This week’s TIME magazine features a cover story on a new initiative against Internet pornography. These anti-porn activists, though, aren’t the caricatured pursed-lip moralists. They are instead young men who say that pornography has compromised their ability to function sexually in real life.
The cover struck a chord with me because I’ve seen a similar situation show up many times with couples seated in front of me for pastoral counseling. In a typical version of this scenario, a young married couple seeks help because they’ve stopped (or in some cases never started) having sex. In this typical scenario, the husband is the one who cannot maintain interest in sex. When one asks the right questions one finds that he’s been deeply immersed in pornography since adolescence. It’s not, in these situations, that he can’t get the mechanics of sex to work. It’s that he finds intimacy with a real-life woman to be, in the word that emerges repeatedly, “awkward.” Many of these men can only have sex with their wives by replaying scenes from pornography in their heads as they do so.
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