R. Albert Mohler Jr.'s Blog, page 394

How Pornography Works: It Hijacks the Male Brain

We are fast becoming a pornographic society. Over the course of the last decade, explicitly sexual images have crept into advertising, marketing, and virtually every niche of American life. This ambient pornography is now almost everywhere, from the local shopping mall to prime-time television.

By some estimations, the production and sale of explicit pornography now represents the seventh-largest industry in America. New videos and internet pages are produced each week, with the digital revolution bringing a host of new delivery systems. Every new digital platform becomes a marketing opportunity for the pornography industry.

To no one’s surprise, the vast majority of those who consume pornography are males. It is no trade secret that males are highly stimulated by visual images, whether still or video. That is not a new development, as ancient forms of pornography attest. What is new is all about access. Today’s men and boys are not looking at line pictures drawn on cave walls. They have almost instant access to countless forms of pornography in a myriad of formats.

But, even as technology has brought new avenues for the transmission of pornography, modern research also brings a new understanding of how pornography works in the male brain. While this research does nothing to reduce the moral culpability of males who consume pornography, it does help to explain how the habit becomes so addictive.

As William M. Struthers of Wheaton College explains, “Men seem to be wired in such a way that pornography hijacks the proper functioning of their brains and has a long-lasting effect on their thoughts and lives.”

Struthers is a psychologist with a background in neuroscience and a teaching concentration in the biological bases of human behavior. In Wired for Intimacy: How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain, Struthers presents key insights from neuroscience that go a long way toward explaining why pornography is such a temptation for the male mind.

“The simplest explanation for why men view pornography (or solicit prostitutes) is that they are driven to seek out sexual intimacy,” he explains. The urge for sexual intimacy is God-given and essential to the male, he acknowledges, but it is easily misdirected. Men are tempted to seek “a shortcut to sexual pleasure via pornography,” and now find this shortcut easily accessed.

In a fallen world, pornography becomes more than a distraction and a distortion of God’s intention for human sexuality. It comes as an addictive poison.

Struthers explains:

Viewing pornography is not an emotionally or physiologically neutral experience. It is fundamentally different from looking at black and white photos of the Lincoln Memorial or taking in a color map of the provinces of Canada. Men are reflexively drawn to the content of pornographic material. As such, pornography has wide-reaching effects to energize a man toward intimacy. It is not a neutral stimulus. It draws us in. Porn is vicarious and voyeuristic at its core, but it is also something more. Porn is a whispered promise. It promises more sex, better sex, endless sex, sex on demand, more intense orgasms, experiences of transcendence.

Pornography “acts as a polydrug,” Struthers explains. As Dr. Patrick Carnes asserts, pornography is “a pathological relationship with a mood-altering experience.” Boredom and curiosity lead many boys and men into experiences that become more like drug addiction than is often admitted.

Why men rather than women? As Struthers explains, the male and female brains are wired differently. “A man’s brain is a sexual mosaic influenced by hormone levels in the womb and in puberty and molded by his psychological experience.” Over time, exposure to pornography takes a man or boy deeper along “a one-way neurological superhighway where a man’s mental life is over-sexualized and narrowed. This superhighway has countless on-ramps but very few off-ramps.

Pornography is “visually magnetic” to the male brain. Struthers presents a fascinating review of the neurobiology involved, with pleasure hormones becoming linked to and released by the experience of a male viewing pornographic images. These experiences with pornography and pleasure hormones create new patterns in the brain’s wiring, and repeated experiences formalize the rewiring.

And then, enough is never enough. “If I take the same dose of a drug over and over and my body begins to tolerate it, I will need to take a higher dose of the drug in order for it to have the same effect that it did with a lower dose the first time,” Struthers reminds us. So, the experience of viewing pornography and acting out on it creates a demand in the brain for more and more, just to achieve the same level of pleasure in the brain.

While men are stimulated by the ambient sexual images around them, explicit pornography increases the effect. Struthers compares this to the difference between traditional television and the new high definition technologies. Everything is more clear, more explicit, and more stimulating.

Struthers explains this with compelling force:

Something about pornography pulls and pushes at the male soul. The pull is easy to identify. The naked female form can be hypnotizing. A woman’s willingness to participate in a sexual act or expose her nakedness is alluring to men. The awareness of one’s own sexuality, the longing to know, to experience something as good wells up from deep within. An image begins to pick up steam the longer we look upon it. It gains momentum and can reach a point where it feels like a tractor-trailer rolling downhill with no brakes.

Wired for Intimacy is a timely and important book. Struthers offers keen and strategic insights from neurobiology and psychology. But what makes this book truly helpful is the fact that Struthers neither leaves his argument to neuroscience, nor does he use the category of addiction to mitigate the sinfulness of viewing pornography.

Sinners naturally look for fig leaves to hide sin, and biological causation is often cited as a means of avoiding moral responsibility. Struthers does not allow this, and his view of pornography is both biblical and theologically grounded. He lays responsibility for the sin of viewing pornography at the feet of those who willingly consume explicit images. He knows his audience—after all, his classrooms are filled with young male college students. The addict is responsible for his addiction.

At the same time, any understanding of how sin works its deceitful evil is a help to us, and understanding how pornography works in the male mind is a powerful knowledge. Pornography is a sin that robs God of his glory in the gift of sex and sexuality. We have long known that sin takes hostages. We now know another dimension of how this particular sin hijacks the male brain. Knowledge, as they say, is power.

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

This article was originally published on February 1, 2010. I interviewed Dr. Struthers on the January 11, 2010 edition of The Albert Mohler Program. Listen here.

The Briefing 10-08-13

1. New York Times Editors give their opinion on how Supreme Court should rule

The Supreme Court Returns, New York Times (Editorial Board)

2. Originalism, Textualism, and Theology in Scalia’s historic interview 

In Conversation With Antonin Scalia, New York Magazine

3. California Governor signs law allowing more than two parents

Jerry Brown signs California bill allowing more than two parents

4. Final decision for Azusa Pacific University professor comes down amid student protests

Azusa Pacific University Students Rally Behind Embattled Transgender Professor, NBC (William Avila and Ted Chen)

5. Transgender student at California Baptist University calls expulsion “extreme”

Student Expelled from California Baptist University for being transgender, The Advocate (Sunnivie Brydum)

Can Liberal Christianity Be Reinvented? – A Conversation With Theologian Theo Hobson

A pink reformation, The Guardian (Theo Hobson)

The Briefing 10-07-13

1) Supreme Court could take on seismic cultural issues this season

Supreme Court term begins with contentious topics, Associated Press (Mark Sherman)

The question facing Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Stay or go?, Washington Post (Nikki Kahn)

2) Rift over abortion at Catholic School instructive for Evangelicals

Abortion Vote Exposes Rift at a Catholic University, New York Times (Ian Lovett)

3) Dating at 11 years-old is dangerous. Did we need an academic study to tell us?

The Data on Teen Dating, Wall Street Journal (Ann Lukits)

4) New York begins campaign counteracting dangerous and unrealistic fashion advertising

City Unveils Campaign to Improve Girls’ Self-Esteem, New York Times (Anemona Hartocollis)

 

 

 

 

The Briefing 10-04-13

1. Tragedy in DC and resulting social media/cable news frenzy

Woman slain after car chase from White House to Capitol, USA Today (Kevin Johnson, Donna Leinwand, Doug Stanglin)

Shots fired at Capitol after chase from White House, Washington Post (Ed O’Keefe, Peter Hermann and David A. Fahrenthold)

2. Politicians attempt compromise with an eye to re-election 

Government shutdown: Obama cancels Asia trip, standoff continues, CNN (Tom Cohen, Deirdre Walsh and Ed Payne)

3. Wendy Davis uses abortion filibuster fame as springboard for Texas governor run 

Wendy Davis announces run for Texas governor, Washington Post (Sean Sullivan)

4. Lawyer who won national case banning school prayer dies at age 88

Leonard Kerpelman, Who led School Prayer Case, Dies at 88, New York Times (John Schwartz)

5. Charter of Quebec Values overreaches into religious liberty

Former Quebec premier Jacques Parizeau chides PQ for overreaching with values charter, Ottawa Citizen (PostMedia News)

6. Bishop warns against gambling, then calls it a morally neutral act

As Casino Vote Nears, Bishops Warn of Social Risks, New York Times (Jesse McKinley)

Two Is Better Than One—Who Knew?

For some time now, scholars like W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia and Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute have been telling us that marriage is becoming an upper class phenomenon. More accurately, they have been pointing to the fact that lower-income Americans have been progressively abandoning marriage for the last two decades.

Now, along comes Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic, making many of the same points. Thompson points to an analysis of census data that reveals the vast economic consequences of this abandonment. Put bluntly, the failure to marry dramatically increases the likelihood of poverty and continued economic retreat.

According to this new data, the average American family with married parents and at least one child under age 18 living in the same home earned $81,000 last year. Interestingly, almost all of the actual growth in this average family’s income in recent years has come from the wife working. Thompson directs our attention to this fact in order to make his larger point: our marriage crisis is making income inequality worse. Those who are getting married and staying married are, on average, moving ahead in the economy. In contrast, those who are not married are falling behind—fast. Add to this the fact that when people marry, they tend to marry someone who shares the same work ethic. The strong get stronger and the weak get weaker.

As Thompson puts it: “In a strange twist, marriage has recently become a capstone for the privileged class. The decline of marriage, to the extent that we’re seeing it, is happening almost exclusively among the poor.”

Unrelated evidence for the importance of marriage comes from The Journal of Clinical Oncology. Researchers have documented the fact that on average married cancer patients live longer than unmarried patients. As Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times explains, “Married cancer patients live longer than single people who have the disease, suggesting that logistical and emotional support from a loved one may be far more critical to cancer care than previously recognized.”

You will not be surprised to know that unmarried men are at greatest risk. Wives make a huge difference in the health habits of their husbands, right down to making sure that doctor’s appointments are made and medicines are taken. Nevertheless, married women also survive longer than unmarried women with the same disease. Even husbands really help. Single patients are far more vulnerable.

All this is testimony to the power of marriage, and to the fact that marriage is one of the greatest gifts God has given his human creatures.

Interestingly, Derek Thompson ends his article with these words: “This is the marriage crisis behind our inequality crisis. It is not complicated. It requires no regressions. It is the simplest math equation in the world. It says: Two is more than one.”

Really?

I think we know where that equation began: “Then the Lord God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’” (Gen 2:18 ESV).

Or, as a modern paraphrase of that text might read: “Two is more than one.”

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

Derek Thompson, “How America’s Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse,” The Atlantic, Tuesday, October 1, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/a...

Tara Parker-Pope, “Marriage May Aid in Longevity,” The New York Times, Tuesday, October 1, 2013. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09...

Ayal A. Aizer, et. al., “Marital Status and Survival in Patients with Cancer,” The Journal of Clinical Oncology, JCO.2013.49.6489, Monday, September 23, 2013. http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early...

Two is Better Than One — Who Knew?

For some time now, scholars like W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia and Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute have been telling us that marriage is becoming an upper class phenomenon. More accurately, they have been pointing to the fact that lower-income Americans have been progressively abandoning marriage for the last two decades.

Now, along comes Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic, making many of the same points. Thompson points to an analysis of census data that reveals the vast economic consequences of this abandonment. Put bluntly, the failure to marry dramatically increases the likelihood of poverty and continued economic retreat. According to this new data, the average American family with married parents and at least one child under age 18 living in the same home earned $81,000 last year.

Interestingly, almost all of the actual growth in this average family’s income in recent years has come from the wife working. Thompson directs our attention to this fact in order to make his larger point — that our marriage crisis is making income inequality worse. Those who are getting married and staying married are, on average, moving ahead in the economy. In contrast, those who are not married are falling behind — fast. Add to this the fact that when people marry, they tend to marry someone who shares the same work ethic. The strong get stronger and the weak get weaker.

As Thompson puts it: “In an strange twist, marriage has recently become a capstone for the privileged class. The decline of marriage, to the extent that we’re seeing it, is happening almost exclusively among the poor.”

Unrelated evidence for the importance of marriage comes from The Journal of Clinical Oncology. Researchers have documented the fact that married cancer patients live longer, on average, than unmarried patients. As Tara Parker-Pope of The New York Times explains, “Married cancer patients live longer than single people who have the disease, suggesting that logistical and emotional support from a loved one may be far more critical to cancer care than previously recognized.”

You will not be surprised to know that unmarried men are at greatest risk. Wives make a huge difference in the health habits of their husbands, right down to making sure that doctor’s appointments are made and medicines are taken. Nevertheless, married women also survive longer than unmarried women with the same disease. Even husbands really help. Single patients are far more vulnerable.

All this is testimony to the power of marriage, and to the fact that marriage is one of the greatest gifts God has given his human creatures.

Interestingly, Derek Thompson ends his article with these words: “This is the marriage crisis behind our inequality crisis. It is not complicated. It requires no regressions. It is the simplest math equation in the world. It says: Two is more than one.”

Really?

I think we know where that equation began: “Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” [Genesis 2:18, English Standard Version]

Or, as a modern paraphrase of that text might read: “Two is more than one.”

I am always glad to hear from readers. Write me at mail@albertmohler.com. Follow regular updates on Twitter at www.twitter.com/AlbertMohler.

Derek Thompson, “How America’s Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse,” The Atlantic, Tuesday, October 1, 2013. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/a...

Tara Parker-Pope, “Marriage May Aid in Longevity,” The New York Times, Tuesday, October 1, 2013. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09...

Ayal A. Aizer, et. al., “Marital Status and Survival in Patients with Cancer,” The Journal of Clinical Oncology, JCO.2013.49.6489, Monday, September 23, 2013. http://jco.ascopubs.org/content/early...

 

The Indispensable Evangelical: Carl F. H. Henry and Evangelical Ambition in the Twentieth Century

I was very pleased to address the Carl F. H. Henry at 100: A Centennial Celebration conference at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary last week. The event was both scholarly and deeply appreciative of Carl Henry and his legacy. In my address, “The Essential Evangelical: Carl F. H. Henry and Evangelical Ambition in the Twentieth Century,” I did my best to speak to Henry’s strategic role in the creation of the evangelical movement in America. I also sought to learn from Henry and his generation of evangelical leaders as we consider what ambitions evangelicals should serve today.

 

The Briefing 10-03-13

1. The Government Shutdown just a show of political theater?

Our Democracy Is at Stake, New York Times (Thomas Friedman)

What happens if they shut down the government and no one cares?, National Post of Canada (Jesse Kline)

2. Euthanasia:

Belgian killed by euthanasia after a botched sex change operation, The Telegraph (Bruno Waterfield)

3. Secularism explodes among American Jewish community

Poll Shows Major Shift in Identity of U.S. Jews, New York Times (Laurie Goodstein)

4. Moms really do have a nose for that baby smell. 

New baby smell: For moms, it’s delicious, USA Today (Kim Painter)

The Briefing 10-02-13

1) Politics important but not ultimate: 3 sobering realities about the government shutdown

House G.O.P. Stands Firm on Shutdown, but Dissent Grows, New York Times (Jeremy Peters)

Defiant Obama blames government shutdown on GOP ‘ideological crusade’, Washington Post (Lori Montgomery, Paul Kane and Debbi Wilgoren)

Government shutdown: What’s the cost?, CBS News (Rebecca Kaplan)

2) Health insurance vs. health care: Why Obamacare doesn’t solve the problem

Obamacare 101: What You Need to Know, CNN (Jen Christensen)

Young and Healthy Needed to Make Obamacare Work, CNN (Jen Christensen)

Health Exchanges Open for Business, Wall Street Journal (Christopher Weaver and Timothy W. Martin)

Muted Rollout for Much Changed Health Care Law, Wall Street Journal (Louise Radnofsky)

3) Study reveals married couples live longer and healthier lives

Married Cancer Patients Live Longer, New York Times (Tara Parker-Pope)

4) Marriage inequality crisis: Has marriage become a capstone for the privileged class? 

How America’s Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse, The Atlantic (Derek Thompson)

Coming Apart – America’s Moral Divide: A Conversation with Charles Murray, Thinking in Public