Note: This Facebook post is the rawest piece of writing I have ever published. Even today it’s hard to publish without some trepidation about being so transparent on the open Internet. But a core principle of this blog is to be honest about my intellectual and religious journey through life. I am committed to letting my past writing speak for itself, first and foremost as a reminder to me of where I’ve been. Looking back on this post now, a couple things have changed. First and foremost, I am no longer living as an unbeliever. I pray intentionally, and I have begun to read the Bible. I still see many reasons to doubt the historicity of parts of the Bible, but it has become increasingly clear to me that the Bible offers the only coherent framework for living that is accessible to me. Therefore, I accept the Bible as my guidebook for life and seek in faith to follow Christ in how I live. Secondly, the language of this piece is almost brutally jaded and unremorseful. Looking back and based on some of the feedback I received at the time, I wish it had been more gentle and treated pornography use s a sin of which to be ashamed. At the end of the post is a follow-up comment I posted a week later. (DL, June 10, 2023).
www.challies.com/articles/my-wifes-plea-to-christian-men
I want my Christian friends to read and let this article sink in.
In particular, absorb the line of thought reflected in the following quote. There are several threads in it I want to unpack.
Why do so many men, and even so many Christian men, have such weakness when it comes to sexual sin? . . . Why are so many of you failing . . .? Is it really that difficult? You would almost think that this one sin is beyond the power of the Holy Spirit. . . . The only conclusion I can come to is that you are so consumed with self-gratification that you are not willing to fight, and I mean really willing to fight, this sin. If it’s not that you can’t, it must be that you won’t.
I have some specific thoughts in response.
WARNING: What follows is extremely frank and includes fairly detailed discussions of porn and sexual content. I would normally never discuss these things in a venue children might encounter them, but this is the Internet and, . . . well . . . if your kids are on the Internet, reading about porn is the least of your worries.
1) Men are Highly Sexual and Non-monogamous By Nature
Thanks to modern communications and information technology and statistical science we as a human race are able to know—to really know—more about human behavior than ever before. We’ve gotten to the level now that we can study behaviors across human populations with the same breadth of view that we get of populations of bacteria in a Petri dish. It used to be our view was limited to stories we heard from friends, our family, our community, people we read about. Basically ad hoc and anecdotal. Now with databases and big data and statistics, all of those old limitations are going right out the window. The question of what’s normal and what’s not isn’t so mysterious any more. We’re all just numbers now—even on issues we really, really try to keep secret.
And what the numbers show us is that maybe 1/6 married men in America were active on Ashley Madison(1). That 50% of married men cheat(1,2). That about 1/40 humans is the product of infidelity(3). And those are just people who’ve acted out. When you consider the additional number who’ve thought about or fantasized about acting out but haven’t, you realize we’re talking the vast majority of married men.
Those are the numbers. Everything else is just bullshit.
You can safely ignore the denials, the fastidious appearances, the smiling facades, and the feeling that your community/church/social circle must different. The numbers don’t lie.
Men are by nature both highly sexual and non-monogamous, and (as is natural) they consistently act according to their nature.
Men are by nature non-monogamous.
What that means is that most men are ready and capable and desirous of sexual activity outside of an actual emotional bond—even those who are actively enjoying sex in the context of an emotional bond.
2) In Practice, Male Heterosexuality is Just Like Male Homosexuality
When I finally understood the above reality about myself, I finally understood gay people. Lots has happened on the homosexual front in fifteen years, but cast your mind back to the late 1990s and early 2000s when “the gay guy” was still the butt of jokes in mainstream media. As homosexuality and the gay rights movement increased in the public consciousness, we heard lots of times from non-gays that being gay is a choice, and we heard from lots of gays who said it isn’t.
This was back when “coming out” was still a huge deal, and we heard a LOT about the closet.
And during this period—maybe in 2005 (so while I was still in Fundamentalism)—I stumbled on a website with coming out stories. It was a little online enclave for gay people to share the trauma of their coming out. And I read a bunch of those stories, and I determined that there was no way they were all made up. That even if SOME of them were made up, there were still enough of them in enough varied voices with enough human details that it was obvious that these were real human experiences. It was my first exposure to gay people speaking openly about their gayness. And the conclusion was inescapable that some of these people had had real sexual attraction to people of the same sex for as long as they could remember, and they didn’t choose to have it.
And then a few years later in the context of discussing homosexuality with a former churchmate who had come out, I had a moment of understanding. The Bible doesn’t call people away FROM homosexuality and TO heterosexuality. It calls people to hetero-spouse-o-sexuality—with the emphasis on the spouseosexual part.
And the raw reality is that I’m definitely not born to what I’m called to. I was not born a spouseosexual, and (as the numbers show) obviously neither are the vast majority of men.
When I really grasped that—when I grasped that I was being called to something totally against my biological nature—I suddenly found it quite easy to be compassionate and understanding towards gay people.
And normally, I have used that mental connection to help anti-gay Christians to open their minds a little bit towards gay people.
But now I want to use it the other way. I want to use it to make a point about normal male sexuality, and I want to make it by recasting the sentence I quoted from the article as follows:
“Why do some men, and even some Christian men, have such weakness when it comes to being gay? . . . Why are so many of you failing . . .? Is it really that difficult? You would almost think that being gay is beyond the power of the Holy Spirit. . . . The only conclusion I can come to is that you are so consumed with being gay that you are not willing to fight, and I mean really willing to *fight,* being gay. If it’s not that you can’t, it must be that you won’t.”
I don’t think Mrs. Tim Challies would write the above sentence. But she did write her original sentence.
What that tells me is that there are people (especially I’m guessing women, and especially women in the church) who are learning to accept the reality of homosexual desire in a way that they have not learned to accept the reality of typically non-monogamous male sexual desire.
Well, let me be the first I know of in my circle to come out of this particular closet: I was born riddled with non-monogamous sexual desire. It wasn’t a choice. I was born with it. And I have had to fight it my entire life.
The practical difference between me and gay people from the biblical point of view is that the Bible gives me a fantastic outlet in marriage. Gay people just need to avoid orgasm as much as possible—ESPECIALLY with other people.
The point is—again—that the default state of a heterosexual man is to be characterized by very strong non-monogamous sexual desire.
He has unchosen internal urges rooted in his biology that compel him towards sexual action—even if those sexual experiences are outside the context of an emotional bond.
3) New Technology Has Changed Everything
“Hi, my name is David. I was born a non-monogamous heterosexual. And I’m part of the first generation of men in history that carries an uncountable number of hot, available, highly-sexual, naked women in his pocket.”
In the old days—that is, for most of human history—to see a naked woman, a man (unless he was rich and could afford painters and sculptors) mostly had to find and see an actual naked woman to see a naked woman.
The modern capabilities that made the experiences of my youth possible would have been astounding to our forefathers.
I first really saw female nakedness when I was about seven. I was hiking in a canyon near my house with a good buddy of mine, and we found somebody’s cast off magazine. I saw my first female genitalia that day, and I still remember it quite vividly. I was moved that day in a way I couldn’t explain and that I did not choose.
I first saw a video of sex when I was about 13 and visiting my grandpa. He had a satellite TV, and we were sitting there watching TV. And then we were watching a tall blond hardbody and a shorter blond woman in blue panties getting to know one another. I still remember it quite vividly. I was old enough at this point to be utterly consumed with guilt—it was so strong it was like a physical perception—and beg God to forgive me afterwards for what I had done by sitting down to watch TV with my grandpa at his house.
I remember a trip to Europe with the family when I was about 14. In places like Germany and Italy they had porno mags just out and about. What’s this!? I can see breasts just walking by a newstand? I first realized that in the airport (or was it train station?) in Frankfurt. I still remember it clearly. Much of the rest of that trip involved (in addition to the genuine awesomeness of the trip itself) strategically scheming to put myself into a position to see more photos of naked women.
When did I first see porn on the Internet? I don’t really know. Before college I think. Definitely by 2001 when Holly and I were married, I had non-trivial experience with Internet porn.
But before I continue, note this fact: Apart from a few brief flashes of nakedness of the family variety, I had not seen an actual naked woman until I was married. I had no game, and I had no confidence, and I believed in saving myself till marriage. And so I did. If I had been born before the mid 1800s, my wedding night would have been my first experience of sex or the naked female form in all its mind-blowing power. Hugh Hefner and satellite TV changed all that.
But really, all of those technologies are nothing—an absolute nothing—compared to what the Internet has brought.
After marriage in 2001, as the Internet grew (YouTube and Facebook are both 10-11 year olds. Wikipedia is maybe a sophomore in high school.), my awareness slowly grew of what was possible. I think the turning point was about 2006. By this point we had been married for five years, and we had two kids. I was sitting in my office at USC, and for the first time ever I discovered Google Images, and in particular that if you typed in “pussy” or “naked women” or “lesbian orgy” or whatever else into Google Images, you would IMMEDIATELY be assaulted—and from a sensory point of view it was definitely an assault; the sheer number of images; the absolute wave of endorphins was breathtaking; I could hardly take it all in—by a seemingly limitless number of images of that thing. Type in “pussy” and you instantly have 100 of them. In living color. And within a few years with the proliferation of online video, in action.
I still have very vivid memories of specific firsts and moments the details of which I’ll spare you. You guys out there I know get it. You women—especially you Christian wives in my social circle—I’m less certain of. But more than that, I’ve by now seen so much porn—and so many kinds of porn—that it’s literally beyond recall.
I have had for almost 10 years the godlike ability to call to mind what I want to see and in that moment to see it. In that ten years, I have called forth many, many things to show themselves to me. I’ve developed tastes. Preferences. Go to sources. I can tell the difference between good porn and crappy porn. I recognize production value. I have a wide visual experience of the gamut of sexual behavior—from hetero, to homo, to bestio, to BDSM, to you name it. (There are only two exceptions. I have never knowingly seen porn that involved unwilling participants (although I have come to assume that I almost certainly have many times unknowingly), and I have never seen child porn.)
What the Internet has done more than anything has given men the power of immediacy and the power of control. You like blondes of a certain size in a certain position at a certain time of day? Verily ye shall have them. Immediately. And in abundance.
And then came the pocket Internet.
In 2012 I got my first smart phone—an iPhone. And from that moment, I had all of the above in my very pocket, and any last inconvenience or risk of discovery passed utterly away. Taking porn into the bathroom to masturbate became the easiest thing ever. It shouldn’t be too difficult to imagine what patterns of life ensued. What patterns of life define men across this country.
4) Hardwiring is Hard
It’s at this point that I’m sure some women are led to conclude:
“You are so consumed with self-gratification, you are not willing to fight.”
And while for many men that may be true, it certainly doesn’t tell the story for all men. And it misses the broader point, and that is this:
There’s an important distinction between preferential behaviors and innate behaviors, and any approach to behavioral change that mistakes the two is doomed to fail.
The difference is that because preferential behavior isn’t hardwired, you can change it without breaking the person.
Innate behaviors are built right in, and to change them, you have to change the person—to break them, or break into them, and make them into something new. Such change is high risk, and can be exceedingly painful.
For example, castration will change innate behavior. Extended periods of physical and mental abuse will also do it. As will trauma of various kinds. Focus groups won’t.
Counseling can help you change which football team you root for, or who you vote for.
It won’t rewire you sexually. It. Just. Won’t.
Witness the fact that for all the books, conferences, counseling sessions, self-help guides, Internet filters, accountability partners, etc. etc. etc. we still have priests raping children, and 20 million men—literally approaching 1/10 HUMANS in America—on Ashley Madison.
People—especially women and women in the church—need to wrap their heads around this reality. Your significant other isn’t Prince Charming on the inside. He’s Conan the Barbarian. That’s Who. He. Is.
I’m not a woman, but I’ll try an analogy.
Women, identify whatever your greatest pleasure is. Maybe it’s chocolate. Or a cuddle. Or your kids’ smiling faces. Or great sex. Or I don’t know what, but identify it. But whatever it is, the desire for it has to be deeply biologically rooted in you. Maybe it’s feeling secure or cherished or respected. I don’t know. But pick something you really, really like, and that you feel compelled to think about and pursue on a frequent basis.
Now imagine that you’re only allowed to have that thing in very specific, narrowly defined circumstances, like only on Thursday evenings, or only on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays at lunch time. And you’re only allowed to have it with your significant other. And perhaps add that you’re significant other isn’t really into that thing as much as you are, or at least in the same intense way you are.
So let’s say it’s chocolate.
You LOVE chocolate. You CRAVE chocolate. It doesn’t matter if you’re full or not. Even if you just ate, you’re almost always up for some chocolate. You are a chocolate connoisseur. You know your Lindt from your Toblerone from your dark to your light, your bitter to your milky sweet.
But you’re ONLY ALLOWED to have chocolate (which you are quite capable of craving almost constantly) three times a week with your husband—who likes chocolate (usually), but maybe not to the same level you do. For him, it’s a dainty bite to be enjoyed. For you, it’s like, “Um, chocolate ice cream with chocolate pieces in chocolate sauce on chocolate cake sounds good. In my face. Immediately.”
And now imagine that you have in your pocket a chocolate making device straight out of Star Trek. Any kind. Any quality. Any QUANTITY. Immediately.
That’s a crappy analogy, but hopeful it helps you get the idea.
Maybe instead of chocolate it’s meth. I don’t know.
5) The Technology Grows Faster than Our Ability to Contain It
I work in IT. The company I worked with really wanted to field a product that would provide robust, end-to-end Internet filtering. You know what? We couldn’t.
There’s too many devices. Too many access points. Too many workarounds.
People have the Internet on their computers, their phones, their game consoles, in their cars. They can connect through cable at home, through hotspots at Panera or wherever, through MiFi on their phone. And by the time a solution is put in place for one of those things, three new things have been invented.
Right now the technology battle is mostly a lost cause.
I’ve got the best I could find. I have mobile-device-management in place on my phone that blocks almost everything. I have put solutions in place on my laptops. Right now I live in Saudi Arabia where possession of pornography is a crime and they have nationwide Internet filtering.
But at the end of the day, there are always workarounds. Always.
And speaking as a parent, even if I could design the perfect lockdown solution that would cover every iPod, every iPhone, iPad, laptop, game console, and PC in my house . . . all my kid would have to do is walk across the street, or invite the neighbor kid who has his own phone to come over, or go to school.
There are lots of kids whose first exposure to porn was on another kid’s phone at some church function. And there’s ultimately nothing any of us can do about it.
6) The Powerlessness of God
This is getting super long, so I’ll try to wrap this up.
The author said this:
“You would almost think that this one sin is beyond the power of the Holy Spirit.”
All I’ll say, you would think that, wouldn’t you.
You want to know the truth?
I begged God to give me victory over sexual sin. I promised God I wouldn’t masturbate. I loved God. I gave my life to Him. I read my Bible. I prayed. I memorized Scripture. I wielded the weapons of spiritual warfare against the devil. I sought counseling. More than once. And again, and again, and again, I failed. I would have victory for a while, and then I would be looking at porn again. I lied a lot—mostly by omission and deception. Holly has suffered a lot from my behavior. More than I understand, I’m quite sure. Those of you who know us best know the difficult waters we have walked together. But I never found victory.
And you know what else?
I’m mostly an unbeliever at this point. I’m certainly living as an unbeliever. I don’t think about God, or His will, or His plan any more. I don’t read my Bible. I don’t pray. I mean basically ever, and when I do, it’s simply going through the motions. And it’s been this way for probably two or three years at this point.
And you know what?
In the last nine months, I’ve hardly looked at porn at all. For the seven months starting in February of this year I didn’t look at any porn. None. Not once. (Actually, it was after I wrote my first draft of this article that I looked at porn again . . .)
For the last three months I’ve been living in a hotel room in a foreign country seven time zones from my wife. And I’ve only looked at porn a few times.
What is my point? To brag?
No.
It’s simply to point out that the success or failure I have experience in my life relative to porn has not been closely correlated to the sincerity and intensity with which I sought spiritual victory over porn.
When Mrs. Challies says, “You would almost think that this one sin is beyond the power of the Holy Spirit.”, I would suggest that those words might be the voice of her rational mind in response to the evidence. The evidence would certainly seem to indicate that Holy Spirit power is not enough to reform male sexuality in any normative, regular fashion.
I wonder what would happen if she and people like her thought more along those lines.
And that’s basically the point of what I’m trying to write. I think the church has built a lot of castles in the sky in regards to what male sexuality is and is not like and the best way to change it and whether or not the Holy Spirit can change it.
As far as solutions to the actual issue of non-monogamous male sexuality?
I think Dan Savage offers a lot of wisdom. Be honest. Be honest honest honest. It’s the key to mental health for everyone involved. Men, get your balls out of the lockbox and say to your wife, “I have an inborn, strong sexual attraction to other women.” Women, get your head out of the clouds and do not be surprised by that revelation.
And then talk it out like grownups, being careful to assert the boundaries that are important to you. And then assume they won’t be observed unless you maintain some level of enforcement yourself.
If that’s worth it to you.
I don’t know. I don’t really have any answers.
I just feel the pain.
A final note: Please don’t take any of what is written here as arrogant or hubristic or bragidoccio. This single issue has caused more mental anguish, guilt, and relationship turmoil than almost any other. If I could go back in time and remove the capabilities and my experiences, I would.
But I can’t.
This is a followup to the post I wrote on porn last week.
Based on the limited feedback I have received, I have come to the conclusion that at least some people who have read it have understood it to be a defense or justification of porn use—basically an argument for why porn use is natural and therefore okay.
My intent was not to justify porn use. My intent was to clearly and frankly offer an answer to Aileen Challies’s broken cry of “Why, men? WHY!?”
In the comments section, my friend Daniel Shackelford took issue with “the idea that human males were not meant/designed/evolved to be monogamous.” In particular, he said the following—words which are worth repeating and considering:
“We have eons of literature that tells us infidelity is a weakness, a vice. Most cultures agree that a man that is unfaithful is not a good man. Why is this, if man was made to take many women? Something in humanity dislikes infidelity.”
Something in humanity dislikes infidelity.
This word is so good; it feels like something that C. S. Lewis would have said, and I wholeheartedly embrace it.
What I wrote was an answer to the question of why men consistently struggle and fail in this area. It was not a fully-developed meditation on the morality (or immorality) of porn use or sexual monogamy. That discussion is an important one, but a separate one from the point I was making.
I will touch on it briefly here by making a few points.
1) The Opposite of Infidelity is not Monogamy. It’s Fidelity.
Having lived the last three months in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I have had on more than one occasion the opportunity to discuss the legal differences between marriage in the KSA and in the USA. In the KSA, a man may legally take up to four wives; polygamy is still commonly practiced. Adultery, however, is a crime subject to serious punishment. These simple facts should be enough to illustrate that fidelity is not synonymous with monogamy.
Infidelity IS a weakness, a vice.
But it’s not a vice because it’s non-monagamous. It’s a vice because it’s vicious.
That is to say, infidelity is inherently not good. There is no “because why” that makes betrayal a flaw. Flaw-ness is part of the very nature of betrayal. At its very core, it is a sin—a blot that sits opposed to purity, just as a Lie sits opposed to Truth.
The same cannot be said of monogamy. Western culture has embraced male monogamy as the normative ideal, but that has not always been the case either historically or biblically. Male monogamy is one way of constructing marriage. It’s not the only way.
2) Virtue Often Requires Overcoming Nature
Fear is natural. The urge towards self-preservation is also natural. But Courage is the virtue.
To say that men are by nature strongly sexual and non-monogamous does not make a virtue of sexual incontinence. It simply highlights the fact that the virtue of sexual continence runs counter to nature—and maybe helps explain why the virtue is so rare.
3) Acknowledging One’s Nature and Affirming One’s Purpose are Different
What I said in my article is that men are by nature highly sexual and also non-monogamous. I did not say that “man was made to take many women.”
If men were by nature monogamous, they would naturally and without external compulsion form lifelong, monogamous partnerships. That they do not is self-evident. It seems to me equally evident that they are not monogamous by nature.
Acknowledging this reality does not in my view stake out any position as to what man’s purpose is or what he was made for.
——
I believe in virtue, and I believe in fidelity—even though my confidence in the Bible as the great arbiter of those things has waned.
I also believe that the pornography industry is one fraught with evils, both in the production and consumption of its product—neither of which I will go into now.
I also believe that it is possible for men to live life without looking at porn.
I just don’t know what the secret to that kind of life is.
I’ve had great “victory” over porn these last nine months.
But I don’t know why exactly. And I don’t know what I would tell other men to help them achieve the same.
Again, my purpose is simply to help all the grieving, wounded wives out there understand the struggle.
I’ll close with another analogy.
Obesity has become a huge (hehehe) problem in the USA. Some people struggle. Some people don’t. Some people have victory for a while. Then they fail again. But it’s a pervasive, widespread problem?
Why?
For some—especially the people who never struggle—the answer is easy: Gluttony. “Put down the Twinkie, Fatso, and thou shalt be thin.”
But there’s almost certainly more to the story than that.
200 years ago, obesity was not a problem. Now it is.
What has changed?
It’s not the people. People are people. And populations of people don’t change.
What has changed are the circumstances.
Work has changed, and food has changed.
Sedentary work is way more common.
High-caloric-density processed foods are way more common.
In the old days, to eat 2000 calories, you had to eat a whole lot of carrots and beans and other whole, natural foods.
Today you can do the same thing with one combo meal at McDonald’s.
You change the food supply, and you change the work environment, and <voila> people start getting fat.
Any approach to fixing the problem of obesity that doesn’t acknowledge those environmental challenges is both less likely to succeed and also more likely to treat the people struggling with obesity unfairly.
There is a useful analogy here to the male struggle for sexual purity in the digital age.