Here’s a new one.

Just before we left for Europe two weeks ago, I got an email from a young man named Josh. Josh is a Christian, and he and I have exchanged emails before about Christianity and a liberal sexual ethic. (See this post and this archive.) Josh and his girlfriend, Ruth, have been separated for the summer, and they’ve been talking on the phone and via webcam. Lately they’ve started having phone sex, and have been incorporating the webcam too, watching each other masturbate.

Josh writes that both he and Ruth like the webcam experience very much, but that they are also troubled. Each has a history of using internet porn, and both have committed to giving it up. (This is the moment to note parenthetically that in my work as a gender studies prof and sex educator I’ve been hearing lately from more and more young women who are troubled by their own porn use as well as that of their male partners. The evidence seems to be that we are moving closer to parity in terms of “consumption” of visual erotica by both sexes. I’m sure that there are studies out there on this. I report only my own “anecdata”.) Josh and Ruth dislike both the addictiveness of internet pornography and the ways in which it teaches the user to objectify and dehumanize the people whose bodies make up the images they view.

Josh and Ruth want to know how their private use of the webcam relates to pornography, as they sense that it is both troublingly similar to and yet in another way clearly distinct from the use of porn. Josh wanted my two cents.

When I first read Josh’s letter, I was reminded of a story I heard from my third ex-wife, Elizabeth, who taught for a while at Fuller Seminary. Elizabeth was mentoring a group of first-years, and leading a class on sexuality. One of the guys in the class confessed that he was having trouble getting lustful thoughts for his own fiancée out of his head. Elizabeth was stunned: the young man had made it all the way through a Christian college, BA in hand, and was now entering a Ph.D. program in psychology, and he didn’t grasp the colossal spiritual difference between lusting for someone with whom you are not in relationship and someone with whom you are. I need to give credit where credit is due; my ex-wife, who had a master’s in divinity, was very helpful to me in clarifying a progressive yet biblical perspective on lust. The tenth commandment (which deals with coveting) and Matthew 5:28 make it clear that lust is chiefly (and, arguably, only) problematic when it violates the bonds of covenant marriage. So when a married man lusts for a woman who is not his wife, or an unmarried man lusts for a married woman (reverse the sexes as you please), that’s a very real form of adultery. But when an unmarried man lusts for his unmarried fiancée, that’s hardly a violation of the covenant. When a single woman aches to be touched sexually by a single man, no adultery is committed.

My ex, whose Greek was better than mine, would at this point launch into an explanation of how porneia (the most commonly used Greek term for sexual immorality in the New Testament) ought never be translated as fornication (meaning pre-marital sex). Rather, she argued, it referred only to sex that was extra-covenantal (like incest as well as adultery). I’m not the NT scholar she was. The point is that her mentee had bought into a common misunderstanding of lust, and had concluded that all sexual desire was bad, even for one’s own girlfriend or boyfriend. Leaving aside the complicated question of the legitimacy of premarital sex, common sense makes it clear that sexual desire for a prospective spouse is a necessary, healthy, and good thing. Only a culture that has deeply distorted sexual values could confuse a prohibition against cheating on someone to whom one had pledged fidelity with lusting for someone with whom one planned to make that pledge! Continue reading →