The essay “Sex Without Women: What happens when men prefer porn?” by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic (posted March 17, 2025) has some very good insights on the social implication of nearly ubiquitous porn. Lust has always been a problem, as Jesus calls adultery of the heart and eyes, but now technology has allowed it to seem like a superior replacement. Like virtual church, some prefer the fake over the real, tangible thing we were made for.
And here was porn so good, so varied, so ready to please, so instantly—insistently—available, that it led to a generation of men who think of porn not as a backup to having sex, but as an improvement on it. They prefer it. Where would this take us? Well, now we know. The heterosexual man can now have what many see as a rich sex life without ever needing to deal with an actual woman.
Here porn is described as a crutch that leads males to avoid relationships and therefore people, changing the dynamics of the sexes, and therefore society. The God-given differences between the sexes are not celebrated and honored, but magnified as the problem—painting male and female as fundamentally incompatible.
The act of intercourse is but one physical aspect of the marital relationship. That link to marriage has already been severed for most in our society—taking something holy and making it common, even expected, and replaceable with pure selfishness. Male and female are pitted against one another, ruining the beautiful unity rooted in Adam and Eve’s one flesh union.
Human relationships, especially between the sexes, are fraught with diverging interests and needs, and when you get right down to it, aren’t [they] kind of a drag? With their talk-talk-talk and their dinner parties, and their pouting about laundry that never gets washed the right way? Your sex robot won’t do that. She’ll never make you go apple picking. She will do only what you want to do.
Even the pagan sees the unifying aspect of sexual relations. It can never be purely selfish or about one’s own pleasure—it points beyond oneself. Physical joining has been given to the married to strengthen their bond. “Marital duty” speaks of the maintaining the unity God creates—serving another, not withdrawing into oneself.
Sex has the ability to create or strengthen a bond between people, and—no matter how many precautions you might take against this terrible outcome—you could find yourself emotionally attached to a person you have sex with.
We are not made for sexual pleasure without knowing another person. This word “know” is used of the marital unification in Genesis 4:1, after the fall into sin: “Adam knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.” From a bird’s eye view, the porn epidemic is shifting expectations of relationships.
While the relationship was going on, they were not a statistic in the loneliness epidemic. They were humans in a world made for humans.
Marriage is the aim and fulfillment of physical knowing. God’s union is to be honored above selfish pleasure. And children are the result of unification, according to God’s will, another gift bestowed upon the joined.
The author highlights a deep-seated desire to be accepted—that porn feeds into that is more than mere titillation. There is no rejection—but not real acceptance either.
But who needs to spiff up now? Porn will never reject you or look at you with a pitying gaze. It’s always there, it never disappoints, and you never have to dig through the clothes hamper for something that smells okayish.
The harm of taking something relational and making it about one’s own base passions is incalculable and damaging to many. Only the Word of God only can address this guilt and inward pervasion which taints how others are seen, creating fundamentally broken people.
The average 14-year-old boy today has seen more hard-core porn than all of the American fighting forces in the Second World War. … Because of the internet’s power to desensitize people and wear down their natural responses to shocking things, and because of the way these algorithms work, young people quickly proceed to more and more extreme videos, and—as it has always been—these earliest experiences of sexual events pass deeply into their sense of what sex should be.
Could that have an impact on society? Surely it does. When straight men don’t need women for sex, a question starts to form: What do they need them for? If it’s having children, these men are going to have to surface out in the world and meet some women, even if they think that means settling for second-best sex. Someone whose adolescence has been spent using a phone and laptop for sex probably isn’t skilled in making conversation with actual women, which will be a problem if he decides to get out among the apple pickers.
The danger is truly spiritual as St. Paul says: “Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” We are meant for much more than a cheap and passing thrill—God’s Word satisfies us when this world can’t.
It keeps taking our souls away from us; every passing year, we’re less of who we were. Soon there won’t be much of us left at all. –ed.
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