I write this particular post for three reasons: 1) I continue to believe that there is a close link between pornography and sex slavery, and slavery of all kinds; 2) Being a part of a confession group the past few years I've come to believe that confessing sins and misdeeds or mis-thoughts to others forges a path toward holy reconciliation; and, 3) Most of the people who have found my blog through google have done so by searching the relationship between pornography and sex slavery.
I want to first focus on the second reason. When someone confesses to someone other than God (though for many a confession to another person is simultaneously a confession to God, as I believe it is) they are forced to deal with the pain involved, because confessing is essentially a self-deprecating act. Especially if forgiveness is given the confessor will then be able to feel less and less as if a burden weighs them down and more and more as if new life has been granted. New life is important: if a person feels that they are tainted, then what will stop them from corrupting themselves more? The greatest obstacle to poor actions is the individual's feeling that they are somehow pure and performing the action would ruin everything. Also important to the confession is the reaction from the person/s hearing the confession: they might very well be greatly disappointed, disgusted, angry, etc., but even those emotions are motivation to be better, if nothing else other to be better than the confessor. Hopefully, hearing the confession will also enable the hearers to look into themselves to determine if they have any of the same thoughts, passions, desires, or tendencies that drove the confessor to the act, and then hopefully preemptively change their character.
It's with this last hope that I again present my personal confession regarding my relationship to pornography. A follower of the blog during the bike trip last year might well remember that I talked about pornography a good deal and, near the end of the trip, began to see similarities between myself and those who hold or use slaves. A year later my confession is less revealing but perhaps more enlightening.
Though even before the start of my trip I realized that my own use of pornography was crippling, if nothing else, a fact that only impressed itself more in my mind during the trip, it only took me a couple of months to return to using pornography. The thoughts and emotions involved in my return are what I want to deal with in this first part, and I'll return to the dire warning that pornography and sex slavery are intimately linked in the second part.
One might think that people learn their lessons. When an individual is convinced that the lesson also involves the hope and souls of other human beings, one might think that individual will learn the lesson much faster and for all-time. Indeed I am convinced that my watching pornography does not only condemn myself but also the people that I interact with on a daily basis and, obviously, the people involved in the pornography. So one might think that I would learn my lesson, especially after the specific bike trip that I embarked on. One might and would think.
Fortunately and unfortunately, we humans have been created with a massive amount of passion. Much of that passion is what the Bible might label, "earthly." I truly believe that all passion can have a positive outlet but finding that path is tricky. Whatever the case, I have been unable to permanently curb the passions in me that have found numerous negative outlets. It's almost as if the passions will exist no matter what and, the more I try to shut them off, the more they bubble up inside ready to burst out in a boiling mass of bile. So I give in, on one hand hoping that by giving in I will no longer be torn up inside and thus be a walking time-bomb, on the other hand simply wanting to give in.
Almost all of us act in the way but with different vices. How many of us thirst for a drink, or a smoke, or unleashing a torrent of complaints and insults to someone in private, or whatever else our vice might be. Some of us are good enough that a good book or an upbuilding discourse, as Soren Kierkegaard would say, are all that we need. I wish I could be the same. And some of us exhaust ourselves with work so that we cannot even think about our deemed inappropriate passions, though of course we should not then persuade ourselves that the passions are not there.
This last part, acknowledging that many of our passions are deemed inappropriate but perhaps not actually, is very important. We are human. If you believe in God, then you believe, I think, that God created us to be the way that we are. By relegating certain passions of ours to dark alleys because they are suddenly considered inappropriate is a shame. I've always thought it very funny that our youth can see hours upon hours of violent video growing up, with our encouragement (especially when the violence is dished out by Batman), but sexual images? Those are inappropriate and evil. Quite frankly I don't understand. The effect is that our sexual passions are then swept under the carpet to rot, worsen, and then seek outlets in secret. Cue prostitution (a majority of which is sex slavery) and pornography (which, I argue, leads to sex slavery and other ills).
I'm not suggesting that we as a society swing the pendulum the other way. Pendulums are always risky. In fact, I don't know what I'm suggesting. All I know is that my passions never disappeared despite my disgust with how the passions of millions of others have morphed into something cruel and terrifying and that, without having been taught or not being allowed by society to properly manage those passions, my passions then directed me to return to the thing that I now most hate about my life: pornography.
And over time this passion banished into secrecy has indeed rotted and worsened. Hopes and expectations with women have changed in a way that I despise. Pornography has only quickened the rotting process. But I would not ever want any woman that I'm with to know or indulge these worsened passions. On one hand I could argue that having a respectable woman in my life to date would eventually force the passions to dissipate, but then I might still be hiding; on the other hand I could argue that I need to purify myself of all relations with women so that I don't ever inflict more harm than I already have.
The point of writing all this, as I said earlier, is so that all my darling readers might look inside themselves and reflect. How much of me is in you? If we are all honest I think that much of the character that is in a person who uses or holds slaves is in us, and thus much of me is in you. I am disgusted with myself almost all the time and, reading this, you probably are, too. But that doesn't change the fact that perhaps you should be disgusted with yourself as well. Shame on all of us really. Or maybe I'm just the scourge of the Earth. Either way, I think I provide a good lesson to all of us as we address the issue of human trafficking: it is easy to fall victim to the passions that lead us into using and holding slaves, particularly because those passions seem fairly isolated and innocent at first. Even those of my friends who are religious and respectable, I know of no one who thinks that pornography is wrong to indulge in, though I know of many who will say that the pornography industry is wrong. That is a false distinction: indulging in pornography is not an innocent activity for any individual, no matter how secret or isolated.
Let us not focus only on pornography, however. There are a great many passions that seem innocent or even positive at first glance that we indulge and activate to only find many years down the road that we should not have. I'm not imaginative enough to think of all the passions that I'm speaking of, but I think that if we read and hear my story and then reflect, we each might be able to find what those passions are.
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