By: Shane James O’Neill
Earlier this year, 5 porn stars died in the span of 3 months. All of their deaths were self-inflicted, through overdosing on drugs or suicide. But why do porn stars and other sex workers have a high suicide rate? They make good money and their job is to have as much pleasure as they can.
So why suicide? And how should we process these deaths?
Here are two reasons:
Shame
First, and this is important, sex workers get a ton of social spite. People love pornography until they’ve gotten off, then they’re sober and ashamed. We — let’s make this personal — criticize pornography in public, in our churches, and in our homes, not ever wanting to talk about it because it is that vile. But we’re just hiding. We don’t want it to come up in public because 80% of us use it. Let’s make the math easy: If we’re in a room with 10 people, approximately 8 of them watch pornography. No one wants to bring it up because the majority will be going home later and giving themselves to it.
It’s shameful, we’re shamed, but God forbid we take ownership of that shame. We hide. And we hate sex-workers, cause that’s easier. They’re open about what they do so we can make them the scape-goat. After we’re done with them we send them off into the desert to die, alone, with our sin all over them.
8 people out of 10 reading this right now are guilty, and so am I.
The next reason digs deeper.
Sex Is Sacred
Sex is sacred. One thing #MeToo has shown us, and it’s shown us a lot, is that sexual interaction is uniquely holy. When it is abused it can rupture a nation and when it is done right … perhaps it can heal a nation. At the very least, maybe it could save people in a profession that profits from consuming forbidden fruit.
Perhaps sex done right wouldn’t save a nation, but maybe it would save one family, maybe it would save just one young girl. Or maybe it could save 5.
St. Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 6 that sexual sin is uniquely destructive, other sins corrupt external things, yet sexual sin devastates the self — the physical has an impact on the psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual.
It has been said that pornography is wrong not because it shows too much, but because it shows too little: when people reduce themselves to being known skin deep then they rob themselves of value.
But porn is the supply to our demand.
Sex-workers reveal skin because we, the [Christian] consumers, only want to know them skin deep. We stripped these 5 women of their value because we don’t know our value.
We see ourselves skin deep.
The Gospel and Your Body
What does Jesus have to do with your body? Sure, Jesus has a claim on the spiritual, but why the physical?
As the Gospels, Paul, and the Nicene Creed so emphatically tell us: Jesus came in a body, was baptized in a body, healed bodies, was physically crucified under the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate, was physically killed, and three days later was physically resurrected, then he ascended into heaven, and will one day come back in his resurrected body to address every wickedness done in the body, to look into every crying eye, to touch every tear, to burn away the wicked, to make every wrong right, and to give us resurrection bodies. All of this, Jesus did in a body and will do in a body.
What you do with your body matters because what Jesus did with his body matters.
Jesus calls us to a righteousness that He practiced, a purity that sets apart, an affection He modeled, and a love that perfects. He has walked out truth in his body, and now Jesus lays claim to your body.
Jesus loves us the way we need to be loved, with a value we dare not give ourselves, with a hope that sees past death, and an identity that is so much deeper than what a mirror shows. Yet, His love profoundly impacts us, physically — even as it will resurrect us bodily.
How we hug, how we kiss, how we hold, what we imagine, what we watch, all of it matters. Even if we’re in a darkened room, alone, what we do with our body affects others.
So how do we know that Jesus cares about our bodies? Because Jesus came in a body to save all of who we are, including our bodies.
He came to save the least of these.
Jesus came to save us from our hypocritical lusts and to resurrect hurting porn stars.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for ProvenMen Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.