Dear Maggie:
Can we use porn?
"My wife and I went through a stage
where I found it hard to keep my
erection and my libido was waning.
She didn’t want to put me under
pressure so she stopped taking
initiative sexually. Eventually we
decided to do something about it. To
help us kick-start our libidos, we took
to looking at soft porn together before
making love. As a Christian married
couple is this wrong?"
It is really good that you have
owned the problem of your
waning sex life together, and have
wanted to inject some life into it again.
Sexual intimacy helps us feel close and
strengthens the bond of marriage.
Sex-less marriages run the risk of an
affair, can undermine self-image, or
create a lack of softness towards each
other.
I hope you have talked to your
doctor about the erectile dysfunction,
as it can be caused as a side-effect of
medication, or may be an early sign
of other important diagnoses such as
cardiovascular problems or diabetes.
The waning libido was probably a
reaction to the anxiety caused by your
erections. Erectile dysfunction can be
effectively treated with psychosexual
therapy, often with the support of oral
medication such as Sildenafil or Cialis.
Cialis can be taken in a low dose daily,
thereby keeping the spontaneity as you
do not have to anticipate when you are
going to want to make love.
Using porn brings another
complexity into an already complex
dynamic. While it can be superficially
arousing, it takes the focus off each
other and puts it onto an external
contributor. You have thereby created
an unstable triangle. It can subtly
undermine your own self-confidence
because real life is always different
to porn – which is airbrushed and a
camera creation. It is easy to make
comparisons with your own bodies
and the created images that are staged
for you. Either partner can start to
doubt whether their body is ‘good
enough’, and the curse of comparison
reduces our ability to be fully in
touch with our own bodies. There is
something intended in God’s design
of exclusivity that endorses our selfworth
and therefore our confidence
to abandon ourselves to the other.
Ironically, it is not only
your self-image
that is undermined by the porn star,
but the
porn star’s self-image is often
undermined by the harsh realities of
selling their body to you.
Porn is crafted purely for
physical stimulation; it is devoid
of relationship, intimacy or love.
This can bring a thread into your
lovemaking that separates out arousal
from intimacy, which can in the
long-term put pressure on the arousal
system, which needs supporting with
emotional tenderness. I have seen this
set in motion destructive dynamics,
ultimately creating sexual dysfunction.
Performance anxiety is a very common
pressure that is always a killer to
sexual functioning and libido.
Real lovemaking is just that: it
is about expressing your love and
passion for each other. While we
want to learn to touch each other
wonderfully, the most important
thing is to express the tenderness in
your heart for each other, and let the
touch flow as an expression of that.
Some couples cannot physically have
intercourse due to medical conditions,
but they can still ‘make love’: they
can give each other the pleasure of
sexual touch, and create physical and
emotional closeness. I believe porn
puts the wrong balance into a loving
and secure sex life.
Porn also raises a wider issue
beyond you as a couple. I believe it
degrades others to just being ‘a body’,
not a whole person with emotions
and relationships. If a person can be
treated and viewed as just a body, not
somebody’s son, daughter, mother,
or partner, then we dislocate our
conscience from who they truly are.
Evil begins whenever we start treating
people as things.
I believe your intention of wanting
to rebuild your sex life was life-giving
and to be encouraged. But there are
better ways of doing this than by
using porn.
About the author