Validation of Manhood Without Requiring Strength
When talking with men about their struggles with porn, I often ask what seems like a random question. Where in your life do you typically feel the strongest and manliest?
Most of the time this stumps them because they don’t have a category in their minds for thinking about their strength and masculinity. But then, almost to a man, they relate to feeling strong at work, playing sports, doing ministry, or engaging in some other hobby.
In more than twenty years of counseling, however, I’ve never heard a man initially respond by saying that he felt the manliest and strongest in relation to his wife, fiancée, or girlfriend.
Most men don’t feel terribly strong or adequate in the presence of a real, live woman—whether they’re the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a decorated war hero, or a seasoned pastor. And yet, God designed our masculine souls to be energized by offering ourselves on behalf of our female counterparts.
Enter porn, which allows us to have our cake (“I feel strong and masculine”) and eat it too (no strength or masculinity required). “What makes pornography so addictive,” wrote John Eldredge, “is that more than anything else in a man’s life, it makes him feel like a man without ever requiring a thing of him.”
The allure of porn is that— contrary to a woman in real life—it makes us feel like men, and it never rolls its eyes at us or rolls over in bed.
Porn never reminds us of our failures, flaws, or shortcomings.
Porn doesn’t evaluate our appearance or performance, our net worth or credentials.
Porn doesn’t tell us to clip our toenails or put the toilet seat down. Porn doesn’t care if we are sullen, irritable, overweight, selfish—even undesirable.
Porn’s only requirement of a man is a pulse—and maybe the click of a mouse.
Struggles with porn confirm our suspicions that we do not have what it takes to be a man. Somewhere deep inside we believe that we lack the strength to relate to a real woman.
As Robert Jensen wrote, porn beckons us with a promise: “What brings us back, over and over, is the voice in our ears, the soft voice that says, ‘It’s okay, you really are a man, you really can be a man, and if you come into my world, it will all be there, and it will all be easy.’ . . . Pornography knows men’s weakness. It speaks to that weakness, softly. . . . But for most men, it starts with the soft voice that speaks to our deepest fear: That we aren’t man enough.”
So in the absence of felt strength, we turn to porn as if it were steroids for our soul. In our minds, porn makes us bigger, stronger, and more desirable. We get our fix and affirm our manhood. The seductive images reliably tell us that we are the man. But as we do with real steroids, we risk porn’s damaging side effects and possible public disgrace. Without this drug, we become just another guy and wonder if we make the cut. C. S. Lewis understood this when he wrote that every time a man masturbates, he chips away at his manhood.
[bctt tweet=”In the absence of felt strength, we turn to porn as if it were steroids for our soul.”]
Porn gives us permission to avoid asking the hard questions about our masculine souls. Why do I feel weak in the presence of a particular woman? Why is so much at stake when I relate to her? Why do I feel Ihave so little to offer?
But when we scrape together the courage to face these questions, we discover life-changing truths about ourselves that can set us free. Truths that will lead us to something better than porn.
In part three of this seven part series I will discuss how porn promises sexual fulfillment without relationship.
Question: In what way do you see porn as a substitute for true masculine strength?
Adapted from Surfing for God: Discovering the Divine Desire Beneath Sexual Struggle, Michael John Cusick, p. 16-24, Thomas Nelson (2012)