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While mulling over what to blog about this week nothing seemed to ring my bell, but in the eleventh hour, it tolled. This week an article appeared on the CNN site. It received a lot of attention, including mine. Titled: “Can the Christian crusade against pornography bear fruit?” by Ashley Fantz.
When I hear the word porn, my mind sways to a seedy hotel room, a cameraman, and dirty curtains. At the same time, I swing into defense being a believer in love, the physical and the heart. Porn, to most people, means sex without heart, the act without connection. As always—I’m not one sided. In fact, I spring from side to side, not because I like to waffle, but because I view things from all angles, including the logical.
The article states, “Many evangelical pastors say they don’t have a choice. The Internet has made porn unavoidable, it’s everywhere. And porn, they say, leads to a lack of intimacy in marriage, threatening the biblical mandate to get and stay married.” The statement is partly true—it is everywhere. But, expanding your sexual knowledge by reading magazine articles or renting videos can enhance a marriage; bringing a couple closer together and tear down inhibitions. Porn exists, but it’s not the reason intimacy dwindles. Physical love is the most intimate of moments between a couple. The love between a couple is not threatened by the Internet, it’s threatened by the person. 
Before I leap into other parts of this article, I’m going to let the other shoe drop right now. Addiction is internal. It is the weakness in people that leads to addiction. It’s not the slot machines fault you’re putting your hard earned dollars into it. The most interesting part of this article is while those (Christians) try to help people who are addicted to sex, and there is no doubt that these people are doing a good thing by helping—the finger is being pointed at everything but the addicted. They claim they got addicted because of what’s available on the Internet. They got addicted because of the freedom to hire prostitutes, and read books with explicit scenes. The reality folks—is that we have access to everything created on this planet from gumballs to guns. It comes down to mind, morals and choice. When a person jumps from a bridge—it wasn’t the bridge that had the problem. The proverbial carrot is dangled in front of us throughout our lives, but it’s our own demons that lead us to snatch the carrot.
There are many good points in this article, and I recommend everyone read it, if for nothing else but to remind us that sometimes we can be weak as humans, and moderation is always key. [http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/08/21/can-the-burgeoning-christian-crusade-against-pornography-bear-fruit/] As I read through the article I stopped on a particular spot and then I began to sizzle, and the reason for this blog emerged.
“Today’s Christian Woman have recently run stories about women consuming porn, often theorizing that the habit starts with explicit romance novels.” Whoa now! Let’s back up the porn truck, and clear one thing up. The terminology here is damning, and it is this type of loose wording that authors who write Romance are trying to clear up. Romance novels are the most widely purchased novels of any genre. That does not mean millions of women are addicted to sex. Why do they love these books? Because of the romance. Because of the struggle and tension between the characters. We close the back cover after reading the last page, and feel satisfied that a happily ever after ending was there to subjugate our fears. Explicit romance novels are NOT porn. 
What are the different degrees of romance writing? The terms might vary from site to site, but I generalize them like this. There is the “sweet romance,” all the tension but the story stays on the outside of the bedroom. There is a plot, a struggle to overcome, and the HEA ending. There is “Romantica,” the story again has plot, and all the tension you can handle, but the physical aspect of the deep love shared between two people carries into the bedroom. Fact of life number one; people in love have sex. The third general group is “Erotica.” This is a story in which if you took out the sex, there would be no story. It runs strictly on the physical.
If the women’s group who offered the suggestion said that—women reading three books a day of erotica can start a habit, I might not have had anything to write about. Yet, even then I turn back to the logical. The therapist interviewed in the article said it best, “…both members of the Society for Sexual Advancement – a national nonprofit think tank of licensed sex therapists – worry that therapy can become overly focused on dogma and ignore the patient’s real-life issues.” And I believe this as well. Sexual addiction as with any addiction, is the plug to a gaping wound. Something at some time in a person’s life left a pothole in the road, and in this case, sexual addiction is the patch.
Physical love is hard-wired within us. Some may argue that it is strictly for procreation. Well, we’re not animals. There is no doubt there is a very dark side to the sex industry. Incest, child pornography—sorry, but they invented prisons for people like that. But again, it’s the mind that has twisted, and hopefully the psychologists can fix what ails these people.
I’m thankful for those who care enough to help people who need it, whether it’s secular or spiritual. The entire article is of interest to me, but I don’t want to give away the plot to my novel “Too Grand For Words” which deals with this subject coming out in October, but I will say that sometimes love—real love—is the strongest tool we have to fight the demons inside us. Addiction is loss: loss of control, loss of self. The crutch we use to fill the holes in our lives can be found in your fridge to your bed. 
The fact is—physical love has been around since the first two people populated the earth—a male and a female…and then it began, but it was people who stretched the boundaries. Our failures,
