I’m a Woman and I Struggle with Porn (Guest Post)

I’m handing the reins over to my dear friend Jillian today. In fact, I desperately wanted her to write this piece to shed light on the women’s side of struggling with pornography. Jill is a wife, barista and friend who lives in Chicago.     -e

Long before I ever cracked open a Bible, Cosmopolitan Magazine was teaching me right from wrong. I remember buying the magazine with my girlfriends around the age of twelve or thirteen, feeling a little embarrassed and ashamed as we reached the register, but full of excitement for the things we’d find inside. Looking back it felt empowering, even though at that age you don’t really understand it that way. Cosmo was teaching me about things I could do, sexual things that would give me power, and the better I could perform these things, the more I was worth in the eyes of a man. My eyes and heart were shaped by all these things before I ever even had my first kiss.

I remember sitting on my bed and reading my thin magazine ‘bible’ as it gave me all the best websites for soft porn. Porn that was more “girl friendly”, not so rough, you know? I remember a specific Q&A even, where a reader had talked about how she enjoyed lesbian porn more than your typical guy/girl action, and she wanted to know if this made her gay. I remember being relieved by the answer as the sex guru explained that lots of straight women felt more turned on with girl on girl.

I was relieved of course, because I was one of them.

I remember the all-consuming enticement as my brain would start to wander to porn, the primal sensation of lust as it drove me to my computer screen. The longing was so intense that it felt impossible to calm unless it got what it wanted. I can also just as clearly remember the quickness of the drop as my climax came to completion. The weight and the depth of the shame and disgust for myself and for the things on the screen. I remember the quickness of my hands as I’d close out my tabs and delete my history and push my computer far away from me, as if I could just make it all go away. It’s so wild to me how both the overwhelming longing and lust, and the disgust and shame are such natural responses with no invitation. I did not ask for those feelings, it’s as if my emotions led me with no warning, rhyme or reason.

The reason I opened with those stories is in hopes that I am not alone. I started this way, with some extremely personal memory-sharing in a desperate attempt to see if there are more of me. Maybe you have a different story, but you can relate when it comes to the worth associated with your sexuality, the intensity of your emotions and lust as they lead you, and the intense shame that follows you as a woman who has struggled or is struggling with sexual sin. Maybe you have felt dirty, too. Maybe you have felt used and manipulated by your own emotions as they drag you into the fiercest desires and longings of lust, like a fire within you, and then in one fell swoop mock you as you are filled with disgust and shame. The emotions that laugh at your own naked body and dirty mind and cause you to become more self-conscious, untouchable, and alone.

Are you out there, women who have used your bodies in such an intimate, selfish, and distasteful way and are now reaping the consequences of feeling filthy? How have our bodies become this way? And our emotions? Am I the only female asking these sort of questions?

After all, women are not raised like men. We don’t get the porn and masturbation classes in Sunday school. We don’t have female role models openly talking to us about their sexual temptations and fantasies. We as women are the ones who need to dress modestly for the MAN’S lustful mind, right? We can’t experience lust like a man does…or at least that is what we have been seasoned to believe.

So here it goes, I am asking. Am I the only woman who has struggled with sexual sin? Am I the only one who feels weirder, and dirtier, and even more of a sinner because I am a WOMAN who has touched herself and seen incredibly explicit things on the internet?

Of course I’m not.

And this is why I am writing.

I am writing because I believe women and men handle sexual sin differently and because there is very little material about why women struggle with sexual sin and what deep-rooted desires and hurts drive us to it.

I believe that as women we have a deep, ingrained desire for acceptance. Not just acceptance, but for people to breathtakingly, awe-strikingly desire us, our whole person. Our souls and our bodies. We desire to be deeply desired, and we have been lied to and tricked by our culture and our own flesh to think that giving into this lust will somehow make us feel more complete.

You see, this desire is healthy. The desire to be wanted. We were magnificently designed with it. It should not cause us shame. As a woman, you were programmed for desire. As a woman, you were programed for sexual empowerment, and you were programed for connection. You were programed for passion, and sexuality. You were programmed for good, raw, sexy, sex within the proper context of marriage. And you were also—and most importantly—programmed for the admiration your Savior feels toward you.

This is why I am writing.

I am writing for you and for me. I am writing for us and for the prostitute who washed Jesus’ feet with perfume in Luke 7. And for the other prostitute in Southeast Asia and for the one in your home town. I am writing for the lovely and broken women in those videos I watched online. I’m writing because I want to be clear that Jesus has given these sort of women a special opportunity to weep at His feet as He tells you how crazy He is about you.

I am writing because I know the self-hate that goes along with these types of sins and I know how ashamed you can feel. And most of all, I know that this type of failure and wreckage is exactly what drives us to a Jesus who looks at us in awe, our whole person, mind, body and spirit in awe. The God who is Jesus thinks of us as perfect and wants nothing more than for us to sit with Him in our hurt as He dresses every wound and mends every scar and calls us clean.

This type of longing that our Jesus has for us is what we are made for.

And as we take it, test it, and make it our own, as we learn to truly believe His love for us, we will begin to stop looking for that acceptance in places where all we find is emptiness.

We, as “this sort of woman” have an opportunity to know our Savior’s love much more deeply than one who is unaware of just how ugly their sin is. We know His love because we need His love, and this causes us to love Him back in deep deep ways. I am writing for the women who have dived into sexual sin, feel like they have lost a lot and gained nothing, and have come out with more self-hate than satisfaction. I am writing specifically for you, to tell you that your sins, which are many, are forgiven — for you loved much. (Luke 7:47)