It’s interpretation.”

XXX churches

A few weeks after delivering his confessional sermon, Gyorke organized a Sunday event at his church intended to help keep congregants away from pornography.

He gave out study guides with scriptural verses related to lust and showed a slick video from XXXChurch, the main Web-based group for the Christian anti-porn movement.

The video opens with a mock-pharmaceutical infomercial for a product called “Lustivin.” It raves about how wonderful the drug can make you feel in the short term but then lists some major side effects: premature relational difficulty, divorce, shallow relationships.

Craig Gross, a young pastor from California, co-founded XXXChurch.com in 2001. Its URL was meant to snag people who were surfing the Web for dirty pictures.

“Ten years ago, when I wanted to bring the church up to date, everyone was like, ‘This won’t work. People will be confused about what you’re doing,’ ” Gross says.

“It was controversial at the time, but the church is always behind the times,” he says. “We should have had a XXXChurch.com in the late 1990s if we really wanted to get ahead of this problem.”

The site was slow to catch on for its first few years, but now gets millions of clicks a day from IP addresses around the globe, Gross said.

This year, XXXChurch sponsored Porn Sunday, a national anti-porn event that included hundreds of churches across the country screening a video starring Matt Hasselbeck, who's now quarterback for the Tennessee Titans, and other Christian NFL stars.

Soundbites from the players speak to the struggle between porn and faith.

“Sex is an awesome thing that God designed,” Hasselbeck says in the video.

Jon Kitna, a Dallas Cowboys quarterback, talks about surfing the Web and getting deeper into porn sites. “[You] see this [link] and it leads you to a link to this … ” he says. “And pretty soon, I’m into a world that I never really knew existed.”

For $7 a month, XXXChurch offers porn-detection software that fires off automatic e-mail alerts to a subscriber and his or her chosen “faith buddy,” a kind of whistle-blowing system designed to keep Christians from going astray.

Achieving “sobriety”

But some Christians have gone much further in their attempts to tackle porn addictions, literally rearranging their lives.

When Jeff Colon, a self-described recovering porn addict in Kentucky, confessed his addiction to his wife, she told him to get help or find a divorce attorney.

It was the early 1990s. Christian sex addition counseling was unheard of. But Colon’s pastor - to whom he’d also confided - called other church leaders and learned of a Christian counseling retreat called Pure Life Ministries, a kind of Christian compound that includes a chapel and all-male dormitory on 44 acres in western Kentucky.

Today, Colon is the president of Pure Life, which he credits with saving his marriage.

He says the program has cured thousands of men of their porn addictions through a six- to 12-month program of one-on-one or group therapy sessions.

The live-in program costs $175 a week. Men must move to the campus and live alone, with wives having the option of talking to Pure Life counselors by phone. Most insurance plans don’t cover Pure Life - a moot concern, really, because most program participants quit their jobs to relocate.

That’s what Colon, who was working as an elevator repairman, did. “I don’t regret it for a second,” he says. “It was a hard time not because I lost my job or had to move from my family. It was a tough time because I had nearly lost my connection with God. That is what’s most important in life.”

Pure Life’s curriculum relies heavily on Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, which stresses that if one lives “by the Spirit,” he will not “gratify the desires of the flesh.”

The scripture goes on to say that those who gratify the flesh “will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Women are not allowed on campus during the initial phase of treatment.

“People who don’t follow Christ aren’t going to get what I’m saying, but it was like intense Bible study that helped me understand how selfish I am as a sinner,” Colon says. “Basically, you have time to talk to God, and for him to show you the way to sobriety. And I’ve been sober for 17 years.”

For Colon, sobriety means abstaining from looking at porn, masturbating and performing any other sex act not involving his spouse.

“You learn that lust is just a state of mind,” he says. “If you lust for someone other than your wife, what you do is replace that lust with prayer. And you have a heart change.”

Indeed, Colon says that God was central to his recovery.

“I know secular people don’t get it,” he says. “But if I had a sponsor who was just another person, a person who is fallible, telling me to stay clean, it’s just not as powerful as God telling me that.”

“Women … drowning in this addiction”

Men aren’t the only ones who have started thinking that way about porn.

According to the creator of accountability2you, a Web-based service that dumps all the pornographic material someone surfs into his or her spouse’s e-mail inbox, roughly half of his 10,000 monthly subscribers are women.

“The Christian Church has started to realize that we’re sexual, too, and we are just as visually stimulated as men and we look at porn,” said Crystal Renaud, author of the recent book “Dirty Girls Come Clean,” a memoir about her own addiction to porn.

For the past year, the 25-year-old with punky-streaked hair has led Christian women’s porn addiction counseling sessions. Her Dirty Girls Ministries website has 450 members.

“I’ve met women who will lock themselves in a room and look at porn all day, ignoring their kids or their jobs,” she says. “I feel like I can relate because that’s all I cared about, getting my high. There are so many more women out there drowning in this addiction, you have no idea.”

Though there are few statistics to support Renaud’s claims about the extent of the problem, Christian media outlets like Today’s Christian Woman have recently run stories about women consuming porn, often theorizing that the habit starts with explicit romance novels.

Renaud, who has no formal training in psychology, promotes a five-step program she’s devised called SCARS - Surrender, Confessional, Accountability, Responsibility, Sharing - which encourages women to confess to each other about their desire to look at porn as a means of saying no to it.

In her memoir, Renaud writes about becoming a chronic masturbator and porn addict at age 10, after stumbling upon a dirty magazine in her brother’s room. It was a confusing, scary experience, she writes.

“My mother made it very clear what the parameters were when it came to sex, and there wasn’t a discussion beyond that,” Renaud said. She describes her relationship with her father as rocky, but wouldn’t elaborate.

In high school, Renaud was a leader in her Christian youth group, but she was also interested in porn. “I felt so bad and I wanted to stop looking at porn because that wasn’t what the Bible instructed,” she says, “and I knew God didn’t want me doing that.”

When she was 18, Renaud arranged to have sex for the first time at a hotel with a person she met in a Christian chat room. She says she went to the hotel but broke down in tears in her room and left before meeting the man.

“That was my rock bottom,” she says. “I remember being there and sobbing, thinking, ‘What am I doing risking my life to meet someone at a hotel I don’t even know?’”

Renaud said that she depends on God to keep her clean and that God is a kind of sponsor or monitor. When she wants to look at porn or masturbate, she and God have a kind of conversation, and the desire passes.

A crusade’s critics

The father of Christian-based porn and sex addiction therapy has a word for this “pray-away” method of sobriety.

“Hooey.”

Dr. Mark Laaser pioneered the Christian response to porn and sex addiction in the 1980s and chides counseling centers like Pure Life for what he says is their near-total reliance on prayer.

“Alcoholics don’t wish really hard to not be addicted to alcohol,” he says in a phone interview from his busy therapeutic practice in suburban Minneapolis. “The field of addiction is much deeper than opening your Bible.”

He’s pleased that more Christians are openly talking about pornography and sex addiction, but Laaser says he’s concerned that some Christian leaders and therapists are confusing sexual sin with sex addiction.

“Men come dragging into my office because their wives have caught them masturbating and labeled them addicts, or they’ve had one affair and they are now looking to have their affair excused by addiction,” he says.

“One affair doesn’t mean you’re a porn addict,” Laaser says. “Looking at porn occasionally doesn’t make you a porn addict. Those may be poor decisions, but they are not necessarily caused by clinical addiction.”

Porn is estimated to be a multibillion-dollar industry in America alone, banking at least 10 times what it did in 1970, the first time the U.S. government evaluated the retail value of the nation’s then-fledgling hardcore film, television and retail market.

During that same decade, Laaser had become the porn industry’s ideal customer. He was constantly on the hunt for it.
As a devout Christian, he spent a lot of energy trying to keep his porn a secret, especially from his wife, Debbie. His guilt distanced him from her emotionally, he says, and began eroding their relationship.

At the time, there was virtually no established psychological research, or mainstream therapy, for sex addiction. So Laaser reached out to secular 12-step programs, using Alcoholics Anonymous’ framework as a guide to reaching what he called sexual “sobriety,” abstaining from sex outside of marriage and avoiding masturbation.

“I remember thinking I wish my problem were drinking because I could get help easier,” Laaser said.

By the late ’80s, Laaser says, he was on the road to sobriety, combining therapeutic methods he’d learned while pursuing a doctorate in psychology from the University of Iowa and a divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary.

“It began to seem very evident to me that secular therapy does not work as effectively for Christians,” he said. “And that’s because the secular world … to us as Christians, seems less moral. Sex is everywhere in secular society - television, film, billboards. It’s just so much a part of life that it is excused.

“Christians just aren’t going to seek out a secular therapist - they won’t seek therapy at all if they don’t have some aspect of Christianity woven into their treatment.”

In 1992, Laaser authored the first book on Christian sexual addiction, titled “The Secret Sin.”

“The Christian church, both Protestant and Catholic, is experiencing tremendous turmoil in the area of sexuality,” it began. “The problem seems epidemic.”

It sold barely enough copies to stay in print.

In 2005, the publisher changed the title to “Healing the Wounds of Sexual Addiction,” and Laaser added chapters on Internet porn. It has sold 75,000 copies.

In Laaser’s care, a patient will undergo psychiatric evaluation, just as he would in the secular world. Laaser wants to know if the patient has any symptoms of depression, ADHD or anxiety. He says many sex addicts suffer from other mental health issues.

“You may need to go to a meeting every day, or connect with a sponsor; you may need to check in with this office once a day,” he said. “Every client is different, but we’re essentially helping them establish boundaries and restrictions.”

Some secular therapists have warmed to this kind of approach.

“The deeply religious were a group that were hard to reach years ago because they had extreme shame connected with their addiction,” says Tim Lee, a licensed social worker in New York with a specialty in sex and porn addiction treatment.

But Lee and Pennsylvania sex therapist Dr. John Giugliano, both members of the Society for Sexual Advancement - a national nonprofit think tank of licensed sex therapists - worry that therapy can become overly focused on dogma and ignore the patient’s real-life issues.

“If you spend your time in session talking about what God thinks and what the Bible says, you don’t get to understand what the patient thinks and what happened in their life up to that point that explains why,” Giugliano says.

Even within the world of Christian therapy, some counselors criticize the methods of other religious counselors.

Richard Blankenship, the Atlanta-based Christian therapist, studied under Laaser in the early 2000s. When Blankenship set up his practice in Atlanta to treat sex addicts, he used the same name as Laaser’s ministry, “Faithful and True,” adding only the word “Atlanta.”

But Laaser wants to make it clear that he has no association with Blankenship’s practice and doesn’t agree with some aspects of Blankenship’s program.

Blankenship doesn’t rely enough on psychological expertise, Laaser says. Laaser objects to a therapist telling a patient that an addiction may be patterns repeated through generations, as Blankenship does. And Laaser disagrees with Blankenship’s habit of connecting a patient’s addiction to a biblical character’s family tree.

Abraham’s family tree

For the rest of his therapy session at Faithful and True, Michael circles emotions from a list that Richardson and Blankenship have provided. He circles “anxious” and then describes a fight he had with his wife about his infidelity.

Blankenship responds to Michael’s description of the fight by saying that addiction is generational, mentioning the Kennedys and the Fondas.

Then Blankenship queues up a PowerPoint presentation on a laptop, showing Michael a family tree he has designed around the biblical story of Abraham.

It has a lot of boxes. There are several pages.

Abraham, Blankenship says, was a guy who committed some sexual transgressions, like fathering a child with Hagar while his wife was barren. Ultimately, God forgave him.

Michael starts talking about his own family. He describes a difficult upbringing with a father whom he said was philandering and verbally abusive. He says sex wasn’t talked about at his house when he was growing up.

Before the session ends, Michael is assured that there’s no reason to think that he won’t kick his addiction. He’ll be on a new path, Blankenship says, toward “sexual integrity.”

The 90-minute session comes to a close with a prayer.

Blankenship and his co-counselor Mark Richardson lower their heads.

Richardson asks that God look after Michael. He asks God to bless this therapy process. Michael is heading out into the world, he says, heading back into a culture of temptation and lust and ungodly ways.

Look after him, the therapist says, keep him on the right path.

I kind of have a problem with therapists who begin with this level of preconception. I see an ethical contradiction in this. You bill yourself as a "licensed" counseler, but you aren't objective. You aren't asessing the funcationality of beliefs and behaviors in someones life, you're judging their weight on the immortal soul. If you're giving spiritual advice, in a faith context, fine, your flock signs up for that. If you are licensed as a counselor, then it's misleading to eschew objectivity from the get-go.

[KhorneFlakes]

Oh look, the Christians are blabbering about porn again. Can you love someone with all your heart and still watch porn? Yes.

Can you lose your soul to porn? No. Because the soul does not exist.

To be honest, I don't really care about this. Members of Christian churches have always blabbered nonsense against porn and try to come up with increasingly rediculous ways to "heal the soul".

I don't like those so-called "counselors", though.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I was raised Christian (and I still am), and I didn't watch porn or masturbate until I was 22. That all changed when I was admitted to the hospital with a severe case of prostatitis and told by the urologist (with thankfully small hands) that I'd need to masturbate 3-5 times a week until I was in my mid 40's.

Its been interesting reconciling a medical necessity with my faith, but I'm getting there.

[ComradeClaus]

Hmm, I saw some dollar signs in the OP. So it's clear what the REAL motive here is for these 'addiction' groups. *cha-ching!*
The church has fought porn since the days of yorn... err, yore. It's only news if the church, GAVE UP it's crusade. But it's a rather PC enemy for them to fight.

[Aniron]

I was raised Christian (and I still am), and I didn't watch porn or masturbate until I was 22. That all changed when I was admitted to the hospital with a severe case of prostatitis and told by the urologist (with thankfully small hands) that I'd need to masturbate 3-5 times a week until I was in my mid 40's.

Its been interesting reconciling a medical necessity with my faith, but I'm getting there.

Can you explain how you managed to not masturbate until you were 22? Did you follow orders blindly without thinking critically?

[Darth Wong]

“I’ve had a record of purity since March when I confessed to my wife,” says Michael, whose name has been changed by CNN.com to protect his privacy. “No porn, no masturbation.”

“Awesome,” Richardson says, leaning forward in his chair. “God knows you’re trying.”

This is Michael’s second week at “Faithful and True – Atlanta” a 16-week counseling program that, like dozens of others like it around the country, combines traditional psychotherapy with the Bible in an attempt to treat addictive behavior.

Blankenship, a devout Christian who once struggled with a porn addiction, says his own ordeal has helped him to treat and “graduate” nearly 500 Christian men and women with similar addictions in the last five years.

He says he has helped people achieve what he calls “sobriety,” which means resisting porn and lustful thoughts.

How does he know it has actually worked?

In any case, this crusade against porn is just the latest iteration of the same old anti-sexual puritanism which the church has used since its earliest days in order to cement its control over society. You cannot separate sexuality from adult society, and if you control sexuality, you control society. They're demonizing something which is so natural that mankind has been doing it since before he had written language. They've found pornographic Stone Age cave paintings. By making something "evil" even though it's virtually inherent to the human condition, they guarantee that anyone who subscribes to their belief system will perpetually feel as if he has to atone for something. And how does he atone? Lots of ways, which mysteriously tend to benefit the church, of course.

And porn, they say, leads to a lack of intimacy in marriage, threatening the biblical mandate to get and stay married.

Yeah, they all say that, but how do they know it's true? What studies have been conducted to establish this cause-and-effect relationship, and what methodology did they use? Even if you could tie the two together, how do they know that the porn use causes a lack of intimacy, rather than a lack of intimacy causing the porn use? If a guy's marital sex life is terrible, it's a pretty safe bet that he'll run to porn, and in some cases, he might even become obsessed with it.

Evangelical pastor Jeremy Gyorke recently came forward to talk about how porn has affected him. In July, the 32-year-old confessed his porn addiction in a sermon at Wyandotte Family Church, just outside Detroit.

“I’m part of a generation of Christians who grew up keeping your mouth shut about your personal life,” he says. “Goodness no, we didn’t talk about sex.”

Don't people like that wonder why they, with all of their sexual repression, can get addicted to porn while someone like me, who has a terabyte of porn stashed on his HD, can indulge in it without becoming obsessed with it, and without harming marital "intimacy" in any way?

If someone becomes obsessed with porn, I'd hazard a guess that something is missing somewhere else in his life. That's what people say when other people become alcoholics, yet Christians, for all their attempts to treat porn addiction like alcohol addiction, don't seem to make that connection. When it's alcohol, they realize that alcohol itself has no magical power, but with porn, they think the problem is the porn itself rather than something in the rest of the guy's life.

[evilsoup]

Oh look, the Christians are blabbering about porn again. Can you love someone with all your heart and still watch porn? Yes.

Can you lose your soul to porn? No. Because the soul does not exist.

To be honest, I don't really care about this. Members of Christian churches have always blabbered nonsense against porn and try to come up with increasingly rediculous ways to "heal the soul".

I don't like those so-called "counselors", though.

Did you actually read the article, or just look at the title? It is talking about pornography addiction, which is just as real a problem as alcohol addiction. Now, some of these evangelicals are probably over-diagnosing, but there is an element of truth in the article.That said, most of the treatments mentioned in the article do sound like bullshit, with the possible exception of that Laaser fellow - which sounds legit, but I would need to see an in-depth peer-reviewed report into his methods before passing any judgement.

@Darth Wong: I believe that alcohol addicts are encouraged to never touch a drop of alcohol; I know someone who won't even eat food cooked in wine. Why shouldn't the same be true of porn addicts? Of course there are other factors contributing to someone becoming addicted to anything, but I don't see why avoiding the thing you are addicted to is anything other than sensible. I agree that if that is all they are doing then these therapies are not very good (maybe even actively harmful), but not all of these treatments seem to be taking this approach.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The thing I find most concerning was the part about the man who told his wife about his masturbation, and she told him to find a therapist or a divorce lawyer.

I mean, what kind of fucked-up marriage must you have if one of you is making threats of divorce over masturbation? Even if it was an idle threat, that's almost as bad.

Also @Darth Wong. A terabyte of porn? Wow, and I thought I had a lot with 20 GB. Kudos to you man.

[Hamstray]

The thing I find most concerning was the part about the man who told his wife about his masturbation, and she told him to find a therapist or a divorce lawyer.

I mean, what kind of fucked-up marriage must you have if one of you is making threats of divorce over masturbation? Even if it was an idle threat, that's almost as bad.

He should have gone for the divorce lawyer instead. The actual problem is obviously that she can't fulfill his pleasures.

[Darth Holbytlan]

Christian publishers, meanwhile, have produced a wave of recent books on the subject, including popular titles like “Porn-Again Christian,” “Secret Sexual Sins: Understanding a Christian's Desire for Pornography” and “Eyes of Integrity: The Porn Pandemic and How It Affects You.”

"Porn-Again Christian" is a great title. Too bad it's wasted on what is probably shit book.

At the time, there was virtually no established psychological research, or mainstream therapy, for sex addiction. So Laaser reached out to secular 12-step programs, using Alcoholics Anonymous’ framework as a guide to reaching what he called sexual “sobriety,” abstaining from sex outside of marriage and avoiding masturbation.

Secular 12-step programs? Did Laaser even read the 12 steps? Half of them talk about God, usually by name.

Don't people like that wonder why they, with all of their sexual repression, can get addicted to porn while someone like me, who has a terabyte of porn stashed on his HD, can indulge in it without becoming obsessed with it, and without harming marital "intimacy" in any way?

I think it's safe to assume that people like that will believe that anyone with a terabyte of porn is, ipso facto, addicted.

[Darth Wong]

@Darth Wong: I believe that alcohol addicts are encouraged to never touch a drop of alcohol; I know someone who won't even eat food cooked in wine. Why shouldn't the same be true of porn addicts?

Yes, but with alcohol, they acknowledge that others are perfectly capable of enjoying the occasional drink without becoming addicted, even if they themselves cannot. They do not make the same admission with porn. In their minds, there is no such thing as a healthy or moderate level of porn consumption. It must be all or nothing, for everyone on the planet.

[Rogue 9]

The thing I find most concerning was the part about the man who told his wife about his masturbation, and she told him to find a therapist or a divorce lawyer.

Did you miss the part about prostitutes?

[Darth Wong]

Don't people like that wonder why they, with all of their sexual repression, can get addicted to porn while someone like me, who has a terabyte of porn stashed on his HD, can indulge in it without becoming obsessed with it, and without harming marital "intimacy" in any way?

I think it's safe to assume that people like that will believe that anyone with a terabyte of porn is, ipso facto, addicted.

Well sure, if they disregard the actual definition of addiction.

[Themightytom]

The thing I find most concerning was the part about the man who told his wife about his masturbation, and she told him to find a therapist or a divorce lawyer.

Did you miss the part about prostitutes?

That could be considered risky behavior, depending on how careful he was with them, and how much he spent on them versus what he could afford.

I was raised Christian (and I still am), and I didn't watch porn or masturbate until I was 22. That all changed when I was admitted to the hospital with a severe case of prostatitis and told by the urologist (with thankfully small hands) that I'd need to masturbate 3-5 times a week until I was in my mid 40's.

Its been interesting reconciling a medical necessity with my faith, but I'm getting there.

Man I want to go see my doctor now. I wonder if I get a prescription, can I get porn with a copay

@Darth Wong: I believe that alcohol addicts are encouraged to never touch a drop of alcohol; I know someone who won't even eat food cooked in wine. Why shouldn't the same be true of porn addicts? Of course there are other factors contributing to someone becoming addicted to anything, but I don't see why avoiding the thing you are addicted to is anything other than sensible. I agree that if that is all they are doing then these therapies are not very good (maybe even actively harmful), but not all of these treatments seem to be taking this approach.

Did you read my post Soup? You're describing a temperance model, which is not only not the only approach but is actually often a different system than a mental illness recovery model. AA for example being the pre-eminent model, simply pushes quitting, and it invokes, often a higher power to do so. Sure it's the template for effective group cousneling, but it's not client centered in anys enswe of the way. Everyone is treated the same, everyone is given the same steps to follow, everyone must proceed from the assumption that alcohol is the source of the addiction and must be avoided.

A chemical addiction could stem from a behavioral addiction, but then again, it could not. maybe a guy got into drinking because he had no insurance, works in construction and his back is killing him. The longer he stays wasted the longer he doesn't have to feel pain, or be miserable. A guy could have anxiety, and alcohol is self medication to slow his thoughts down. The presence of that alcohol can create a physical addiction, but through a detox program, and by addressing the underlying issue either guy could reassert control over his behavior. An illness focused model, promotes objective recovery. AA does snot. it promotes abstinence. In fact you can succeed at AA and still not treat your problem, you could shift the addiction TO porn, or drugs or something else. It's actually pretty common at the detox center I work at to have clients detoxing, and doing well on their steps, start to get a little too promiscuous because they are still trying to treat...something.

Alcohol = Evil Abstinence= good is still a binary moral system, and AA puts it in the context of a higher power. As long as you know what you're signing up for, I don't really have a problem with it but the temperance model was developed from clinical studies. it's outputs are not particularly proven either. I've never seen a study actually supporting the claim that AA improves your chance of recovery once you've decided to deal with your problem, which suggests that it's core assumption of abstinence as the solution, isn't necessarily valid.

[Traveller]

Nothing new here, amerikan fundies have a core group of social 'ills' as they define them that they obsess about almost exclusively. Its like, I dont know, a fetish with them or something.They get rotated around to the top form time-to-time, and most of you here should be pretty familiar with them by now.

Things like
Abortion
Evolution\anti-science in general
Homosexuality
School Prayer
Anything under the catch-all category 'Morality'
Public Sex Education
And of course, Porn*



*This one is actually older than fuedalism. In the Roman era, cities and public ares were adorned with high-quality frescos, many pornographic, and by all accounts no one thought anyting of them(at least until the xtians started showing up that is). Very few exist today of course, the early christians destroyed a great deal of erotic art from the ancient world once they had the power to do so. Christians cant blow up the interweb to rid of all that evil porn, or they would trust me, so a lot of guilt-based ummm fundy therapy will have to do for now.The more things change I guess...

American fundies are strangely un-concerned and or silent when it comes to things to matter, like wealth-inequality, a growing and serious set of enviromental problems, resource depletion, over-population, imperial wars, poverty and so on. I never see amerikan fundies or there political talking heads, discuss those or related topics that, but drop 'family values' into a converstation and you cant shut em up.


Its funny how the amerikans here reflexively buy into the notion that porn is an 'addiction'. The implication being that its a 'diesease' that can be 'cured' by for-profit counselling or a pill, or surgery. Even here @SDN, you might find the idea that xtians counselling others about to porn to be at least somewhat dubious, but the underlying idea that every little human foilble is itself a business opportunity that needs curing with the liberal application of cash and questionable science, is not.

[Themightytom]

Nothing new here, amerikan fundies have a core group of social 'ills' as they define them that they obsess about almost exclusively. Its like, I dont know, a fetish with them or something.They get rotated around to the top form time-to-time, and most of you here should be pretty familiar with them by now.

Its funny how the amerikans here reflexively buy into the notion that porn is an 'addiction'. The implication being that its a 'diesease' that can be 'cured' by for-profit counselling or a pill, or surgery.
Even here @SDN, you might find the idea that xtians counselling others about to porn to be at least somewhat dubious, but the underlying idea that every little human foilble is itself a business opportunity that needs curing with the liberal application of cash and questionable science, is not.

yeah... thanks for taking the opportunity to grind your personal axe.
Can you prove that any of the counseling centers discussed in the article, or the associated programs, are in fact, for profit? The three I just did a check on are actually 501c3's, and regularly document that they are not "for profit" . If you consider "profit" to be ideological advancement, than I am right there with ya, but I have a feeling you commented with your own agenda, and didn't do your own research, which strikes me as hypocritical.

[evilsoup]

Its funny how the amerikans here reflexively buy into the notion that porn is an 'addiction'. The implication being that its a 'diesease' that can be 'cured' by for-profit counselling or a pill, or surgery. Even here @SDN, you might find the idea that xtians counselling others about to porn to be at least somewhat dubious, but the underlying idea that every little human foilble is itself a business opportunity that needs curing with the liberal application of cash and questionable science, is not.

I just reread the thread to make sure, and I am the only one who wrote even neutral things about the issue (as opposed to attacking the evangelicals). And I'm not an American. Did you even read the thread? Or are you really stupid enough to interpret 'some people can get addicted to porn' (which seems to be the mutual position here) as 'porn=addiction'? Bloody hell, Darth Wong was boasting about the size of his porn collection, I don't recall anyone saying that he has a problem.

@Themightytom: Okay, I didn't know all of that; does the 'mental illness' model not also discourage recovering alcoholics from drinking, even after they are considered cured? Regardless, the 'temperance' model is widely accepted for addiction (I think, please correct me if I'm wrong), so I don't think it's irresponsible for these counsellors to focus on it.

@Darth Wong: I agree wholeheartedly, with the reservation that one shouldn't tar all Christians with the same brush as evangelicals (not that I'm accusing you of doing so, just a disclaimer against internet athiests).

[madd0ct0r]

I was raised Christian (and I still am), and I didn't watch porn or masturbate until I was 22. That all changed when I was admitted to the hospital with a severe case of prostatitis and told by the urologist (with thankfully small hands) that I'd need to masturbate 3-5 times a week until I was in my mid 40's.

Its been interesting reconciling a medical necessity with my faith, but I'm getting there.

I'm sorry Chewie, but this is fascinating (not to mention sounding like a sitcom plot). Why was it so hard to reconcile?

Is it the act is frowned upon or the mental images?

[Parricidium]

I wonder how drastically different dogma and teachings would be if the Gospel of Eve were around. Supposedly, this book supported free love and eating semen as a religious act. Right now the church sexually starves its members and directs the resulting fervor towards their establishment.

Hmm, I saw some dollar signs in the OP. So it's clear what the REAL motive here is for these 'addiction' groups. *cha-ching!*

There was an advertisement on with a preacher today saying, "If you're in debt, you need to plant a $1,500 seed with the church so that God may focus his attention on you and help your debt situation."

[ComradeClaus]

There was an advertisement on with a preacher today saying, "If you're in debt, you need to plant a $1,500 seed with the church so that God may focus his attention on you and help your debt situation."

On an episode of 'The Boondocks" there was a commercial of a preacher called Rev. Gibmo Dinero (who cameoed in the "Return of the King" episode), who was basically pulling that stunt.

The sad thing is how many are gullible for it.

We need to liberate these poor lambs from the wolves (in Shepard's clothing) who keep fleecing them.

@ Darth Wong: A terabyte? Wow... although I'm guessing alot is HD or HiRes. (which eats harddrive space like crazy) I've got all but ~200MB of my 32GB Mac G3 loaded w/ porn (thousands of .jpgs), demotivational posters (100s) & scanlated manga (10s of thousands of jpgs), all low res (under 100kb per jpg). I've yet to figure how much of each kind I have. Most of it I collected just after seeing it once, so It's not like I spend hours gazing at navels

But I definitely spend more time (~4 hr/week) on anime/manga. (Plus a full week of Jon Stewart/Steven Colbert) So probably I have an addiction to that?

[wautd]

Someone explain to me how an organisation where its people are required to live in celibacy and that's been riddled with pedofile scandals has any authority on sexuality.

[Hamstray]

I just reread the thread to make sure, and I am the only one who wrote even neutral things about the issue (as opposed to attacking the evangelicals). And I'm not an American. Did you even read the thread? Or are you really stupid enough to interpret 'some people can get addicted to porn' (which seems to be the mutual position here) as 'porn=addiction'? Bloody hell, Darth Wong was boasting about the size of his porn collection, I don't recall anyone saying that he has a problem.

It is unclear what these evangelicals mean by 'porn addiction' since. They also include 'and sex addiction' further down. While I would consider the preference of watching porn instead of having actual sex with people to constitute addictive behavior, frivolously throwing around with the term 'sex addiction' does not do well to your credibility.
One major symptom of addictive behavior is isolating yourself socially. Sex on the other hand is a form of social interaction, unless it's rape.
If you go by the definition of addiction simply as something that dominantly affects all of your life then marriage is rather likely the thing that qualifies for addiction.

[mr friendly guy]

Someone explain to me how an organisation where its people are required to live in celibacy and that's been riddled with pedofile scandals has any authority on sexuality.

Presumably the same reason why uneducated hicks whose knowledge of science is less than a grade 8 high schooler somehow knows more about a particular topic, be it climate change or evolution than >90% of scientists. I think its a combination of a) being indoctrinated to follow a particular authority b) following the authority who agrees with you, ie you already made up your mind and now look for "evidence" from an "expert" which backs your believe.

[Broomstick]

Someone explain to me how an organisation where its people are required to live in celibacy and that's been riddled with pedofile scandals has any authority on sexuality.

I think the OP is referring to Protestants for the most part, which are not required to be celibate (just heterosexual and married, I gather).

Not that Catholics are much better, but there are differences between the two groups.

[Purple]

If you go by the definition of addiction simply as something that dominantly affects all of your life then marriage is rather likely the thing that qualifies for addiction.

But if you go by that definition religion it self is an addiction. This said, I fail to see how addiction demands that you isolate your self from others. You can be an alcoholic, nicotine or even a drug addict and still hang out with people who agree with you shooting together and sharing bottles/needles.