FROM ONE NEWS NOW/AFA

Pornography and women
Marcia Segelstein - OneNewsNow Columnist - 7/27/2010 8:00:00 AM
"Pornography is the drug of the millennium and more addictive than crack cocaine." So says Donna Rice Hughes, president of Enough is Enough, a nonprofit organization working to keep the Internet safe for children and families.

And while most people may think of men when they picture purveyors of pornography, women are joining their ranks in droves. A big part of the problem – for both men and women – is the easy accessibility of porn. Thanks to the Internet, it's not even necessary to leave your house. Anonymity feeds temptation.

A survey conducted in 2003 by Today's Christian Woman found that one out of every six women, including Christians, admits struggling with an addiction to pornography.

According to a 2006 poll by Internet Filter Review, every month 9.4 million women access adult websites, many of them doing so while at work.

Douglas Weiss is the executive director of Heart to Heart Counseling Center in Colorado Springs, and works with people addicted to pornography. One of the dangers of viewing such material on a regular basis is that people, according to Weiss, "will actually attach to sex as object relationships as opposed to intimate relationships. So they will actually hunger for object relationships, creating over time what we call intimacy anorexia." Object sex replaces relational sex. And when people become no more than objects, relationships naturally suffer. Healthy marriages are put at risk.

For resources, including faith-based ministries, on overcoming pornography addiction, check out the website for Enough is Enough.

Writing for Salvo magazine, Alexander Jech, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, discusses another way pornography impacts women and girls. "It is common for Christians to say that pornography is a form of idolatry. What is less well appreciated is how pornography, as a form of idolatry, affects the dignity that women hold in society." Instead of seeing themselves in the image of God, women begin to emulate the female images that saturate the culture.

Those images – seen in actresses, TV news anchors, pop stars, models – are often highly sexualized creatures. Whether it's Miley Cyrus's transformation from wholesome girl to Lady Gaga imitator, or the cleavage and short skirts exhibited by cable TV anchors, or everyday TV commercials, females flaunting their sexuality are hard to miss. By today's standards, Marilyn Monroe posing in her two-piece bathing suit seems almost prudish. Jech cites the book Female Chauvinist Pigs, by Ariel Levy, regarding how what Levy calls our "raunch culture" affects women and teenage girls. Levy believes that girls – in their dress and demeanor – have begun to emulate porn stars. They present to the world a "hyper-sexed image of themselves." They make sex objects of themselves.

By doing so, from a Christian perspective, women grow further and further away from the image of God. Jech writes: "Even as she gains power, she resembles God less and less, while this resemblance is the very basis of her dignity. She wills to become something she would never desire to be except under our present conditions of degradation."

I believe Jech is absolutely right. Dignity is not a quality most girls value. It's not a quality they see held in high regard, or modeled by our female cultural icons. To quote child expert and author Penelope Leach: children are apprentice people. Children and adolescents learn how to be adults by imitating them. A look at the role models most teenage girls come across on a regular basis is sobering. Jech writes that communities of faith must "provide a counter-cultural image of what it is to be a woman."

Looking at the website of the church friends of mine have recently started attending, I noticed a club for girls there called Handmaids of the Altar. They meet on a regular basis and, among other things, learn flower arranging and sewing for the church altar. The club's stated goal is to "try to develop an authentic femininity based on the special gifts that God has entrusted women. The stories of women in the Bible show how woman, in her deepest and original being, exists 'for the other.'"

Now that's counter-cultural! And it sounds like a good place to start.



COPYRIGHT AMERICAN FAMILY NEWS NETWORK 2010