Religion & Spirituality

Growing Problem: Increasing Sexual Addiction Among Christian Women

By Austin Cline, About.com GuideOctober 26, 2007

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Apparently, there is a developing problem among Christians: more and more Christian women are becoming "addicted" to pornography. I have a feeling, though, that "addicted" here actually means something like "able and confident enough to enjoy sexually explicit material in ways similar to how men have been able to for so long." Since the enjoyment of any sexually explicit material is forbidden, women now have a "problem" which needs to be "cured."

Coincidentally, the people sounding the alarm over this "problem" have the "cure" — for a price.

For twenty-two years, Kathy Gallagher has been helping women cope with their husbands’ addiction to pornography, strip clubs and prostitutes. Now she is responding to a growing number of women addicted to porn, chat rooms and online sex. “Thirty years ago,” remarks Gallagher, “you never would have thought that the woman sitting next to you in Sunday school might be viewing porn. But with the growth of the Internet, the gap between what men and women do in secret has been drastically reduced.”

Source: Religion News Service (via Pandagon)

For some reason, these Christians don't seem to be drawing an obvious conclusion: that the past differences between men and women was more cultural than inherent (biological, genetic) and, therefore, that it's absurd to think that men and women were "created" differently. That, however, would contradict the traditional Christian ideology that men and women exist for specific, divinely ordained purposes rather than for themselves, much less that they have evolved along the same path.

Just in case you might be thinking that these people are just opposed to "harmful" pornography rather than sex generally, consider their inveterate opposition to even masturbation:

I won’t take the time to explain my reasoning here, but I will briefly mention the reasons why I believe masturbation is sinful:

• Sexuality was not created for personal enjoyment but as a way to express love to one’s mate.
• Masturbation is self-centered behavior.
• Jesus expressly calls His followers to deny themselves.
• Masturbation is driven by lust and fantasy.
• Masturbation causes a person to isolate from others.
• Masturbation is controlling.
• Masturbation causes feelings of guilt and shame—clear signs of its wrongness.
• Masturbation opens the door to other sexual sin.
[emphasis added]

You're not supposed to enjoy sex, you're supposed to use it to express love for your mate — your spouse, no one else, not even yourself. Sexuality was created for a purpose; to experience or use sexuality in any other manner is sinful and contrary to "natural law." For theocrats, this means it should also be contrary to civil law. Granted, criminalizing masturbation sounds like it would be impossible, but would it be any more impossible than criminalizing sodomy?

First, though, it's important to make people fear masturbation — you can't ban things which people openly and unapologetically enjoy. So Christian leaders and institutions make people feel guilty and ashamed about masturbation by telling them how evil and dirty it is, and then they claim that feelings of guilt and shame are evidence that they are right to tell you not to masturbate in the first place. What a wonderful racket — anyone who finds a way to use this tactic to sell washing powder will make millions.

Guilt and shame, not money, are the basic currency in traditional Christianity: anything that might distract attention away from the commands of religious leaders and orient us towards our own lives, our own relationships, and our own autonomy must be closed off. The problem with sex is that the church has no role while human pleasure has every role. If you look around, you'll find that authoritarian and totalitarian governments — even non-religious ones — ban always pornography for this very reason.

You'll never find a pro-sex totalitarian regime; every one of them gets very conservative and traditionalist when it comes to sexuality. If people are allowed to explore, enjoy, and establish their own autonomous, physical relationships outside the control of traditional institutions, then the power of those institutions will necessary wane. Both authoritarian government and authoritarian religion must therefore oppose pornography, homosexuality, bisexuality, and every other aspect of sex which isn't very restrained, controlled, and conservative.

Pornography and masturbation mean fantasy, and fantasy means imagining possibilities which go beyond what you're currently experiencing in your life. No authoritarian regime can long survive if the people spend much time imagining a different and better set of future possibilities, so any context where people might be given to learn how to do this and acquire the habit must be shut down as harshly as possible — but never while admitting what the real reason is. It must always be portrayed as for their own good, never as a means for preserving the power and authority of those in charge.

It's all a question of control: how can religious and political leaders effectively maintain control over a population which can, in the privacy of their own homes, experience physical, emotional, and psychological pleasure, connection, or satisfaction at will? They can't, which is also why control over women is so vital — women are the ones who bear children and, in traditionalist communities, the ones most directly responsible for raising children.

The more control exercised over women, the more control that can be exercised over the community generally. This is why women must be taught not to work outside the home, not to have autonomous lives independent of any men — husbands, fathers, brothers — and not to presume to take on leadership roles other than those explicitly allowed by traditional authorities:

In the new book Passionate Housewives Desperate for God (The Vision Forum, October 2007), Stacy McDonald and Jennie Chancey offer a counter-cultural view of feminism. McDonald says feminism has been presented to the American culture as biblical, but she says it actually goes against scripture.

Source: One News Now (American Family News)

Perhaps it does go against scripture. Margaret Walters writes in her book Feminism: A Very Short Introduction about how tough it was for the earliest feminists in the West who were trying to argue on behalf of women's equality in an explicitly Christian context:

But any woman wanting to defend her sex had to tackle powerfully negative scriptural images of women: Delilah was treacherous, Jezebel murderous, while Eve was directly responsible for the Fall of the human race: ‘the woman tempted him and he did eat’. Saint Paul was regularly invoked against any woman who spoke out, or asked awkward questions about the Church’s attitude to women: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted to them to speak’, he instructed the Corinthians. And again, in the epistle to Timothy, ‘if they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home: for it is shame for women to speak in the church’.

Women did make some progress on the basis of religious and Christian arguments, but they made far more progress on the basis of secular arguments. Shifting the terms of debate away from what God supposedly wants to what actually makes more sense, what is more just, and what is best for the human beings involved leads us much more quickly and securely to the conclusion that women should not be held down in a second-class role.

So even if feminism is against scripture, so what? The direction that argument leads is the idea that we should preserve injustice simply because it's "biblical," but I say that if scripture supports injustice then people should jettison scripture.

Growing Problem: Increasing Sexual Addiction Among Christian Women

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