There is a place here in Bellingham, known as the Light of the World Prayer Center. The primary person in charge is a man named Jason Hubbard. I first became aware of Jason when I was still attending the Band of Brothers fellowship on Tuesday nights, at Christ The King, a church near the Cordata bus stop in Bellingham.
There were a number of things I liked about the Band of Brothers fellowship. There was tasty free food (although after while, since I couldn't help wondering why they couldn't occasionally vary the menu by offering pizza or fried chicken or something else). There was also a philosophy which seemed designed to encourage people to open up and honestly share their problems and issues. Raul, the guy in charge of Band of Brothers, always made an effort to say, "What happens in Band of Brothers stays in Band of Brothers." There was an opportunity, every Tuesday night, to share one's problems with other men so that they would pray for you.
To see a YouTube video of Band of Brothers Radio, visit this link.
At their Tuesday night meetings, they would often show little videos downloaded from the web, and the videos often underscored the primary beliefs the group wanted to promote. Some of the videos were quite amusing and entertaining, and most of them made good points that needed to be made, particularly in terms of personal responsibility and treating one's family members right.
When I started attending the group, they seemed to be on a bit of a tangent, however. Specifically, they would talk on and on about the evils and dangers of pornography (which shouldn't surprise you if you watch the video to which I linked earlier in this blog post). They brought in Jason Hubbard, who distributed a little study guide he had written on that subject. We were all expected to do the study. Needless to say, Jason also spoke about the subject. He confessed to having had personal problems with porn, and he talked about how he believed that pornography exploited women. He said, in a whiny, weepy voice, "I love women", implying that any person who truly loved women would abstain from looking at porn. (Some guys might reply, "I love women, too, Jason. I really love the way they look when they are naked. Why do you think I like to look at porn so much?")
I understood that Jason meant well, and I understood that the issue was personal for him, so I was willing to cut him some slack. But I was very uncomfortable with his implication: Porn was principally a men's problem.
The trouble is that the facts do not support that idea. Google search the phrase "Christian women addicted to visual pornography" and you will very likely get the same results I got just a minute ago when I ran that web search, which returned 6.130,000 results. Friends, that is an awful lot of search results, for something which is ostensibly a problem which only Christian men have.
Like I say, I am not in opposition to Jason Hubbard, which has a good ministry of prayer, here in Bellingham. But in my opinion, he needs to try to be fairer to men, who have enough problems without being villified because they have sexual urges, and because they occasionally yield to the temptation to sneak a peak when they are presented with opportunities to look at porn.
By the way, I might point out that there are all kinds of pornography, which literally means "printed or visual material containing the explicit description or display of sexual organs or activity". Notice that phrase printed or visual. Porn can be visual, but that is not an intrinsic aspect of pornography.
You might also want to give some thought to the fact that Albrecht Durer (the Renaissance artist known for his famous image of the praying hands) also depicted bare-breasted women in some of his prints and works of art. I guess that means that the Christians with lovely recreations of the Praying Hands image in their living rooms are guilty of unknowingly patronizing a pornographer (since the mere depiction of sexual organs is enough to qualify something as "pornography").
So-called "erotic fiction" which many women prefer to the kinds of porn containing photos or drawings, nevertheless fits the aforementioned definition. In fact, the suffix "-graphy" means writing. It doesn't have to be a picture book, in other words, to be considered pornography.
My guess is that Crystal Renaud, the Christian author of the book "Dirty Girls Come Clean", was not just talking about an addiction to erotic fiction when she wrote that book. But even if she was, I am not sure that in the eyes of God, there is any important moral distinction between picture book porn and porn which comes in the form of easy-to-disguise erotic fiction novels with titles like "Ask For It" (a novel I found lying there in the laundry room at my apartment complex while recently doing the laundry). Try reading a passage from that book aloud, next time you're at your prayer group or Bible study, and see if it does not provoke a lot of embarrassed laughter, if you're lucky. (If you are not so lucky, you will very likely be asked or adamantly commanded not to read such materials anymore.)
How is it that women get by with promoting the rather sexist idea that porn is just a man's problem? My suspicion is that their preferred form of pornography is a lot less obvious than the kind of pornography preferred by most men. I once spent time in a grocery store, browsing through some of the "innocent" novels which were very clearly aimed at a female audience. I never saw so many references to "throbbing manhood" and "heaving breasts" in my life.
Let's stop lying, folks. People like sex. They like having it, and they like thinking about it. Even if they are lifelong virgins, as I am and have been for the entire 56 years I've lived on this earth, most of them would like to think that they might, in the right circumstances, marry a man or woman (hopefully a person of the opposite gender, although that is by no means guaranteed here in Washington State these days), and experience the kind of sexual ecstasy which motivated the rather descriptive prose to be found in the biblical book known as the Song of Solomon.
Maybe in some science fiction fantasy, there exists a world where sex is not necessary for procreation, but here in this world, in lieu of the development of human parthenogenesis, sex is still necessary for the population of the planet. Look around you, at church, and you will see a lot of people due to have babies, especially if there are a lot of young couples. And if you need further proof of the ubiquity of sex, just look into a mirror. Unless your parents used artificial insemination, the chances are very high that you exist because YOUR PARENTS HAD SEX. I know, I know, people don't like to think of their parents grinding away on a sweaty bed, but the fact is, they did.
I notice that Jason Hubbard has kids. I have to assume that he has kids because he and his wife "did the nasty" at some point. It strikes me as a bit hypocritical for him to actually enjoy doing the deed and then to turn around and condemn those Christian men who have to content themselves with an occasional peek at a pornographic photo because they have never been blessed with wives of their own.
By the way, a note to Raul: If you want to reduce the likelihood that the men in your fellowship would yield to the temptation to have sexual intercourse with women they are not married to, then you might try holding occasional fellowship meetings where Christian men would have the chance to actually mingle with Christian women, including single Christian women they might conceivably marry. I know, you have a women's fellowship similar to the Band of Brothers (I forget the name of that group, offhand), but while that's a great opportunity for men's wives to get together for some "girl time", it's absolutely useless to single Christian men and women who would like to be able to meet people of the opposite sex.
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