The Power of Pornography:
Using Divine Design with Evil Intent

The ideas put forward in this article as to the true power and design inherent in our sexuality go a long way to explain the pervasive success of the pornography industry. I quote from our book Lust and Longing: Towards a Deeper Understanding of Male Sexuality for Men and Women:

"Why is it that pornography has such huge power over men? And over some women too, in the sense that thousands of them are more than willing to be photographed in the most explicit positions. These women are not, in the main, prostitutes and drug addicts as the popular stereotype would try and have us believe. The vast majority are normal women from every walk of life. And often they are not doing it for money either, as many send their pictures off to internet sites and magazines for little if any payment at all. It is as though they have a primal hunger 'to be seen' at what they at least intuitively know to be their most beautiful, powerful and in one sense their most sacred!

Pornography in most of its forms has intuitively tapped into and owes its huge success precisely to this God-given primal hunger in the male to experience love and welcome from a woman at both a human and divine level. And the female's willing co-operation is based on a soul hunger to give the power of her love and welcome to a man. Pornography is so 'successful' because of the vast inherent sacred power which pours forth from the naked female body, and from her vulvic cave in particular. It perverts that power for sure, but is successful because the pornographers know instinctively how to plug in illegally to God's power grid, and then they misuse that sacred power. Those who are sucked in are there because they too are longing for love, longing for welcome - but all they get is a sad counterfeit, a warped, unfulfilling and addictive marred image of the real thing. It drains them of divine presence and produces only shame, addiction, loneliness and sad rejection." (3)

At this point a sobering fact needs to be faced up to. It is all too easy to imagine that pornography is totally a non-Christian problem. The evidence says clearly that this is not the case! Questionnaire-based research done by Doctor Archibald Hart, dean of Psychological Counselling at the prestigious Fuller Theological Seminary, found that among evangelical/pentecostal American men 15.5 percent of non-clergy and 6.8 percent of clergy admit to masturbating while using pornography. Doctor Hart commented that, based on his twenty-five years of clinical counselling of what he calls 'good Christian men', these percentages were lower than he would have expected, mainly because, even in anonymous surveys, men find it very difficult to tell the truth on such sensitive issues. (4)