I am annoyed by the ways that evangelical Christians talk about porn.

It’s incorrect, it places blame on things that are not actually the problem, it leads to disempowerment, it’s a distraction from real deeper issues, and in some cases it feeds right into the hands of grifters. And so I’m going to write a series on it.

Some topics I’ll probably cover:

• Every problem that Christians have with porn is actually a deeper problem with something else.

• Porn is a scapegoat. (It’s not inherently evil or addictive.)

• Porn addiction is not real and anyone who says so is either misled or a grifter trying to sell you something.

• I’d rather have a guy lust over me in his heart than bounce his eyes.

• The way to deal with porn is teach people how to be emotionally mature.

• Women betrayed by their husband’s porn use experience real betrayal, but that comes from a breach of social contract, not some problem inherent with porn.

• What makes porn ethical or unethical? (I don’t have answers but I have more questions.)

This series is aimed specifically at people with a Christian evangelical or fundamentalist background, people who grew up in the world of I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Fireproof, and Covenant Eyes. People who often heard from the pulpit or in Bible studies about the evils of porn and people’s (men’s) struggles with porn addiction.

It’s from the perspective of someone who grew up in that world, and has deconstructed purity culture. I’m still a Christian, but I wouldn’t call myself evangelical any more, and I hold a lot of views that are considered more progressive (as I think the title of this post reveals). I’m demisexual, which means that I don’t experience sexual attraction unless I have formed an emotional connection with someone—this means that a lot of conventional wisdom about sexual attraction and temptation just doesn’t super apply to me. I also have nerdy hyperfixation on sex as a subject and topic of research. I do not have any professional or academic qualifications in this area, I am just a blogger with Opinions.

My measuring stick for whether something is ethical or moral is not “is it biblical?” but rather, “is it Christlike?” Does it lead to greater human flourishing? Does it show the fruits of the Spirit? Heck, does a theology work? For this reason you probably won’t see a lot of Bible verses. I love the Bible, but I think it needs to be read in context, and my ideas are shaped by the whole sweep of the Bible, not specific verses.

Oh and for the sake of this series when I say “porn” I mean sexually explicit media (photos, videos, GIFs, films, artwork, comics, etc) made or shared for the purpose of arousing people. I think audio could also fall into my definition of porn, but I am mostly concerned with visual media, since this is what evangelicals focus on.

I’d love for this series to maybe help people be a bit more chill about porn, and a lot more energised about developing emotional maturity and fixing problems like misogyny, exploitation, and fearfulness. No promises about the regularity of articles being published though. Stay tuned, and we’ll see where this goes!

As you may have gathered so far, I have some issues with the things Leslie Ludy teaches. Prepare yourself, because this blog is going into details over the next few weeks.

I loved Leslie’s books as a teen. I was super passionate about loving God and serving Him with all my being and actions. Leslie showed me practical ways to do that. I loved her passion for Jesus, for purity, for living a set-apart life. And I wanted to do that too. I had read a lot of books about Christian femininity by other authors, but they were from the Christian Patriarchy movement, and seemed a bit too extreme or old-fashioned to be realistic. Leslie, on the other hand, was more in touch with the real world. And yet she wasn’t part of the world. In it but not of it. She was my prime example of what godly femininity could look like.

I prayed for a Christ-built warrior poet. I dressed modestly and watched how much of my heart I shared, to avoid causing my brothers in Christ to stumble. I surrendered my life to God and stayed far away from  profanity and entertainment. I spent more time praying and reading the Bible. I pored over the latest gorgeously-designed Set Apart Girl magazines, and devoted myself to the lonely but oh-so-worthwhile life of devotion to God. I traded my fantasy novels for missionary biographies, and avoided any music that wasn’t Christ-honouring. I did my best to live the life that Leslie promoted.

And I felt stressed and guilty all the time.

Which leads me to my Big Question: How did something that seems so Christ-focused bring so much anxiety, stress and heaviness into my life?

What Leslie preaches is supposed to be all about centering our life around Christ. It’s about how to make him Lord of our lives, to live with vision and hope and deep satisfaction. And yet, all I experienced was pain and frustration. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough. . . But I think if I’d tried any harder I would have killed myself. I burnt out.

Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” And “A good tree produces good fruit”. Paul said “Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom”. I didn’t experience that from Leslie’s writings. In the last few days I’ve come across a couple other people who had similar experiences, so I know it’s not just me.

That’s why I’m reading her books again–to find out why something that would appear to bring life actually brought death to me.

Leslie Ludy has written a host of books for young women. Young, Christian women who are presumably single. I own four:

Answering the Guy Questions
Authentic Beauty
Sacred Singleness
When Dreams Come True (co-written with her husband Eric)

I’ve read a bunch of her other books, though it’s been a while.

When God Writes Your Love Story (again, written with Eric)
Set-Apart Femininity
The Lost Art of True Beauty

Leslie also has an online magazine called Set-Apart Girl, and a blog devoted to topics of interest for young, single Christian women.

Last week I was re-reading When Dreams Come True, which is an autobiography of the Ludy’s love story. Eric and Leslie alternate telling their story in different chapters. This time, something hit me that I had never realized before.

Leslie was never a single young woman.

She met Eric when she was around 16, and they began dating (or courting or whatever you want to call it) a few months before her 17th birthday. She got engaged at age 18, and married at 19. When Leslie was still single, she was a girl.

I find it very strange that a woman who has had no adult experience as a single person is writing so many popular evangelical books for young single women. It’s just as strange as a 21-year-old single, Joshua Harris, writing the top-selling Christian book on dating and relationships.

Now, I do realize that there are basic principles of life than can apply regardless of your age or marital status. However, I believe that when you’ve lived something, you have more wisdom and weightier advice to bring to a situation. This is why I’m not telling my friends how to raise their kids; I haven’t had kids, so I don’t really know what I’m talking about.

I wish Christian publishers would stop publishing books by under-qualified authors. It’s not healthy or helpful for us. And the damage is worse when the audience is young impressionable people who haven’t yet developed wisdom or discernment.

It’s going to be interesting re-reading other books by Leslie, having realized that she never was part of her target audience.

 

 

A couple days ago I decided to go through Leslie Ludy’s Answering the Guy Questions. I’ve read it a few times, but not since I kissed legalism goodbye. I’ve been going through it and taking notes about how the ideas affected me as a teen, and what I notice now as an adult. It’s been educational. And I’m only partway through chapter one.

Leslie begins the book by describing “Counterfeit Manhood”. She talks about the dismal state of modern masculinity, which I find especially interesting in light of the current discussion about toxic masculinity.

She starts the book with a discussion of her seventh grade experience. “Boys were loud and obnoxious, insensitive and crude.” She then goes on to talk about guys who “treated  every girl like a piece of meat to either lustfully consume or carelessly discard.” Her high school experience was even worse. Most of the guys she knew actively viewed pornography. Her youth pastor constantly asked the girls if they had boyfriends, and flirted with the attractive girls. She constantly overheard guys lustfully describe girls’ bodies, and when she finally called a guy out on it, he told her that’s just the way guys are.

All of this is utterly foreign to my high school experience. I was home schooled and the guys that I interacted with were decent people who respected the girls and women in their life. Some were obnoxious, selfish and arrogant, but they never treated women like meat.

What Leslie talks about is far removed from what I know. “Like most girls my age, I reasoned that being treated like a sex object was better than being disregarded by guys and spending the rest of my life alone. So I began catering to the masculine perversion all around me by dressing seductively to gain male approval, laughing carelessly when guys touched or grabbed me sexually in the school halls, and giving away my heart, emotions and almost all of my physical purity to one casual, meaningless fling after another. Like most other girls my age, giving in to the dismal state of modern masculinity left me heartbroken, wounded and plagued with debilitating insecurity.”

I was horrified when I read that. And then something clicked in my mind. This isn’t a description of modern masculinity. This is a description of sexual harassment and toxic masculinity.

Just to be sure I did a quick google search. I ended up at the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s page about identifying sexual harassment . Certain points fit Leslie’s story all too well.

• invading personal space
• unnecessary physical contact, including unwanted touching, etc.
• derogatory language and/or comments toward women (or men, depending on the circumstances), sex-specific derogatory names
• gender-related comment about a person’s physical characteristics or mannerisms
• displaying or circulating pornography, sexual pictures or cartoons, sexually explicit graffiti, or other sexual images (including online)
• sexual jokes, including circulating written sexual jokes (e.g. by e-mail)
• bragging about sexual prowess
• questions or discussions about sexual activities
• requiring an employee to dress in a sexualized or gender-specific way (ok, she wasn’t required to dress a certain way by an employer, but there was definitely a cultural pressure to “dress seductively”)

I’m horrified and sad that her school was like this. Yes, I’m probably naive, because people will say that’s just what high school is like. But that’s not what it should be like.

What disturbs me most about this chapter is that Leslie calls all this “modern masculinity” and “counterfeit manhood”. She perpetuates the lie that nearly all guys, and especially non-Christian guys, are like this. She takes the blame for not standing up and having high morals, and not encouraging guys to do better. She doesn’t call out sexual harassment for what it is: An unhealthy and unacceptable way for guys to interact with women, regardless of whether the’re Christian.

Thankfully in college I never experienced what she described. If I had, I probably would have believed that unwanted touching or sexual comments were my fault for interacting with a non-Christian guy. Because after all, what else would I expect from a modern man?

This leads to greater problems later in the book. One premise of Answering the Guy Questions is that we can inspire men to valiant manhood by being princesses of purity. We can make guys behave better by following God’s Plan™ for femininity. Thus the responsibility for men to change is put on women’s shoulders. Which is ridiculous. We can’t manipulate guys into changing their hearts.

What we can do is call unacceptable behaviour by its true name. Let’s not pretend that leering, catcalling, unwanted advances and inappropriate touching is just “the way modern guys are”. No. It’s sexual harassment, and it’s wrong.

 

 

Before You Meet Prince Charming by Sarah Mally

So Much More by Anna-Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin

Sacred Singleness by Leslie Ludy

I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris

Set Apart Girl by Leslie Ludy

Authentic Beauty by Leslie Ludy

Answering the Guy Questions by Leslie Ludy

When Dreams Come True by Eric and Leslie Ludy

It’s (Not That) Complicated by Anna-Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin

Making Brothers and Sisters Best Friends by Sarah, Stephen and Grace Mally

Boy Meets Girl by Joshua Harris

Extreme Romance by Jesse and Heidi Jost

Leave Dating Behind by Christina Rogers

Bright Lights curriculum by Sarah Mally

Emotional Purity by Heather Paulson

This list (and a few random others that I’ve probably forgotten) are what I like to call Those Books. I read them multiple times as a teen. The first few books on the list I read over and over and over again. They were my anchor, my lifeline, my window into the world of guys and relationships and romance.

The ideas in them thoroughly messed up my thinking. They did NOT lead to healthy relationships with myself, with God, with boys, and even my girl friends. Three years after realizing most of them were built on fear and legalism, and I still find so many warped viewpoints that I have to deconstruct. Even today I was talking with a friend about a belief I held in one of my relationships. She replied, “That’s not true!”, and I realized Those Books were speaking again. Oh well. I have fun punching the lies in the face (with God and my friends’ help).

Part of me is haunted by this list. What if I had read pro-dating books and books from different points of view as a teen? Would I be in this mess?

(Probably yes, because would I have listened to those other ideas as a teen? I’ll never know.)

But the point is I can read different viewpoints NOW. I do. And I shall.

And I’m having fun picking apart the unhealthy bits in Those Books.