By: Shane James O’Neill
Chris Rock and Cheating
During a Netflix comedy special called Tambourine, Chris Rock shares how pornography destroyed his marriage with Malaak Compton-Rock. What began with porn led to sleeping with several other women. And then just like that, 18 years of marriage was shredded apart, with nothing to show for it except for an empty home. Makes you wonder how something like that can happen.
As Chris Rock puts it, “When guys cheat, it’s like we want something new. But then you know what happens? Your woman finds out, and now she’s new – she is never the same again.” He connects his cheating with pornography by saying, “When you start watching porn, any porn will do. Then, later on, you’re all f–ked up and you need a perfect porn cocktail to get you off.”
Porn hinges on novelty. Chris is right to say that at first, “any porn will do.” We’re fascinated with the naked form. The novelty of that fascination grabs a hold of us. But we quickly need to crawl deeper and deeper into that fascination to find something new.
This is why people don’t just pull up one image or one video and then act out on it. We binge. We gluttonize ourselves on image after image, video after video. Then, finally, we’re satiated. Well, until later.
It’s a heartbreaking and humbling thing to hear Chris Rock say that in his pursuit of novelty, something “new,” it changed his wife, and it changed their marriage. His lust broke something inside of her, and he got a kind of “new” that he never wanted.
His porn habit — a quiet, private thing — shaped him in ways he was unaware of, and it broke apart the most important thing to him.
Chris Rock: Changed by Porn
Using Chris’ words, when you watch porn “You become, like, sexually autistic. You develop sexual autism. You have a hard time with eye contact and verbal cues.” He goes on to say, “What happens when you watch too much porn is you get desensitized.”
That’s the novelty piece in full affect. We seek out different porn, we gain new fetishes, and we look for real life encounters. There’s a weird irony at play here.
First, porn destroys (well, it replaces) the libido (human sex-drive), which means single folk who watch porn have difficulty climaxing when they’re having sexual intimacy with an actual person.
And second, porn pushes us toward novelty, so the married person who watches porn can’t find satisfaction with their spouse.
Related: The Science of Confession
It’s a vicious cycle that entraps each and every one of us. Porn doesn’t discriminate.
Learning From Chris Rock
Behind all of this is Chris Rock’s remarkable honesty. Very few people would have known that his marriage ended because of porn. If anything, we would only know about the cheating, which is rough enough. But Chris allows us to peer behind the cheating and into his very divorce. With the amount of people who viewed the Netflix special, and the news outlets that picked up on this information, millions of people now know about his failures and secret sins.
In short, Chris Rock didn’t try and hide his sin. He declared his most embarrassing and shameful secrets from a stage. Living in the light is the only way to banish darkness. The dark places we hide within can only be dispelled by light. That’s true of every secret, every sin, even porn.
Chris didn’t step into the light because of Jesus. He stepped into the light because he wanted to be truthful about the ravishing effects of pornography. How much more should we, who follow on the path of Jesus, expose our own hidden secrets of shame?
Jesus isn’t asking us to share our sin to millions, but He is asking us to share it.
His promises are trustworthy and clear: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Jesus’ own brother, James, says it this way: “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.”
To follow after Jesus is to live in the light. And in order to find hope and real freedom, we must live in the light.
When the secular world lives in the light better than those who follow after Jesus then we know something is terribly wrong.
But Jesus is always at work, even through Chris Rock. Let’s learn by his failures, and let’s learn by his vulnerability.
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Shane James O’Neill is the Editorial Director for Proven Men Ministries. He is currently working on a graduate degree in apologetics at Liberty University’s Rawling School of Divinity.