By: Lexie Smith
What’s happening
If you’ve been on social media this week, you will have seen your feed filled with posts including a hashtag #MeToo. It all came about when actress Alyssa Milano sent out a tweet.
It’s an awareness campaign to illustrate how many people have been sexually assaulted. The numbers are overwhelming. You might be wondering, “Ok, that’s great and all but what does it have to do with me?”
Let me tell you.
A movement of individuals who are fed up with the statistics and set out to change them. How great would it be to raise your kids in a culture where sexual assault is rare, rather than the norm? That’s the kind of world I want to raise my kids in someday. And here’s how we do it.
Looking at the connection
Disclaimer: I am in no way saying that if you have ever looked at porn you’ll hurt someone. I would never speak such a thing over someone, but the research is important to be aware of.
According to the FBI, “pornography is found at 80 percent of the scenes of violent sex crimes, or in the homes of the perpetrators.” That is huge! We need to be calling out porns presence in our culture, marketplaces, and businesses. If porn is leading people to be sexual offenders we should run far from it.
It may seem far-fetched to believe that porn could correlate with sexual assault, but here are some more resources:
- A) The University of New Hampshire did a study that showed that the states with the highest readership of pornographic magazines like Playboy and Penthouse, also have the highest rape rates (1).
- B) In conjunction with FBI findings, the Michigan State Police Department found that pornography is used or imitated in 41 percent of the sex crimes they have investigated (2).
- C) Dr. Victor Cline did research that showed how men who become addicted to pornographic materials begin to want more explicit or deviant material and end up acting out what they have seen (3).
For further figures consult stats here and here.
The reason why I am sharing all of this information is because the common factor with sexual assault, whether violent or otherwise, is the use of pornography. We need to be informed about that.
The reason is that porn hijacks the pleasure centers of your brain and causes you to crave it. In a sense, it’s like eating too much of your favorite guilty pleasure food, though more like heroin or crack. Porn engages the same indulgence craving that takes over so many people. It results in them taking advantage of someone without even realizing it or being fully conscious of what they are doing. It seems impossible, but you can, in fact, get so focused on something you tune out the world.
That also might include someone’s objections to your advances. And that’s where it turns from bad to awful.
getting real
I am going to get real vulnerable here. I’m going to marry the guy I wrote about in Why I Decided To Date A Recovering Porn Addict. We are so thrilled to unite our lives together in covenant. But, I have experienced what I just described above, with my soon to be husband. We have had to face that from his pornographic addiction. We can gratefully say that we will be getting married having abstained from sex for almost two years. We didn’t start off well, but we are finishing well. Part of the reason we didn’t start off well was because of his tunnel vision and the trauma of my past colliding.
It took a lot of work for me to learn how to stick up for myself and tell a guy “no” after all the awful experiences I had as a child. Anytime I was faced with needing to tell a guy “no” I would be overcome with fear. It took everything in me to get the word out, “No”. Meanwhile, my now fiance would be so focused on what he wanted that he wouldn’t hear me. I would repeat it. No reaction. To snap him out of it I would end up having to basically yell at him. This caused me to feel incredibly hurt and uncomfortable to even snuggle while watching a movie. That may make him sound like an absolute jerk, but he is actually one of the most thoughtful people I know. I have never been so well loved by someone. This reflects the compulsive nature of porn more than it does anything else — and the stats testify to that.
Even the best of people and best of intentions can be turned into terrible things when it comes to porn.
Resolve
We had agreed when we first got together that we wanted to remain pure until marriage. He also noticed me pulling away so we talked about it and he was devastated by his actions. He could not recall me telling him no. Scary. Had I not been healed enough to speak up and snap him out of it, that could have been date rape. It was a huge wake-up call for him, and he got super serious about ending his addiction of looking at porn. He opened up to friends and got a community of men to hold him accountable. ProvenMen is a great place to start if you want to get off the path you’re on, or want to help others.
And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:24–25 NIV)
That’s part of what the #MeToo campaign is about. Uniting to raise awareness and cause change.
How will you respond? Will you make decisions to change yourself and help your community turn away from ‘rape culture?’ Sexual harm of any kind, whether to your brain or body, should never be the norm. Together, we can change the culture. In the words of one of my most favorite people, Mother Teresa, “Just begin.”
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Lexie Smith is a coffee connoisseur and avid dog lover living in Nashville, TN. She has a degree in Psychology from Lee University and attends The Belonging Co. Church. Lexie has been fighting sex-trafficking for 6 years, partnering with non profit organizations, to help people find redemption and live undefined by their circumstances.
Lexie blogs at www.lexiespeaks.com/blog. You can follow her on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/AdvocateLexieSmith/ or on Instagram at @_Lexie_Smith
References:
Baron, L., & Straus, M. (1984). Sexual stratification, pornography, and rape in the United States. In N. M. Malamuth & E. Donnerstein (Eds.), Pornography, sexual aggression (pp. 185209). New York: Academic Press.
Campbell, M.C., & Campbell, J.M. (2005). The Engines of World War III. Retrieved January 2011
Cline, V. (2009). “Pornography’s Effects on Adults and Children”. Retrieved January 2011 http://www.scribd.com/doc/20282510/DrVictorCline-PornographysEffectsonAdultsandChildren