By Shane James O’Neill
4 min. read
Josh Radnor
Josh Radnor. Or, as many of us know him, Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother.
Although we may love the child-like, and at times childish, idiosyncratic professor, there is more to Josh Radnor than our beloved and gullible Ted Mosby.
Josh Radnor is an articulate and thoughtful guy. He spends time with ideas and thoughts, thinking about the kind of human being he wants to be, he searches ancient wisdom, and he intentionally practices friendship. You know, all the beautiful things Christians are called to pursue and cherish.
So with that description given about Josh Radnor, it’s not surprising that he has spent large amounts of time considering intimacy, with its many broken forms — of which pornography is one.
Here are the thoughts of Josh Radnor, the real Ted Mosby.
Porn as an Iron Maiden
Josh Radnor has never fallen into porn addiction, yet despite that he still observed how irregular porn use has impacted him. He states it this way, “I just started to notice how when I watched porn the quality of my life and mood was really affected. It depleted my energy and focus… led me to over-sexualize women in the real world. It clouded my thinking and deadened my imagination.”
I find myself loving and hating that language, porn “deadened my imagination”. It’s striking that Josh was able to take note how even marginal porn use altered the quality of his life.
Porn does deplete energy and focus — when we’re giving our passion to empty pixels then all we’re doing is throwing our best selves into a black, nameless pit. We’re exposing our most intimate and vulnerable selves to an Iron Maiden (you know, those torture boxes with spikes inside).
Porn is an Iron Maiden: a false woman who opens herself up to embrace us, yet once we go into her, we find ourselves locked in chains of darkness with only spikes of nails and pain to hold us. We give our passions to porn, and we never get another’s passion in return. The life-force we spill is really our own blood as we let porn bleed our passions and relationships dry.
Josh Radnor gives similar language to the entrapment of porn when he says: “I should also say that I understand porn’s charms… I know its pleasures but they’re cheap, brutal pleasures that fade fast and leave you worse off than before. Porn ultimately hurts the heart and confuses the mind. It gives nothing back. All it does is take. I played a character with a morphine addiction and in my research I came across a description of opiates as “the Judas drug,” in that it will “kiss you then betray you.” This is also true for porn.”
Josh Radnor: Becoming Human
More often than not, we think that sex is the highest good and the greatest pleasure. So much of our human identity is wrapped up in sexual desire. We quite literally change our biology to match our desires.
Josh Radnor speaks directly into this identity shift: “I feel like it took me a long time—too long—to learn that sexual gratification is not the highest human aspiration or achievement and that the relentless, single-minded pursuit of it is hollow and depression-inducing. Porn peddles selfishness, domination, and oppression—all terrible qualities to bring to a relationship. It strips women of personality, agency, and dimensionality reducing them to objects who exist simply for men’s sexual pleasure. And can be discarded when they’re through—after all, there are always more women a click away.”
With porn, intimacy becomes a mouse click, and sexual gratification becomes the highest human aspiration and achievement — even while depression and suicide continue to climb to all-time historical highs.
Living in the light
It’s a hard thing, when a secularist is able to speak with such insight into a better form of humanity. Harder still when Christians have a ageless vision of hope that all things will be made new, have access to a gentleness that neuters shame of its ability to reproduce, and a source of affection that offers an eternal caress.
Josh Radnor shares some of his own human longings when he says: “I never closed the window on a porn site and thought “Time well spent!” Something about it never felt right. There seemed to be this other, better person longing to get out and express himself and with porn in my life—even in a minor way—that guy didn’t stand a chance.”
Josh Radnor is a remarkable man and he speaks so directly into the issue plaguing so many of us. As he notes, at the end of the day, the question does come down to what kind of human you long to be. Living in the light isn’t easy but it is good, and living in the light is the only way to become the kind of person you long to be.
Here I just leave you with the Master’s words:
When Jesus spoke again to the people, he said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”
Let’s follow Him.
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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.