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Just a note up front, we're talking about pornography in this episode and also sexual abuse. That's the sound of 70,000 Korean women protesting an alarming rise in pornographic videos made from spy cams placed in public bathrooms and change rooms. I don't want that! I don't want that!

But for every voice decrying the evils of pornography, there's another that says it's healthy, part of our freedom of expression. It's sex positive. The first big case was back in the 1980s when people tried to shut down Hustler magazine and Hustler fought back. That's the basis of the film The People vs. Larry Flint. I'm not trying to convince you that you should like what Larry Flint does.

I don't like what Larry Flint does, but what I do like is that I live in a country where you and I can make that decision for ourselves. We live in a free country, and that is a powerful idea. That's a magnificent way to live. But there is a price for that freedom, which is that sometimes we have to tolerate things that we don't necessarily like. So go back in that room where you are free to think whatever you want to think about Larry Flint and Hustler Magazine.

But then ask yourselves if you want to make that decision for the rest of us. Because the freedom that everyone in this room enjoys is in a very real way in your hands. And if we start throwing up walls against what some of us think is obscene, we may very well wake up one morning and realize that walls have been thrown up in all kinds of places that we never expected.

Is pornography a question of individual freedom of expression or is it a profound injustice? Or perhaps both? I mean, the things that girls are telling me, they're telling me younger, indicating the sexual stunting of an entire generation. You know, these boys are watching essentially show reels of abuse and then they're wanting to enact on girls what they've seen. Pornography.

An expression of evil or a matter of personal taste. A detriment to society or a means of fulfillment. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions. Undeceptions

Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new commentary on the Book of Exodus by Christopher Wright. I love that guy. Every episode at Undeceptions, we explore some aspect of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that's either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out. Music

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today. He's a

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

Mere Christian Hermeneutics also offers insights that are valuable to anyone who's interested in literature, philosophy, or history. Kevin doesn't just write about faith, he's also there to hone your interpretative skills. And if you're eager to engage with the Bible, whether as a believer or as a doubter, this might be essential reading.

You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

MasterCard said on Sunday it was investigating allegations against Pornhub.com after a New York Times opinion piece said many videos posted on the adult website depicted child sexual abuse.

On December 4, 2020, a New York Times opinion piece titled The Children of Pornhub put the world's biggest porn distributor on notice. The author, Nicholas Kristof, detailed the disturbing proliferation of harmful videos on the site, videos made at the expense of trafficked and abused girls.

In response, Mastercard and Visa announced they would conduct independent investigations into their relationships with Pornhub and subsequently announced they would cease processing payments for the porn giant. This was a real hit for Pornhub and a victory for grassroots campaigns like Collective Shout, who have been publicising Pornhub's practices for years.

Well, I would describe Pornhub as really the mother of all porn dispensers. It's the largest porn hosting platform in the world and tragically popular with teenage boys.

That's Melinda Tankard-Reist. She's an author, media commentator and advocate for women and girls. For years, she and her team have confronted sexualization, objectification, the harms of pornography, sexual exploitation, trafficking and violence against women.

She's the author of six books, including Big Porn Inc., exposing the harms of the global pornography industry. Melinda has no love for Pornhub. Its genres include some of the most violent content you could ever see, but, you know, perhaps just take my word for it. Sadism, porn, rape, porn, incest themes, teen, barely legal porn,

It's become increasingly brutalized and callous. It presents women as existing for male gratification, but increasingly violent and sadistic. And we're part of a global campaign against Pornhub that was started by a colleague of ours at Exodus Cry.

And there's been a remarkable response, 2 million signatures to a global change.org petition, exposing the trafficking of girls, exposing rape content, exposing videos filmed without consent, including videos of underage girls.

exposing the extreme racism on Pornhub. Here you have Pornhub supporting Black Lives Matter at the same time eroticizing historic racist tropes. You have genres of slavery porn, you have genres of Nazi porn, of Jewish women being violated in places depicting concentration camps.

We say, how is it possible you can have a global outcry against racism and justly so at the same time, Pornhub, which is owned by MindGeek, which has its headquarters in Canada,

allows all of this, not only allows it but facilitates it and promotes it. Harmful ideas, normalizing and sexualizing extreme violence against women. We talk a lot about respectful relationships. We talk a lot about consent. We've had the Me Too and It's Time campaigns and

But a platform like Pornhub is undermining those campaigns. It's eroticizing cruelty and degradation and the submission of women.

The research tells us that pornography contributes to harmful attitudes. It contributes to young men being more tolerant of sexual harassment and sexual violence. The research says that this type of porn desensitises men and boys to sexual cruelty. Now, at a time when we have an epidemic of violence against women, why does pornography

Pornhub get a free pass to profit from the extreme suffering of women and girls around the world.

The decision by Visa and Mastercard to stop processing payments to Pornhub certainly is good news to Melinda, but she reckons the fight is far from over. The battle continues in our schools and unis, in corporations, among our elected officials, and in our homes, as well as in our brains. There's a bit of research on the effect of porn on the brain, and the evidence is mixed.

A study by the Australian Research Centre in Sex Health and Society said it found that pornography enabled sexual confidence and positive community formation, especially for LGBT people. However, a 2007 study published in the American Journal of Medicine found that the sex lives of 18 million men over age 20 were negatively affected due to excessive porn viewing.

Then there's a recent study by the Kinsey Institute. Yes, I know the history of the eponymous Alfred Kinsey. Google it if you don't. It showed that people who use technology for sexting or webcamming gained a sense of emotional connection as well as sexual gratification from this contact.

But in a study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, researchers discovered a significant association between reported pornography hours per week and grey matter volume in the human brain and a drop in reactivity to sexual cues.

And here's a line ball. A study published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour looking at Norwegian use of pornography found that couples who use pornography together tended to enjoy a more permissive erotic climate.

But where only one person in the couple did, men who used porn were likely to experience problems with arousal and women who used porn were likely to have increased negative self-perceptions.

Back in the 2000s, people hadn't really thought about pornography as something that could potentially become addictive. So what I wanted to do in the book is to actually unpack what pornography does when a person looks at it from a neurological perspective. That's Bill Struthers, a neuroscientist and professor of psychology at Wheaton College in the United States. He's also the author of Wired for Intimacy, How Pornography Hijacks the Male Brain.

And he tells me that when he was researching his book in 2010, the buzzword was addiction.

And then at the time there was a lot of concern about whether or not it was addictive or not. And so basically what I wanted to do is then kind of throw sort of a sex gender dimension to it and say, why are so many men looking at porn? And one of the things that I wrote about in the book is that I think it actually has something to do with the way that men are wired neurologically to be sort of on the lookout for those kinds of signals. And so it impacts men in a way that I think is very profound. Can you talk me through that process of

of pornography hijacking, that's the word. Well, I think that it's important to stop and step back and think about the human being, the people who want to get caught up in sex as if it's all about the genitals. But actually, as a neuroscientist, I think that the most significant sexual organ that you have is between your ears, not between your legs.

And so when we look at the nervous system and how it's coordinating everything that we do, certainly our sexual behavior is something that's going to be overseeing, it's going to be involved in. So...

when the baby is born, they don't come out ready to mate. You know, they actually go through a period of development. And then around the time of puberty, which is really kind of the way that most cultures distinguish between being an adult and being a child is when you're now kind of ready to mate, so to speak. And so, um,

There's something going on in the brain that these regions, perhaps they've been lying dormant or they're being reorganized or whatever it is that's going on. And there's a lot of science behind that, and that's maybe something that would be for another time. But these systems become live. They become active. So there's a neurological dimension to the way that we kind of think about our sexuality, not just about our motivations, right?

about the reasons why we do it, but the things that we look for. And then when we're activated, do we respond in such a way? Do we see that attractive person who really sexually arouses us and do we roll the dice, so to speak? Do we go and see if they're interested in us or not? And if they are, then how does that play itself out and do we actually go home with each other, so to speak? So for me as a neuroscientist, that's really what I'm interested in.

And so pornography now hijacks that whole system, that embodied real world system where you're a sexual creature that's embedded in this sort of dance of embodied people trying to figure each other out, whether you're attracted to each other or whether you want to invest in that relationship or not. Now you don't have to do any of that. Simon encountered pornography near the beginning of the online revolution.

For me, I was in that generation of people who was a teenager as the internet was coming to the world, which was a really unique time and people didn't really know what the internet would bring. And so one of the things that the internet brought was this sort of tsunami of pornography and made it accessible to everyone.

And so I remember when I went to uni, which was, I was 19 and there were computer rooms and back then computer rooms were not, you know, this is 97. They weren't monitored. They weren't, they were just this new thing. And so I really just, I started looking at whether porn was actually that easy to find. I'd heard that it was and I,

And so it was actually just that sort of morbid curiosity about, is it really that easy to find? Is it really there? And then when I stumbled upon it, I didn't realise how powerful an impact it would have on me, that it wasn't just something I could go, oh, yeah, that's there, and then leave it, but that it drew me back to it time and time again.

Can you describe that? I mean, are we talking, you know, 10 minutes a day you'd look at it, or an hour a day? How much in your life was this? There were times where you would just look for hours and hours. And you'd think at the end of it how, you know, how stupid it was to do such a thing. You know, you'd go, where on earth has the time gone, and why on earth did I do that? And

It definitely wasn't satisfying like eating a big meal going, oh, well, I've had my fill and I don't need any more. It was sort of emptying at the same time as gluttony. Simon would say that his connection to pornography in those days bordered on an addiction. Professor Struthers says that's a concept that's hotly debated by researchers.

Yeah, I think since I've been doing research on this now for going on 15 years,

I found that a lot of the language of addiction, addiction was really kind of the term that people grabbed onto in the late 90s and the early 2000s. I think a lot of that is down to the technology that was available at the time. In the late 90s, early 2000s, people were beginning to get broadband internet, and people were really being able to kind of get lots of pictures or moving pictures, right, now clips and movies. And so what happened was,

was that adults who could get access to this material were now finding that it was really easy to just watch porn and to sexually act out to it, to masturbate to it. And they found that that was something that they could do whenever they wanted to. And so for many individuals, what happened is

the normal safeguards that were in place of not going out and being able to grab porn wherever you wanted to, or the social awkwardness of going to the store where the magazines were sold, that was taken away.

And so, for a lot of those individuals, what happened is, it was like being a kid in a candy store. They just went nuts, so to speak, and they watched all kinds of stuff. And what happened is that it developed for them in what I think is fair to call an addictive pattern of behavior. And so, in the early 2000s, the language of addiction became very common.

And when you would take 20-year-olds or 30-year-olds or people who were addicted to pornography using that terminology, or you'd put them in an MRI, or you'd kind of show them pictures of naked people, that all of the regions that are involved in normal sex, the hypothalamus, amygdala,

you know, kind of ventral medial striatum, these regions would light up. And we know from studies on drug abusers and drug addicts that these are the same regions. So it seemed really logical for addiction to be the language that people used with because most of the people who were really upset about it were self-diagnosing, they were being diagnosed. You looked at their brain activity and lo and behold, hey, it looks like a drug addict. It's probably an addiction. Seems simple enough.

But it gets more complicated when researchers consider the different generations and different types of pornography.

Now, so keep in mind, this is the early 2000s. What I've noticed then in the time since then is that as people became more interested in it, and as we started thinking about this as a neurological issue rather than maybe a moral or a spiritual issue, that now researchers kind of came and they started doing research on people who were maybe normals or non-addicts, right? And they're thinking, well, what's going on here? And so they started looking at 20, 30-year-olds in schools.

you know, 2009, 2010, 2015. Well, these are different people. These are actually not the people in the late '90s and early 2000s who were sort of in their 30s and 40s and now becoming addicts. These are actually kids who were raised and kind of went through puberty when the broadband porn kind of became available.

So this is a whole different crew that we're working with. And so this is a crew that's actually neurologically sexually coming of age now with this material present. They grew up having pornography more as sex ed. And rather than pornography being like a crack cocaine or heroin that they became addicted to, I think it's fair to say that pornography for them became their education, but also their ibuprofen.

It became the way that they dealt with all kinds of other sort of anxieties and things that they sort of moved into this space where easy access to pornography meant that, hey, you know, if I had a bad day at school, I can just log in and look at some porn and masturbate to it. And I can just, you know, then, you know, wake up the next day and it's not a big deal.

So it wasn't a heroin addiction. It's not like a pornography addiction, right? It's more self-medication. It's more self-soothing for a lot of the people from that millennial generation. Can you talk me through some of the negative consequences? Pornography can cause stress. It can cause anxiety. It can be used in such a way where it becomes an obsession for the people who are addicts.

Who would fit that addict narrative, for lack of a better way of putting it? But I think what happens is, for people who really become preoccupied with pornography, is that it really does serve as a distraction for them. Everything becomes about sex, and so it spills over into the other parts of their lives.

where normal sex with their spouse doesn't have all the richness of the multiple images, the multiple positions, the variety, all that kind of fun stuff that they have at the keyboard. Real person is just bad porn, so to speak.

For Simon, pornography was becoming a serious problem for cultural reasons as much as neurological ones. Simon is a Christian, and like many Christians, he saw the struggle against pornography in a very different light. It was a sin in a category all of its own, he felt. What made it more difficult was that Simon was a youth minister in his church, and he didn't feel he could share his struggle with anyone.

Yeah, I think I had the wrong belief that a Christian shouldn't

or doesn't struggle with this, that a Christian couldn't. And so for me to be captured by this created a real sort of fracture in my spiritual walk. And so it's something I felt like I had to keep hidden. Or if it ever was talked about, it had to be something that I was on top of and fighting. I couldn't actually admit to myself that this was something that

There was a part of me that loved and a part of me that hated it where I knew I had to fight it, but I couldn't admit that to anyone. And I was sort of wearing this, you know, I think of it as like wearing this mask that I had to hold up. And it was really sad that I felt like I had to do that even to my best friend and my wife at the time, that I couldn't be honest with her.

And I met many guys over the years who have just gone, no, I need to be honest. And they pour out their heart either to a friend or to a pastor or to their loved ones. But for me, it was always something I just couldn't share. I was so worried about how people would be disgusted by me and upset.

And I think a lot of people, especially in that season, and I know it's still true today, but in that season, no one really expected that people would be struggling with porn. It was sort of a thing that you did on the side, but no one with the internet, there were so many people struggling with it and no one was talking about it. And whereas now, I think it's more talked about. It's still a secret sin for a lot of people, but it's

It's more, if someone brings it up, it's not a big surprise that people are struggling with it. Whereas I think in those times it was still so new that it was such a, not pornography was new, but it being, you know, sort of unleashed on everyone. So, yeah, so I didn't share it with anyone and that was a real challenge.

I'm not excusing that or seeking sympathy, but it was a huge burden. I would probably argue that people with a sincere faith that actually do see viewing pornography as a taboo are in truth more at risk because

Because what happens is when you violate the taboo, it's going to actually create a bodily distress, a bodily anxiety. And that bodily anxiety can ramp people up to actually have a more robust sexual response when they do act out to it. Now,

After that, however, the guilt that comes with that taboo violation in many ways can derive the shame that the person will then try to deal with the shame by going back to the sexual release.

then use the porn for the sexual release. So they get caught in this spiral. So a lot of the early stories about, you know, the sex addicts are of people who were presumably very, you know, moralistic people who were very, you know, devout believers or very religious and, and felt horribly shamed about this, recognizing that the shame was actually making the problem worse for them. The idea was that I was, I was just going to,

repent, say no to this sin, fight it and, you know, plug on and grip my teeth and sort of not realising how much of a grip it had on me. I obviously, you know, was thinking about doing it and then dabbling back into it and then, you know, got back into it as a habit. But there would be these seasons of me fighting and then slipping back into it.

Until the third time that it really blew up, my wife said, that's enough, and she asked me to leave. And so, yeah, so I sort of kicked out over this issue, which...

When that happens, you no longer can just put on a brave face and go, oh, well, I guess I'll just try again. You realise this is actually really serious and you have to then, you know, your friends find out and your parents find out and your, you know, people at church find out and that sort of thing. And so that was when it all really happened.

exploded and I realised I actually need help. I actually can't fight this on my own. I can't do this just by gritting my teeth and saying no. This thing has a bigger hold on me than I thought. That realisation was 15 years ago. Thankfully, Simon eventually found support in a group of Christians and it was a safe harbour.

Professor Bill Struthers says that parts of Simon's story, particularly the shame and anxiety around porn, are, for better or worse, becoming less common. So many people actually just don't see it as a problem at all. They don't feel bad. They don't feel guilty about it when they do do it. I think that's just a different problem. I think you should sort of, you know, sort of...

Now, getting rid of the high ceiling that the person might have, their high view of sex is, no, we're just animals. This is just what animals do, right? I think they sell sex really short in that way. I know it's very common in pop culture to accuse Christians and their Bible of being anti-sex, having such a low view of it that it all has to be banned.

This is a plain reversal of the truth. It's the Bible that sees sex as precious and it's porn that diminishes sex.

In the Bible, sex is viewed as a psychosomatic soul and body encounter between two people in which the two become one flesh, to use the biblical expression. In porn, sex is by definition reduced to one person's bodily function. You don't really need a moral framework for bodily functions like sneezing, scratching yourself or going to the toilet.

But for precious things, you do need a framework. It's a bit like the rules in the Dixon home around my precious handmade Taylor guitar. The instrument is so valuable, there are rules about who's allowed to play it and how you position it when it's not being played. The approach of, sure, play the Taylor, lend it out, just don't hurt anyone with it, doesn't really reflect the value of the thing.

But here's the paradox. By making sex cheap, it becomes a commodity. And where there's a commodity, there's big money to make. That's the business model of the multi-billion dollar commodification of sex that is the porn industry. More after the break.

68-year-old Tirat was working as a farmer near his small village on the Punjab-Sindh border in Pakistan when his vision began to fail. Cataracts were causing debilitating pain and his vision impairment meant he couldn't sow crops.

It pushed his family into financial crisis. But thanks to support from Anglican Aid, Tirat was seen by an eye care team sent to his village by the Victoria Memorial Medical Centre. He was referred for crucial surgery. With his vision successfully restored, Tirat is able to work again and provide for his family.

There are dozens of success stories like Tarat's emerging from the outskirts of Pakistan, but Anglican Aid needs your help for this work to continue. Please head to anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Tarat.

and make a tax-deductible donation to help this wonderful organisation give people like Turat a second chance. That's anglicanaid.org.au forward slash Undeceptions. Music

In February this year in Australia, a former Sydney schoolgirl launched a petition calling for sexual consent education to be taught much earlier in schools. The results, recorded by the Sydney Morning Herald, were staggering. Producer Kayleigh.

Within 24 hours, a petition started by 22-year-old former Kambala student, Chanel Kontos, delivered a disturbing list of allegations from respondents who said they had been sexually assaulted during high school or shortly after by young men who attended nearby Sydney private boys' schools. More than 200 young women contacted Ms Kontos with personal testimonies about sexual assault they said they experienced at the hands of a peer at a boys' school.

A chorus of voices called for better education, but several others also pointed out that the problem goes way beyond just a schools-based response. Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, teacher Dr Sarah Goldsby-Smith put it like this. Kayleigh?

You go, Sarah.

This, says Melinda Tankard-Reist, is part of the social cost of pornography's accepted place in society. It warps the way we see others. You know, these boys are watching essentially show reels of abuse and then they're wanting to enact on girls what they've seen. I used to only speak in upper secondary. Now I'm doing these talks in primary schools, which I never expected.

A boy was interviewed for some research out of the UK a couple of years ago and he said, do I need to strangle girls when I have sex with them? They think that violence and brutality in sexual relationships are normal and expected, choking and gagging.

I have young women say now that they are expected to endure punishing, harsh sex and they're expected to enjoy it. And if they don't, they're told there must be something wrong with you. Not there's something wrong with the entire culture that tells you you should buy into and enjoy your own objectification and mistreatment.

But no, you must be prudish and hung up because you don't enjoy sexual violence and sexual debasement. So, you know, that's what we're seeing. And these boys just expect to treat girls like this because we've trained them into hostile attitudes and then hostile behaviours.

I think some of the more interesting research that we're beginning to see pop up is the research of what happens when you sort of look at these images. How does that translate out of the sexual environment?

So to speak. So one of the things that you do see is that when you are looking at images of people who are just sort of naked, like if you can imagine in a medical textbook, right, where you're doing it, here's a picture of a human being naked because we want to name their body parts, right? We kind of want to do that. That when people view those images and they're not sexualized, right?

we actually see that person as a vulnerable human being who is a moral agent. If, however, you sort of dress that image up and you sort of sexualize them in such a way that they give you this sort of come-hither look, or you've put some makeup on them, or they're bending themselves, or they're accentuating a part of their body, what the research suggests is that you actually see them as less of a moral agent.

And so one of the things that we need to be looking at is how is that spilling over into non-sexualized relationships? That is, if all you're viewing is sexualized people over and over and over again, does that spill out over into the interactions that you have with people in your day-to-day activities? Yeah.

And you're suggesting there is research that's pointing in that direction? Yeah. A study done in 2011, you know, even like, you know, 10 years ago, people were noticing this. A lot of it is the language that we normally hear used is that pornography trains people to objectify people.

especially women, right? That's the kind of the standard narrative is that, oh yeah, pornography objectifies women. I think that's probably not the best way to refer to it. If anything, pornography animalifies or dehumanizes women or makes them be less worthy of dignity, for lack of a better way, because they're just animals that want to have sex, right? That's what it's all about.

So is it just a feminist issue? You know, women are just the victims here and the problem is that men are just behaving badly? Or are men in any way victims in all this? Of course. Boys, I believe, are.

are victims, yes, because they're being preyed upon by a global industry that is deliberately targeting them. We talk about accidental exposure, but there's evidence that it's not accidental, that the porn industry is dropping porn deliberately into the places where boys are, especially online. It's in video games, it's

in all kinds of places that young people go. And boys are being trained into aggression, into trivialising significant relationships, of seeing girls as just there to get off on. I believe young men are being sold a lie that they're being...

indoctrinated with false views of women and girls. It's a disaster for women and girls, of course it is. But it also is for boys because it's inhibiting their ability to incorporate sensitivity and empathy into their relationships. This is the theme of a classic episode in the seventh best sitcom of all time, Friends. I really looked that up.

The episode is titled "The One About Free Porn". Joey and Chandler think they've hit the jackpot when their cable service accidentally delivers them free porn. But after just a few days of non-stop pornography, they start to lose their grip on reality. - Hey. - Hey. I was just at the bank and there was this really hot teller and she didn't ask me to go do it with her in the vault.

Same kind of thing happened to me. Woman pizza delivery guy comes over, gives me the pizza, takes the money and leaves. What no like nice apartment, bet the bedrooms are huge? Nothing! You know what? We have to turn off the porn. I think you're right. Turning off the porn is no easy task. Pornhub alone has 120 million users a day.

That's the equivalent of the populations of Australia, Canada, Poland and the Netherlands combined every day. Statistics released by the web hosting company Fast Hosts place the traffic metrics of Pornhub and its next biggest rival, Xvideos, above those of Amazon, Netflix and Reddit combined.

The campaign against Pornhub in 2020, the one that led Visa and Mastercard to block their cards from use on the site, culminated in the giant site removing millions of videos depicting child abuse, rape and incest. The purge of unregistered videos meant that the site went from 13.8 million available videos to 2.9 million.

Melinda Tankard-Reist says that was an enormous win, but there's still 2.9 million videos. And it's a myth to say that the tens of thousands of girls, mainly girls, shown in these videos are there happily in a free exchange of money for labour. What is the link between ordinary pornography and human trafficking? People think that they think of trafficking as

into the sex industry as trafficking into brothels, into prostitution, and that's certainly true. But women and girls are also trafficked into the global porn industry. Women are used to film pornography. Women are also filmed pornography.

when they don't know they're being filmed or videos are taken of them through hidden webcams, which is a global issue. So non-consensual filming of women, also known as upskirting and down-blousing. So

Pornhub hosts this content. We've exposed that, including the actual real trafficking in the bodies of women and girls to produce this pornography in the first place. So you're saying there's a chance that the 15-year-old boy at home looking at porn is actually looking at a girl who has been trafficked? What I say to young men is there's no dolphin-free content

version of porn. You've got your dolphin-free tuna. Because what boys will often say, oh, she was smiling. She seemed to enjoy it. This is not proof. What I try to convey to young men is

who are consuming porn is that you have actually become a patron of the global industry that traffics women and girls for this purpose because you don't know. You don't know her backstory. You don't know how she came to be there.

and you can't do this in conscience. Now, fortunately, I've spoken to young men who have told me that one of the reasons they stopped consuming porn, they said that it was when they learnt more about the actual lives of the women in the porn industry, how they'd come to be there, what their backgrounds were, and...

and what was done to them in the industry, they could not in conscience continue to view this. Being in the grip of pornography, you want yourself to be lost in the fantasy that the people engaged in the pornography are there for you and that they're not acting, that they're not doing it under duress. That's our friend Simon again.

And that dark side of the whole porn industry is something that you just switch off. Even if it's not trafficking, you don't go, well, this person may be doing this to get some money. Do I realise me engaging in this means this porn is...

part of their story for their entire life. And if they ever want to leave it behind, they can't. And, you know, in the process of loving, you know, the people you are consuming is those two things don't, can't coexist to some degree. And part of the process out of pornography was actually realizing what is happening in pornography and who the people are and who you are in relation to them. Here's the other thing about porn.

Even if your brain isn't rewired by porn, even if you don't have a high view of sex, I can't see how porn isn't a justice issue.

We rightly condemn racism because it refuses to give due dignity to a fellow human being made in the image of God. Or if you prefer the more secular version in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.

Justice is about paying respect to those who are your equals and treating them like animals.

This is why so many of us fight against economic inequality too. I don't just mean the natural disparities between the rich and the not so rich. I mean the perverse inequality where people through no fault of their own sink into starvation and easily preventable diseases. No one who believes in the equal dignity of all humans can be comfortable with that. Here's the thing.

porn reduces another human being to a two-dimensional object of my pleasure. It is unjust. It's impossible to view that woman or man on the screen as your equal and then fantasize as you like about them as you bring yourself to an orgasm.

Even if the person on the screen isn't a victim of trafficking or of harsh conditions to make ends meet, porn by definition objectifies, demeans and dehumanizes another human being. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament has this deeply humanizing way of urging his protege Timothy to honor women in his congregations. He says, "Treat younger women as your sisters with absolute purity."

Think of every person on the screen in front of you as your sister, your brother, as someone invested with dignity and porn becomes illogical and unjust. Over and above any harm it does, the porn industry is about cultivating a habit in us of viewing other humans as mere flesh, mere objects of my pleasure.

I hope I don't offend anyone in saying this, but if I advocate for racial and economic justice by day and then watch porn at night, I'm a hypocrite. We press on in these global campaigns and just this year we have had so many victories. We had a massive win against the huge global shopping e-commerce platform Alibaba after we exposed...

the sale of child sexual abuse dolls. Now these are replica children, they're lifelike, you can commission a doll based on a real child and they are for penetrative sex. And there were 23 companies selling those dolls on Alibaba and we exposed it, we documented the dolls, we documented who was selling them, we targeted the CEOs and investors

in Alibaba and we got them down and it only took us a few weeks. Now, while that's a victory, you do have to ask, why do we have to have these campaigns in the first place? Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus for you.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, sex has been seen as the sign and seal of the self-giving of one human being to another. More than pleasure, more than procreation, sex is sacred in the sense that it symbolizes and achieves oneness between two individuals. The first reference to sex in the Bible emphasizes this. A man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh, Genesis 2.24.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul likewise says that illicit sex still creates a kind of illicit oneness. "Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body?" 1 Corinthians 6:16 Even the frequent euphemism for sex used throughout the Old Testament

to know a woman is suggestive of this same point. People sometimes make fun of the quaint terminology, to know her in the biblical sense. But the Bible's choice of word isn't prudish. Indeed, scripture is frequently more open about sexual extravagance and deviance than polite secular society today. This word underlines the intimacy-creating nature of intercourse.

In an ideal setting, one comes to know a partner in a profound way through sexual intimacy. It's a point we can now describe in scientific terms as sexual health research stresses the bonding hormones released with sexual encounters.

The mental and spiritual dimensions of sex are stressed in Jesus' transposition of the seventh commandment, the commandment against adultery. True to form, he takes the law of Moses to a surprising level.

There's something to notice here to rightly feel the force of Jesus' remarks.

The English adverb lustfully here could imply that a mere feeling of arousal in the presence of another person is wrong, is even adultery. But in the original Greek, this is what's called a purposive clause, not an adverbial expression. It literally reads, whoever looks at a woman in order to lust for her, not just looks at a woman lustfully, looks at a woman in order to lust for her.

The issue is not the feeling of arousal caused by noticing someone is attractive. It's not referring to a passing erotic thought. Jesus is talking about intending to look at someone in order to satisfy your desire. The reference here is to nursing desire, directing desire, aiming to fulfill desire.

Perhaps nothing is a clearer target of this particular teaching of Jesus than porn. It's a kind of adultery, Jesus said.

People sometimes slander all this stuff in the Bible as having too low a view of sex as dirty and taboo. The opposite is the case. If I value my car, I'll be careful how I use it and to whom I lend it. The Bible values sex enough to limit its enjoyment to the most intimate human relationship imaginable.

A more secular, unrestrained approach might have the appearance of sexual liberation and celebration, but it's frequently little more than a diminishing of the symbolic and relational power of sex. It's blending out the car too freely. If you think of sex as merely a pleasurable physical experience, it probably makes sense to throw off any perceived shackles. So long as it's safe, it's fine.

It's a bodily delight only, like eating an exquisite meal. But if you find yourself persuaded that sex is a joyous physical enactment of a profound spiritual truth about oneness with another human being, you'll approach sexual activity very differently.

C.S. Lewis, the great Oxford literary don and public advocate of Christianity, once defended the biblical approach to sex against the call in his day, 1940s, for more sexual freedom. His insights are as relevant today as then. Listen to this.

I know some muddleheaded Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex or the body or pleasure were bad in themselves, but they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body, which believes that matter is

is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion, and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex in itself is bad,

Christianity contradicts him at once. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food. There would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say that you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors had

have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect. And we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance. You can press play now.

This campaign isn't run by people who are anti-sex. In fact, it's quite the opposite. It's people who think that sex is actually really great and shouldn't be...

shouldn't be misused in the way it is for profits of the global ejaculation industry, a global industry which trades in the degradation of women. Teachers are telling me that they're seeing more brutality and more cruelty and more sexual demands being made at school, more demands for sexual selfies. I was told about even a faith-based school in Western Australia

where the first day back post-COVID, the girls were greeted to photocopies of boys' penises on their school lockers. And this is at a Christian school.

Another school told me that there's a new game going around. It's called the Boner Game and this was being played by year nine students where the boys invite the girls to lap dance them and the boy that's the last to get an erection is the winner of the game. How will they know that there's another way to live and to be in the world? How will they understand authentic human connection and

and intimacy when porn is their formative environment, when porn is their primary sex educator? The problem with online pornography is that it's sexual intimacy junk food. You're basically just feeding yourself on stuff that's been super refined and taken out of its proper context, right? This is not something that's really going to nourish you. If anything, you're going to

only prefer super sweet things. You're only going to prefer the kind of stuff that you're putting into your system, so to speak. So you're going to want intimacy that looks like the porn that you're viewing. And that's just junk. ... ...

This is the place where I often ask you to think about donating to Undeceptions. But today, can I ask you instead to go to collectiveshout.org and give to Melinda and the team. They are doing amazing work in combating the pornification and objectification of women and girls. They're not a Christian organization specifically, though Melinda herself is a strong believer. They're just funders of the

fighting for justice, for a culture where women get the dignity and respect they deserve. That's collectiveshout.org. By all means, though, head to underceptions.com and check out the huge library of bonus material. And while you're there, send us a question by audio or just by typing, and I'll try and answer it in a future episode. Next episode, we're talking about finding God in the silly little things. See ya.

Brought to you by the Eternity Podcast Network.

Episode 43, editorial 20, in three, two... This is a theme of a classic episode in the seventh best sitcom of all time, Friends. I really looked that up. Kayleigh, don't give me that look. The seventh best sitcom. What about the other one? Seinfeld. Yeah, Seinfeld was number one. The Simpsons is above it too. Is Frasier in it? No, not above Friends.

Hey, just while John Dixon is out of the room, here are the seven most popular sitcoms of all time. Number seven, Friends. Six, The Simpsons. Five, The Andy Griffith Show. Number four, All in the Family, whatever that is. Three, I Love Lucy. Two, MASH. And number one, of course, Seinfeld. See ya.