Pornography Is Destroying Us: A Word to Those Who Watch It and Those Who Sell It

Pornography is no longer something a person has to go looking for. It arrives uninvited, in the ad along the side of the page, the scene in the show everyone is streaming, the app that was supposed to be for something else, the paperback with the tasteful cover. A whole generation has grown up with the entire weight of human sexuality sitting on a device that also holds their homework and their grandmother’s phone number. What used to live at the far fringe of a culture now runs quietly through the middle of it. And most of us have made a private peace with that, either because naming it out loud feels judgmental, or because we are tangled in it ourselves and would rather not look too closely.

We are going to look closely. This is written for everyone pornography has touched, which in a culture like ours is very nearly everyone: the man who has hidden it for twenty years, the teenager whose first picture of intimacy came from a screen, the wife who tells herself the novels do not count, the young woman who has started selling images of herself and calls it independence. If any of that is you, we have not come to pile shame on you. We have come to tell you the truth that the people profiting off you never will. It is destroying you. And there is a way out.

One sin, a hundred faces

We tend to sort this problem into separate boxes. Watching is one thing, we think, and producing is another. A video belongs in one category, and a steamy novel must surely belong in some gentler one. Men have their version; women have theirs. But sort it however you please, and you keep arriving at the same root underneath all of it.

Jesus put His finger on the machinery of the thing. Long before an image is ever made or sold or clicked, there is a look, and behind the look a want, a decision of the heart to take a person God made and use them for your own appetite. That is the seed of all of it. Pornography is simply that seed industrialized, a global market built on training people to do with their eyes and their imaginations the very thing Jesus called adultery of the heart.

Which is why the one who watches and the one who sells are not really in different businesses. They are two ends of one transaction. In every frame of it a human being, an image-bearer of God with a name and a soul and a mother, is turned into a product to be consumed or a commodity to be sold. The person clicking and the person performing have both agreed to the same lie, that a person can be reduced to a body, and a body to a price. Paul names the engine running under it.

Notice where the list lands: greed, which amounts to idolatry. Lust is a species of greed. It is coveting a person, or a sensation, or an image of yourself, badly enough to bow down to it. And whatever we bow to that is not God will own us in the end. The specific shape hardly matters. Man or woman, watching or selling, moving pictures or purple prose, it is one sin wearing different clothes, and it is an idol, and idols always take far more than they give.

What it does to the one who watches

Start with watching, because that is where most people are, and because the common assumptions about it are half a generation out of date. For a long time the quiet cultural script said that pornography is a man’s struggle. It never fully was, and it certainly is not now. Women are consuming it in numbers that would have been unthinkable not long ago, and the female form of this sin often arrives bound in a story rather than a video. A great deal of what gets sold today as “romance” is pornography with a plot, written to do to a woman’s imagination precisely what the cruder material does to a man’s eyes: to manufacture a craving for an intimacy that costs nothing and answers to no covenant. The packaging is softer and the aisle in the store is respectable. The sin underneath is the same one.

And it does real damage to real parts of you. Scripture is not shy about the kind of person it is calling you to become instead.

Possess your own vessel in honor. That is God’s design for a human being: a person who governs their own desires, free to give themselves wholly and faithfully to one covenant partner, rather than a person owned by an appetite they can no longer command. Pornography drills the exact opposite into you. It teaches you to treat arousal as something owed to you on demand, delivered by strangers who exist to you only as a means to it. It builds a private world in which no one has to be loved or forgiven or served, where the other person makes no claim on you at all. And a person well practiced at that in secret does not simply lay it down at the altar on their wedding day. He carries it into the marriage, where he finds that his wife cannot compete with an endless screen, and she finds herself quietly measured against images she never agreed to compete with. The one place two people were meant to be fully known becomes one more place where someone feels alone.

Flee, Paul says, and the verb is chosen with care. He does not tell us to resist immorality, or to manage it, or to set sensible limits around it. He says run, the way you would run from a burning building, because this is the one sin he singles out as a sin against your own body. It gets inside you. It rewires what you want and deadens what you feel, and it always asks for more over time, because that is how every idol works: what satisfied yesterday is not enough today, so the demand keeps climbing. A great many people who began with something they were ashamed of have watched it escalate, month by month, into things that once would have sickened them. The escalation is designed into it, the thing doing exactly what it was built to do.

What it does to the one who sells

Now the harder half, the half our culture is presently applauding. There are platforms today, and you know the ones without my having to name them, built so that an ordinary person can sell explicit images of their own body to strangers by the month. The whole enterprise has been dressed in the language of small business and self-ownership and empowerment. A staggering and still-rising number of young women, and young men alongside them, have signed up, having been told that this is freedom, that it is easy money, that it is nobody’s concern but their own.

It is one of the crueler lies this generation has been sold, and someone has to say so plainly, because almost no one with a platform will. Selling yourself puts you on the wrong side of the deal, as the merchandise rather than the merchant. The company takes its cut, the buyers take what they came for, and what it quietly takes from you never shows up on any statement. It takes the possibility of ever being fully unknown again, because those images do not come back once they are loose. It takes the covenant you might one day have wanted, handing your future husband or wife the knowledge that a paying public already holds what was meant for them alone. And it trades a body God calls holy for a wage, feeding in the same motion the very appetite that is enslaving millions of other people. Paul says something to the Corinthians that lands squarely on all of this.

You are not your own. In a culture that treats “my body, my choice” as the final word in every argument, that is a scandalous sentence, and it is also the most freeing one you may ever hear. Your body is not a possession you happen to hold and may liquidate for cash when you need it. It is a temple, fashioned by God, bought back by God at the unthinkable price of His own Son’s blood, and meant to put His worth on display. To sell it is the desecration of something that was never yours to sell in the first place.

Here the same clarity that names the sin has to make wide room for compassion toward the sinner, because on this side of it, many were caught before they ever had a fair chance. A great number of the people trapped in this were lied to when they were far too young to weigh it. Some were groomed into it by someone older. Some are being coerced right now, by a boyfriend, a so-called manager, a debt, a trafficker. Some stepped into it in a season of real desperation, needing the rent in a month when there was simply no other way they could see. If that is you, hold two things at the same time and do not let go of either. What you are doing is sin, and you can stop, and be washed, and begin again. And if someone is forcing you, that is exploitation, not a job you are failing to appreciate, and there are people whose entire calling is to help you get free of it.

The lie that it is harmless

Underneath every version of this sits one load-bearing lie, and everything else leans on it. It is private, we are assured, just between consenting adults, and not hurting anybody. Our culture has become expert at renaming sins until they sound like rights, and it has done some of its finest work right here. Lust was renamed “sexuality.” Using a person became “content.” Selling yourself became “empowerment.” Adultery of the imagination got rebranded as “self-care.” The words grew prettier while the thing itself went on doing exactly what it has always done.

God is not mocked. That is less a threat than a description of how the world He made actually runs. You cannot sow to an appetite for years and reap anything other than a bigger appetite. The man who has spent a decade training himself to be aroused by strangers should not be shocked to find he can no longer be moved by his own wife. The woman who has fed her imagination a thousand versions of a man who does not exist may find the real one, with his ordinary flaws and his bad mornings, a bitter disappointment she resents. The young person selling images today will one day long to be loved for something other than that, and will have to live in a world where a market already set a price on the rest. None of this is God being harsh. It is simply the crop coming up in its season. Whatever we plant, we eventually have to eat.

Into the marriage bed

If pornography only wrecked the single and the searching, it would be tragedy enough. But it does not stay politely outside the covenant. It has moved into the marriage bed, and lately it has begun rearranging the furniture.

Many marriages already carry the quiet wound of it: one spouse using in secret while the other lives with an inadequacy they can never quite name, a coldness and a distance that seem to have no cause. That grief is real, and it deserves the same honest repentance and patient rebuilding that any betrayal calls for, because that is what it is. But the newer development is stranger and more brazen. A culture that has finally run out of ways to make plain adultery sound sophisticated has started marketing it to married couples as a feature. It has minted soft new names for very old sins. “Ethical non-monogamy.” The “open” marriage. “Swinging,” and the parties arranged around it. Setups in which a husband hands his wife to other men and it is given a playful nickname and framed as a kind of generosity. These practices are drifting out of the shadows and into ordinary conversation, into magazine columns and streaming plotlines, pushed along by the pornography now stitched through even mainstream film and television. A Christian couple can start to feel like the odd ones out for keeping a bed that belongs to just the two of them.

Hear God on this, and do not flinch from it.

Undefiled. There is no clause tucked in there for “unless the two of you agree otherwise.” God designed the marriage bed to be exclusive, a walled garden with a single gate that opens for one person and stays shut to every other, and that exclusivity is not a fence around the joy; it is the very thing that makes the joy safe. The instant another person is welcomed in, in the flesh or on a screen, the wall is breached and the garden stops being a refuge. What the culture now calls an open marriage, Scripture calls by its plain and ancient name, and it warns that God Himself will take up the case of the one being sinned against. There is nothing enlightened about any of it, only the oldest sin in the world in a rented tuxedo.

The bill coming due

Step back far enough and you can begin to make out the size of what is happening. We are the first people in human history to hand an entire generation, in childhood, a bottomless supply of industrialized lust, and we are only now starting to read the bill as it comes due.

An enormous number of young men have formed their whole idea of desire in front of a screen before they ever held a girl’s hand. An enormous number of young women have been taught, by the very same culture, that their worth is measured in being watched and their power lies in being wanted. Both are walking into adulthood already shaped, and very often already scarred, by a thing engineered to deform the exact part of them that a marriage will one day depend on. This is the water a whole generation has been raised in, no longer a scattered private struggle here and there.

We ought to be honest with the young about what that means, in both directions, because false comfort has never rescued anyone. If you are a young man hoping to find a faithful wife someday, you are searching in a culture where a great many women have been talked into selling or exposing themselves, and where doing so is treated as unremarkable. If you are a young woman hoping for a faithful husband, you are searching in a culture where most men have been shaped by pornography, and many are using it still. That is sober ground, and pretending it is otherwise does no real kindness to anyone about to build a life on top of it.

But sober is not the same thing as hopeless, and here the world’s despair and the hope of God’s people have to part company. God has always kept a remnant for Himself. In every generation, this one included, He is raising up men and women who will not bow to the idol, who repent of what they have already done, who guard their eyes and their imaginations on purpose, and who come to the covenant clean, or cleansed. Those people are real, they can be found, and by grace you can become one of them. A marriage built by two of them, in a culture like ours, will not be a common thing. It will be a quiet miracle, and a lamp in a dark room. The answer to a generation learning its loves in front of a screen is to build the rare and radiant kind of marriage that shows a watching world the very thing the screen was only ever able to counterfeit.

The way out is not willpower

So what do you actually do, if you have read this far and you already know that it is you?

Begin by turning off both of the dead-end roads. The first is despair, the quiet decision that you are simply too far gone, that this is who you are now and the door closed a long time ago. The second looks more responsible but ends in the same ditch: the self-improvement plan, the new blocking app and the fresh burst of resolve and the private promise that this time you will really stop for good. The first is a flat lie. The second is a trap, because at bottom this is a sin to be repented of and an idol to be pulled down, and that is God’s work inside a person, not something a person grinds out alone.

Repentance is where it starts, and repentance is far more than feeling bad. It is agreeing with God about what this actually is, turning away from it, and turning your face toward Him. Jesus was almost violent about how seriously that turn has to be taken.

He is not commending self-harm; He is telling you to be ruthless with whatever keeps feeding this in your life. If it is a device, the device gets the strongest filter you can find, or it goes somewhere you cannot reach it, whatever the moment actually requires. An account dies today, not at the end of the month. A whole genre of book or category of show goes, all of it, without the careful negotiation your flesh will start proposing the instant you decide. Job, a man who feared God, understood that this war is mostly won or lost upstream, at the level of the eyes, before the heart is ever engaged.

A covenant with your eyes. Decide in advance what you will not look at, and then treat that decision as settled and binding when the moment comes, instead of reopening the case every single time. But even that, done alone and in the dark, will not hold for long, because the deepest strength of this particular sin is its secrecy. It withers in the light. Which means the single most important step many of you will ever take is also the one you dread the most: tell someone. Confess it to God, and then confess it to a flesh-and-blood person, your pastor before anyone, and let a few people who love you know the truth and help you carry it.

Confession is not God hauling your worst secret into the open in order to humiliate you. It is you finally bringing into the light the thing that was rotting in the dark, and discovering that He was never standing there with contempt, only with cleansing already in His hands. Then do not merely try to empty the space; ask God to fill it, replacing a starved and grasping love with the love of Christ, which is the only thing large enough to satisfy the hunger the idol was always failing to feed. And for those of you being brought out of the selling side of this, the very same door stands open, with rescue standing right next to repentance. You are not disqualified, and you are not damaged goods. You are someone Christ died to buy back, and He does not spend His own blood on things He means to throw away.

You can be washed

Because that is the word this whole hard subject has been driving toward from the beginning. It would be a cruelty to name a sin this thoroughly and then leave you standing in the middle of it, and God does no such thing. Writing to the Corinthians, who lived in one of the most sexually broken cities of the ancient world, Paul reeled off a long and ugly list of the very sins their neighbors were drowning in, and then he turned a corner that ought to stop you where you stand.

Such were some of you. But you were washed. Every one of them had been washed, sanctified, justified, made new, by the name of Jesus and the Spirit of God, not left to grit their way to respectability on their own. Some of the people Paul was writing to had done everything this article has described, and worse, and the gospel had reached all the way down into the filth and pulled them clean out of it and dared to call them saints. That same gospel has not lost a step since.

This is the deepest reason there is real hope here, and not merely good advice. At the very center of the Christian faith is a Bridegroom who did the opposite of everything pornography trains us to do. He did not take from His bride to feed Himself; He spent Himself to make her clean, at the cost of His own blood, to set her before Him without a stain. And the bride He did all of that for had a past every bit as ruined as yours. He knew every bit of it, loved her still, and made her new. That is exactly who is offering to wash you.

So do not spend one more night believing you are past saving, because you are not. The industry that profits off you has every reason in the world to keep you convinced that this is simply who you are and there is no road back. It is lying to you, the same way it has lied to you about everything else. There is a road back, and it runs straight through honest confession, ruthless repentance, the help of Christ’s people, and the cleansing blood of the God who buys back the very thing the world uses up and throws away. Turn it off, and tell someone who can help you, out loud and today. Then come home. He has been watching that road the whole time, and He has never once been ashamed to be found in the company of people exactly like us.

This is a pastoral article, not counseling, medical, or legal advice, and it does not replace your pastor, or a biblical counselor sought with your pastor.