Why it’s Not Surprising Over 50% of American Christian Men Watch Porn

by Coleen Singer at Sssh.com Porn For Women

A new ‘study’ (read: survey) reports that over 50% of Christian men in America admit to watching pornography. Among people who have never met an honest man, evidently, this factoid is comes as a major surprise. How can it be that so many Christians are watching porn, they ask?

I’m tempted to boil my ‘analysis’ here down to three words: Because they’re MEN.

Since it’s not really true that all men watch porn (although one Canadian researcher reported great difficulty in finding men who don’t), I’ll go a bit beyond those three words.

First, let’s just acknowledge up front that many American Christian men routinely do things that are prohibited somewhere in the Bible, like eating pork (see Leviticus 11:7-8 and Deuteronomy 14:8) or touching their wives while said wives are on their period (Leviticus 15:19-33). 

So, even if Christian men are prohibited from watching porn by some scriptural tenet of their faith (having to do with the nakedness of the porn stars involved “belonging” to someone else, presumably), we shouldn’t be shocked that many of them ignore the proscription; it’s a rule that’s in good company in terms of being summarily ignored by the flock at large, after all.

I’m a lot more forgiving of such “hypocrisy” than are a lot of my fellow atheists. For one thing, I’d find Christians a lot more problematic to live around if they insisted on following every rule in the Bible. What if I were outside doing yard work on a Sunday and some fundamentalist neighbor decided that it was incumbent upon him to fulfill the part of Exodus 31 which holds that “whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death”? (Somehow I don’t think being a “she” would get me off the hook on that one….)

As the right Reverend Lovejoy of The Simpsons fame once observed while holding aloft a copy of the Good Book: “Just about everything is a sin. Y’ever sit down and read this thing? Technically, we’re not supposed to go to the bathroom.” 

Given the broad swath of its rules, and how many of them seem irrelevant to the modern world, I don’t necessarily think of it as hypocrisy to selectively follow the Bible’s rules; I think it’s more akin to pragmatism.

I’m less forgiving of people, however, who are publicly anti-porn but who jerk it nightly like a crazed spider monkey to Internet porn. I strongly suspect that the porn consumption rate among Morality in Media members, for example, is somewhere well above 0%, so I don’t doubt there are some true hypocrites out there among these Christian porn consumers.

So, how do the folks who watch porn despite being “against” it account for their porn-watching ways? Why, they’re “addicted,” of course! They aren’t hypocrites, they’re victims – victims of that evil spawn of Satan known as the Porn Industry, naturally.

Buried near the bottom of the Washington Times article about the results of the study is an important point, however, one that seems to have escaped the notice of just about every media outlet and pundit in America that has commented on porn in the last 15 years: there’s no such thing as porn addiction, at least from the perspective of the bulk of the medical and scientific communities.

As Joshua Grubbs of Case Western University puts it in the article: “It’s not a diagnosis that’s recognized…. I know there are some people who believe it’s a diagnosis, but it’s not recognized by the community at large.”

The niggling little detail of porn addiction’s lack of existence won’t cause one second of pause among self-proclaimed “porn addicts”, though – especially those who claim to be against augmenting their wanking with the use of the visual aid of pornography, even as they do so on the reg. For that matter, some of those same people, if asked, will tell you masturbation itself is a sin. If you’re looking for insight on why people watch porn, talking about it with someone that self-deluded is probably not going to be a fruitful endeavor.

No, the “addicts” will continue to cast blame outward – because they sure as hell can’t internalize the truth: they like porn, and whatever the Bible says about it can sure as hell wait until they are done rubbing one out, one last time. 

Call it, perhaps, the American Christian male’s version of “shoot first, ask questions later.”

About Coleen Singer:
Coleen Singer is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen), where she often waxes eloquent about Female Friendly Porn, sex, pleasure products, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. She is also the editor and curator of EroticScribes.com. When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.

Visit Coleen at Sssh.com for more sex news, commentary and hot porn for women and couples!