By: Shane James O’Neill
4 min read (Explicit Content!)
Strip Club
The first time I came face-to-face with sex trafficking I was 16 and working in Philadelphia. A guy named Matt would often come into my work, flaunting money and confidence.
As an impressionable 16-year-old, I thought he was pretty cool. His uncle owned a strip club in Philadelphia and Matt was always promising to take me, saying he could get me in, even though I was underage.
One day, Matt came in flashing pictures and videos on his phone. He had been at the club the day before and some of the girls had been used to create porn. They were beautiful. It looked like any porn you would see online and viewing it you couldn’t tell the actresses were strippers.
Then Matt said, “My uncle just got in some new girls.” With a hungry look in his eyes, he continued, “They’re 16. We keep them in the back for private use.”
I wasn’t a Christian and at that point in life I lived for pleasure. But in that moment, my soul was cracked open.
They were 16!
I was 16…
These were girls I should have crushes on, asking out with anxiety, sweaty hands and a racing heart. Instead, they were kept in the back of a strip club … “for private use.”
13 years later, I still remember those images. More than that, I remember their faces.
Related: Porn is Not Victimless
Nonconsensual
That was the day I realized there is a core relationship between sex trafficking and pornography.
Most people think porn is harmless. But if someone was suffering for your pleasure, would you want to know?
Here are a few first hand accounts from porn actresses:
“When I was finished with the scene, my throat was bleeding, I had bruises all over my body, my vagina was torn in two places, and I ended up with pink eye. I felt so weak, used, and honestly I felt like I had been raped all over again.”
Another woman says,
“People in the porn industry are numb to real life and are like zombies walking around. The abuse that goes on in this industry is completely ridiculous. The way these young ladies are treated is totally sick and brainwashing.”
Legal scholar Catherine A. MacKinnon says about porn,
As with all prostitution, the women and children in pornography are, in the main, not there by choice but because of a lack of choices. They usually “consent” only in a degraded and demented sense of the word (common also to the law of rape) in which a person who despairs at stopping what is happening, sees no escape…
Porn isn’t harmless. People are used and deeply abused for the demand that our lust provides. Porn is everywhere and nearly everyone views it. But just because we get pleasure from watching it doesn’t mean the people in it are experiencing pleasure, as the testimonies above attest.
Sex trafficking and porn are bed partners, and if you’re sleeping with one then you’re sleeping with the other.
An Eternal Echo
While God is speaking in Hosea 4:6 He says, “My people are destroyed from a lack of knowledge.” He goes on to say, “because you have rejected knowledge, I also reject you as my priests; because you have ignored the law of your God.”
The priesthood of Christians is a significant role that the world desperately needs. To be a priest is simple: (1) we communicate the hope of Jesus to the world, and (2) we communicate the pain of the world back to God.
During the time Hosea was writing, the people of God weren’t just failing to communicate God to the world, they were taking part in the sin and brokenness of the world. Both aspects of their priestly role were violated. And in so many ways, that is us today.
We are drawn to porn because sex is sacred and full of pleasure. Yet, we destroy ourselves and others by consuming sex however we want. We not only fail to show the hope of a resurrected and dignified body, but we share in the darkness of the world.
But we don’t need to.
Does knowing about these women help to shame your lust? I hope so. It certainly shames mine. But we need not be trapped in our shame or our sin.
Fight to be the hope you long to see in the world. But first fight for it in your life.
Related: The Links Between Porn and Sex Trafficking
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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.