THE CHRISTIAN STRUGGLE WITH PORNOGRAPHY

The TV Kid
When I was a little kid, I loved television. I was fascinated with the thought of some people in another part of the world who I could see, first in black and white and later in coloured. It felt like a little piece of white magic every time I watched cartoons between the hours of 4-6pm and late night movies that started at 10 pm. The movies were shown on local TV stations, hence there was no blatant display of nudity. Nevertheless, my dad always ensured that there was an adult in the living room when we watched late night movies on the weekend. If there was a kissing scene that exceeded a simple peck on the lips, he quickly changed the station to NTA 10 (Be assured that the only movies shown here were the runt of the litter movies absolutely no one wanted to see). If the couple embraced longer than 10 seconds, change it to NTA, if she took off her shirt and left only her bra on, kpeke kpeke! My father did not change it to NTA but switched off the TV. That is it for the night! Everyone go to bed. So you can imagine how limited our movie options were as children. If we wanted to watch the new blade movie, we had to sneak out to the neighbour’s house and watch it there because their parents left them unsupervised most of the time.
Angelina Jolie

I remember the first time I saw a couple make out passionately on the bed. Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas’s Original Sin. It was a Sunday afternoon and we had innocently inserted the disc into the VCD player thinking it was another cute romantic movie. However, what we saw was far from cute! Hence, my sister practically leapfrogged to the TV and removed the film before my mum, who was just about to settle in and watch the movie with us, understood what was going on. Sunday evening was our only period of the entire week without supervision. Mother went for village meetings and dad was always hanging with his people. This was the perfect opportunity to watch the movie. We chased our little brother and sister out of the living room, deeming them too young to watch such ‘mature romance’ as we the ‘matured gals’ (the three big sisters) settled in to watch our first 18+ movie.

We were so excited…finally, some real action! I would get to see how humans had sex! Original sin was everything we wanted it to be. I recall that none of us dared looked the other in the eye after the credits rolled at the end of the movie. Almost as if we were scared of what we would see in each other’s eyes. I felt like how Eve must have felt when she ate the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. 
 My first exposure to porn
 Suddenly, I didn’t want to be watching Sleepless in Seattle and City of Angels, I wanted to stay up after everyone had gone to bed, close the curtains, mute the T.V and be sleepless with risqué movies I knew I shouldn’t be watching. The question that arose was where I could go to get such movies. I knew I had to be careful because everyone knew everyone and your parents were also friends by default. Hence, I went to the original bad guy, a friend who we shall refer to as Abu, he was from a super spiritual home and his mother went to Deeper Life church, but I knew that if there was anyone who was keeping 18+ movies it would be this friend of mine. When I went to his house, I told him straight up in my usual blunt fashion what I wanted and he smiled that evil smile and said to me…’I have been waiting for this moment Chima! Come into my lair and be amazed’. He opened a drawer and there were only 18+ movies inside…arranged from I just started watching 18+ movies to top-shelf pornography. My eyes were threatening to pop out of its sockets. The cover pictures for some the VCD packs would have been enough to give someone a heart attack. I wanted to take it all! However, my friend in his worldly wisdom told me to take only three and to start with ‘mapouka dancehall’…it was something he would ease me into, he said. I still remember what it felt like seeing all those 95% naked bodies on the screen. This was not some perfect, all-white American couple but black West African naked men and women and it was real. I barely slept a wink that night. Every time I closed my eyes, all I saw was naked flesh dancing from one end of the screen to the other.

I had seen the light! I knew how babies came about, where the penis went in, how women looked when they truly received pleasure and when they had what seemed to be orgasms.

When I returned each one, he always asked my opinion on what I watched and we would sit and talk about risqué movies until he deemed me ready for my first pornographic movie…NURSES 2…I would later learn that this particular movie was a ‘passage of rights’ for many of the young people in my community.

The internet was not popular at the time and most cybercafés had phishing software installed on their computers to prevent users from watching videos or downloading content over the internet (data saving methods). Most people got their porn from the same ‘alaba’ street movie dealer who sold “Paloma and Diego”.

Oh, what a mess! Our parents were trying so hard to protect us from the world that they shielded us from the important topics like sex and how it all worked. They limited the visibility of what we watched and assumed that it would be enough hint for us to understand that sex was out of bounds. 
The role of the internet in pornography addiction

With the dawn of competition in the mobile data market, access was available to everyone who had a mobile phone bearing 3G capabilities and pornography was not the taboo it used to be. Young people were sharing it through Bluetooth or watching it on their phone and PCs. I recall a cybercafé I frequented while in the university. Once a month I would bundle up my research work and spend all night gathering as much data resource as I could on the internet, and a few computer stations over, there would be a young man who I distinctly remember because he looked like the Nigerian Rapper, Vector. He and his friends gathered around the computer, streaming porn on the internet, and smack in the middle of a public cyber café without a care in the world.

Watching sexually explicit movies like this was the “how to” for young men looking to hone their sexual skills. It encouraged you to give into the sexual side of your body and take pleasure where you could get it. 
Free porn for everyone!

This was all before the innovation of blackberry. Imagine how much more exposed young people are to pornography in 2017! We have 4G LTE that streams videos without buffering so your ‘HD streaming experience is amplified in brighter colours’. There is so much pornographic content out there that it is almost insane. The bonus? It is all completely free! (For the most part).

A thirteen-year-old with an android phone, and a data subscription with no parental guidance on the phone. There are few Nigerian parents who even bother to put a parental lock on their children’s’ tech devices with the aim to limit what they are exposed to. Parents who treat sex as a shameful taboo not talked about thereby making it more alluring and interesting to the young teenager who is coming into her body and seeking to understand all of the changes happening. Young crowds of people, subconsciously urging and pressuring each other to lose ‘the V-Card’ and join the cool gang of  ‘14-17-year-old young adult who think that premarital sex at that age suddenly means they are not teenagers anymore’.
sex and pornography

Sex is the topic of conversation when young people sit down at bars for a night out. It is the hidden message when bodies join on the dance floor at a clubs, seeking to spark some sort of energy primarily derived from alcoholic boldness. It is the boast of married men whose wives are unsatisfactory as they proudly ‘gist’ their friends about their sexual escapades with young girls whose vaginas are still tight, breasts perky and soft because they have not carried children.

Pornography drives us to sex…explorative sex…adventurous sex…dangerous sex with pleasure mostly derived from pain… pornography is sex.

It is hard to avoid pornography on the internet. You try to download a free movie from your favourite free media site and there is a porn advert at every corner showing a male with a 10-inch penis and a woman with breasts looking like something from Ice Age. It is at the bottom of the page on your favourite fanfiction author’s site… It is everywhere. Once you see what is inside, your eyes open to a new world of possibilities that you urgently want to try out. You subconsciously compare your partner to that porn star with the amazing, acrobatic, multitasking ability who can lift his woman high in the air while maintaining a hold of gravity to keep pummelling his manhood into her. You want to have porn sex and love at the same time, anything less leaves you unfulfilled.
How can parents limit children's' exposure to pornography?

First of all, what can parents do to keep their young, inquisitive, impressionable children away from porn?

Pray- Despite all of your effort, it is only God who can help your children to have the willpower, strength of mind and assurance of self, necessary to not give into peer pressure or the curiosity of seeing what lies behind the red curtain.

Talk- The era of porn and sex as a taboo topic is past gone. You must engage your children in interactive discussions about sex and everything that relates to it. Your children must be informed or the internet will do it for you and believe me when I say you do not want the internet as your children’s educator

Parental Guidance Apps- There are safe browsers and software you can install on your devices and those of your children that limit what they see. This will ensure that when they are at home you can monitor their online activity. Browsers like Spin and Mozilla safe browser are good options.

How can you help children with porn addiction?
Now in the situation where your children still get access to porn, through a friend, at school, or wherever young people hide to watch porn these days. What do you d? Not just as a parent, but as someone trying to help your friend or loved one who might be struggling with letting go of the habit. It is a two-faced action:

What do you do after each porn session (the person watching the pornographic content)?

There are emotions that can engulf a Christian after they watch porn. The severity of the emotions depends on your spiritual connection to God. First, there is the obvious guilt for having done something you know somewhere in your heart that you should not be doing. The guilt is the most dangerous part because it can pull you further away from Jesus and force you to wallow deeper in the sinfulness of your ways. Guilt is the tool of the devil when he attempts to draw you farther from the love of God.

Guilt is usually accompanied by a feeling of self-loathing, the sensation of disgust and ‘dirtiness’ for allowing your mind to be so debased by such carnal visual content. The devil is slowly making his way into your mind now, fighting a battle that seeks to ensure you distance yourself from God because of the weight of your perceived sins.

Pornography is the Number 1. struggle of Christians the world over. Hence, you are not alone! So, you watched porn! You saw two; three or an orgy of people slapping skin against skin and maybe you even masturbated and derived self-pleasure from it! You are not the worst sinner out there, neither are you dirty or disgusting for even in the midst of your actions the Lord Jesus did not leave you, neither did he take His eyes filled with love away from you for a single second. 
There is no single road to recovery

The moment you apologise with a contrite heart and show an effort to become better, you are already on the right part. Rome was not built in a day. You are most likely not going to stop watching porn because you prayed about it once and received forgiveness. There is every likelihood that you will go back again, and again until you fully accept that the grace of God is all you need to curb the habit and you will be awed at how you gradually start to reduce your porn induced habits and finally stop.
Find a confidant

This is where those around you come into play. I encourage those who have a habit of watching porn and have a genuine desire to stop to talk to someone they trust about it. A bible believing Christian who will not judge you, but will patiently listen and help you see just how much grace God has for us. His love is without depth, thus no action of ours (definitely not pornography, masturbation or pre-marital sex) can take His love from us.

The fact that you acknowledge the error of your ways even when you go right back to doing the same wrong thing is proof that your heart is in the right place. I will not sugar coat it and tell you that it will be easy, but we have to take conscious actions to lead our minds away from thoughts that can trigger us to spiral into old habits. Sometimes it is at those times when we are comfortable in our confidence of kicking the porn habits permanently, that the devil tempts us right back into sin and the old feelings of imperfections, shame and guilt surround us stronger than ever in an attempt to take us away from the love of God. 
Perfection is a fallacy

It is okay to backslide…you do not have to be perfect, for Jesus is the perfection that God sees in us. Ask for the grace of the Holy Spirit to be stronger against temptation and hold yourself accountable for your actions by talking to your appointed confidant when you go back to old habits.

You are not allowed to give into guilt and shame but bring your inadequacies to the foot of the cross and even in the midst of your worst descent into sin, you will always be enough for Jesus.

Pornography might be a pleasure for the flesh but it is happiness that is fickle, the grace and love of God is good for the Spirit and it is Joy that is everlasting.