Study: Pornography hurts Couples and Relationships

There are certain givens in life, things we take for granted because they’re so obvious. In cultural terms, one of them is that pornography is a plague, a moral disease contributing with increasing tenacity to the erosion of our country. It’s destructive to the thousands participating in it and to the millions who view it. It can devastate marriages and destroy families. It devastates God’s vision for human sexuality and debases everyone involved in it.

FRC has been saying this for years. Several years ago, our distinguished social scientist Dr. Pat Fagan published extensive research showing that pornography is “a major threat to marriage, to family, to children and to individual happiness. In undermining marriage it is one of the factors in undermining social stability.”

And our friends at Morality in Media (MIM) regularly documents how pornography, like a cancer, is spreading throughout our society and that Christians must work actively to curtail it (FRC is a long-time member of MIM’s “Porn Harms” coalition, “the leading national organization opposing pornography and indecency through public education and the application of the law”).

So, in one sense, the case has been made. But that case recently has been made all the stronger by research done by a group of respected secular researchers at New York University, the University of Arkansas, Virginia Commonwealth and James Madison Universities who have published a major new study showing that “the more pornography a man watches, the more likely he was to use it during sex, request particular pornographic sex acts of his partner, deliberately conjure images of pornography during sex to maintain arousal, and have concerns over his own sexual performance and body image. Further, higher pornography use was negatively associated with enjoying sexually intimate behaviors with a partner.”

Put a bit more simply, pornography causes men to objectify their sexual partners and use them to re-enact often bizarre sexual behavior derived from pornography. It removes love and respect from sex and reduces sexual intimacy to impersonal re-plays of sexual conduct for sheer physical gratification.

What can Christians do? Ministries like Covenant Eyes and Pink Elephant Resources offer effective resources to help those addicted to or tempted by pornography to fight against it, and the Porn Harms Coalition works actively to show how evil pornography is and to demand government enforce laws already on the books against it. We can pray for and counsel those we know fighting this battle. As the testimonies of many former porn addicts and performers indicate, it’s a battle that, with Christ’s enabling power and the love and accountability of caring friends, can be won.

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