Honesty Like an Open Wound

If preachers and teachers had spoken like this when I was growing up, I think I would have been able to avoid a lot of self-inflicted misery. But alas, while the world got darker, people were more concerned about propriety than saving souls, more interested in appearances, than going into the dark and pulling out those who were drowning; we were drowning not because we wanted to, but because we didn’t know how to swim.

In my past, I was lonely; I was single, intelligent, and creative. Without much social skill, and with little confidence, which arose from not really knowing who I was in Christ, it was easy for me to find myself online. Specifically, chat drew me in. Very specifically, sex chat lured me in and kept me.

While I was there, I was aware of the BDSM people. I knew, even at that state of rebellion, the utter sickness of “the lifestyle” as those people spoke of it. Like all things evil, BDSM takes the appearance of something beneficent and promises a reward; however, I knew that what it really conveyed was slavery and bondage.

Think about it — why would you role-play, or live out, a situation where you had to be always dominating or submitting? How boring! How lacking in creativity. Yet, this is the most minor problem with the lifestyle. It has no real bounds on behavior, and as bondage quickly leads into sadism and masochism, and the sexual kinkery becomes more and more outlandish, people suffer and die. If they survive, then they are simply wounding themselves over and over again, trying to repair what cannot be healed through human hands.

I wish people would listen to those who have been into pornography, erotica, sexchat, and so on. The high you get never lasts. The feeling is the shaky-hands, nervous, eclipsing of all life chemical thrill that pressures you to ignore God, food, your health, relationships, and even your own integrity. Left to your own devices, you will attempt panmixia — you will mate with nearly anything female that walks. Why? Because lust is insatiable. There is nothing secret about it; nothing pure; nothing that isn’t already seen by the One, All-seeing Eye.

If you do find that person whom you can write erotica to, and whom writes it back? Then what? That person is living in a fantasy just as you are. You get no younger while you spend months and years in a futile fantasy. And what you experience haunts you. It took me years to get free of sexchat. Years. The hunger for eroticism without bounds still sometimes claws at my soul, and sometimes, people from my past reach out to me. I know what they want. It pains me to think of how much evil I have brought into the world by spinning lies that people desperately wished were the truth.

The lie always whispers “There is more that God is not giving you. He is holding out on you.” Anyone who thinks that — trust me, please. There is not more pleasure. There is only more and different shards of pain, different ways to die, different ways to choke. It is not worth it, and experiencing these things creates memories inside that well up in the most inappropriate and unwanted times. I know I can overcome and will overcome through Christ, but this lingering shadow makes it much harder than it should be.

No erotica is worth it.