By the time the couple made it to my office, their marriage was
already chaos. She had cheated on him, he had cheated on her, and
neither seemed remorseful. The problem, as they saw it, was that the
other was not satisfying them. The problem, as I saw it, was that they
had each spent years consuming pornography. Frequently subjecting their
minds to perverse pictures had created a pattern of thinking and of
arousal. And my counselees are hardly the only ones in this predicament.
The sexual climate of our culture is dominated by the pornographic.
The way most people think about sexual expression is tainted by
lubricity. True sexual morality is seen as inane and archaic. Sex and
sexuality are governed by the immoral, and the pornographic mindset has
cornered the market on all sex. In short: we live in a Pornopoly.
This monopoly has affected everything from sex education in schools,
to clothing styles for pre-teens, to the expectations of married men and
women in their bedrooms. The porn problem is not contained to
adolescent boys and their computers in mom and dad's basement. It has
spread, like a rapacious plague, across our culture and even into the
church. Porn controls much sexual expression and sexual discussion in
our culture.
For example: porn has deeply affected the way men relate to women.
The average single man watches porn for 40 minutes, three times a week.
That's two hours a week, and 104 hours per year. The average male views
porn for the first time at age 11, which means by the time he is 30 he
will have watched almost 2,000 hours of pornography. For the average man
in a relationship it is only slightly different. A married man, or man
in a steady dating relationship, will watch porn 1.7 days a week for 20
minutes. Perhaps more alarming, 90 percent of men watch pornography.
William Struthers talks about how this prolonged exposure to porn
affects relationships. In his book Wired for Intimacy, he writes: Continue at Dave Dunham
