P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

THE INTERNET PLAGUE #3

FANTASY FATALITIES

It all started with a book she found in the attic. Marisa was just a kid rummaging around, and this big, thick paperback caught her eye. Then it caught her imagination as it transported her into a different world, where handsome men with plenty of money and mellow machismo lavished affection on young women just like herself.

It was her first introduction to the world of soft-core romance novels. And pretty soon these Caribbean love stories, these exotic adventures where the bedroom was always the final destination, turned her into an addict.

In Stephen Arterburn's book, Addicted to "(quote) Love," he describes Marisa's initial reaction to these stories.

"The book seemed to confirm something Marisa had instinctively known all along, but had never known how to put into words: love and affection from the right kind of man would instantly and permanently wipe away all her pain and confusion."

You see, Marisa had always known abuse. Her brother and dad regularly called her ugly, dumb, and fat. But in these books, the heroine was never called such names. And so her escapes into the fantasy world of romance fiction escalated.

Now friend, you might think we've jumped ships here, topically speaking. We're discussing the tragic consequences of pornography, and now we're talking about drugstore paperback books instead. Are these R-rated romance novels the equivalent of porn? Let me make a couple of connect-the-dot observations.

Marisa, even as a chubby preteen already addicted to these fairly explicit sex novels, hit puberty with a vengeance. Following the example of the voluptuous women on the book jackets, she lost those extra pounds and immediately began to send out come-on signals to any and all comers. She lost her virginity at the age of 13 to a kid named Brad. Many more were to follow, as she lurched from one destructive relationship to another. Once, deciding she'd had enough, she determined that she wanted to straighten up and regain control. But it didn't matter. The very next boy to come along, knowing her reputation for being "easy," took advantage of her, pinning her down in the middle of an old baseball field and raping her, then casually drove away.

"By the time she was 24," Arterburn writes, "Marisa had been through dozens of destructive relationships and hundreds of sexual encounters. She had become pregnant three times, and had all three pregnancies aborted. She had also contracted herpes."

There's a sad little endnote to this story.

"Marisa never stopped looking for her Prince Charming," Arterburn explains, "the man who she believed could fix her once and for all."

And of course, Prince Charming is a fantasy, isn't he, a person who doesn't exist in the real world.

Friend, we want to talk today about how pornography and fantasy go together. Later in his book, Arterburn makes this plain statement:

"Pornography is an industry based on fantasy."

The whole idea of porn is to suggest to your mind that these people can be yours, that you can possess them physically, that what you see being done on that triple-X movie screen . . . you can do too.

When you look at pornography, Arterburn suggests, that magazine is suggesting that the following options are AVAILABLE:

"Having sex with a small child; having sex while inflicting pain on another; sex as an act of violence; forcing sex on someone and discovering that they enjoy it; having sex with multiple partners at the same time."

Let's bring it down to something maybe even closer to home. We've been considering the impact of Internet pornography and what adults and kids can log onto with just a few computer keystrokes. In her book, An Affair of the Mind — that has implications regarding fantasy right there, doesn't it? — author Laurie Hall describes how a corporation called Interotica has mass-produced a CD-ROM entitled "Dream Machine." According to the report, this computer invention features a woman who "adapts her personality to users based on their choice of sexual fantasy." In other words, what you want her to do — in your fantasies — she does. Hall reports: "The folks at Interotica have calculated that their programming allows for 1.3 million experiences" — all of them hard-core — "without duplication."

We want to discuss in just a moment the human results of pornographic fantasy, but Hall adds just a bit more. Notice:

"In the fantasy world of pornography, a man is lord and master of the woman, able to use her in any way he desires. She is completely subject to his will. This is especially true in some of the pornographic interactive software, like Dream Machine and Virtual Valerie."

Now friend, what happens when a person has available to him hundreds, even thousands, maybe even 1.3 million free sexual partners, all of them ready and willing to participate in any act, any variation, any abusive perversion? What happens when a person's mind is given over to that kind of fantasy day after day?

Laurie Hall's own testimony will absolutely tear your heart out. Let me share just a bit of it. Her husband, as we've mentioned, spent many hours a day looking at pictures of beautiful, nude, air-brushed females. Here's what happened:

"Although I was careful with my clothes and figure," she writes, "I found that my husband was increasingly critical of the way I looked. Even when friends and acquaintances told me I was an attractive woman, I wasn't attractive enough to compete with eternally young, surgically altered models. Jack also expressed irritation when I was uncomfortable with some of the sexual practices he'd seen in pornographic magazines. In the end, he lost all interest in me as a sexual partner."

Stephen Arterburn, writing in his book Addicted to "Love," makes much the same point.

"A man with his mind full of visions of college-age girls finds intimacy with his fifty-year-old wife increasingly unexciting. He becomes a victim of his own decision to look at what is not his, what he has no right to see." And it goes both ways, gender-wise. Notice: "A woman who steeps herself in romance novels filled with explicit sex scenes is no less a victim. Through the printed word she escapes to exotic foreign countries and makes forbidden love to unattainable idealized men. How will she then be satisfied living with a forty-five-year-old husband who takes her to Niagara Falls in their Winnebago?"

We mentioned yesterday the escalating effect of porn — or maybe we should say the DE-escalating effect, since it's always a spiral down. Arterburn adds this devastating commentary a bit later:

"Many sex addicts cannot achieve orgasm apart from elaborate — and ever-escalating — fantasy fulfillment."

A number of writers and researchers make the same observation — and it's an ironic point — that this kind of fantasy addiction actually works against the addict. A man is completely hooked on sex: he wants more and more. But because of his addiction to fantasy, and then as he's increasingly critical of his flesh-and-blood wife, their own romantic life is destroyed. The wife, understandably, is discouraged and depressed — and begins to let herself go since she can't compete with the Playboy bunnies anyway. She gains weight; he criticizes more and buries his head in more X-rated material, and it goes downhill from there. Instead of more real sex, he gets less and less . . . and finally zero.

And this kind of fantasy spills over into every aspect of a person's life. Here's what Laurie Hall writes, and she saw this happen up-close, remember:

"Accustomed to one-night stands, ‘playboys' have no concept of having to work at something beyond the moment, so they feel put upon if they are asked to work through conflicts with bosses or family members. Used to immediate gratification, they have a low frustration level for the hard work of learning new job skills, and they are unwilling to wait until their pocketbooks can afford the things their hearts desire. Used to getting what they want by deception, they bilk customers with shoddy merchandise and service. Used to a fantasy life where they call all the shots, they view those who don't fall into lockstep with what they want as uncooperative ‘jerks.' Inhabitants of a world where there are no boundaries, they think nothing of invading the person and property of others and begin treating their employees, employers, friends, and neighbors with less and less respect."

Laurie's own husband, who was deeply into this kind of sexual fantasy, fueled by porn, got more and more to the point of glazing over. At the supper table with the kids, he'd just sit staring into space, often unable to complete a single sentence. When they'd go out to the garage to get in the car to drive somewhere, Jack would quickly get into the passenger seat, expecting his wife to drive. Now, maybe that's not so unusual, but the minute he was all buckled in, his eyes would glaze over again. He was GONE — his mind a million miles away pursuing yet another X-rated adventure, while his wife was less than two feet away, completely isolated as she drove the family around.

How did things end up? Here's what she writes:

"One day, when I was agonizing in prayer, asking the Lord to show me what was going on, He gave me a picture of Jack's brain. It was completely smooth, except for one terribly deep trench that ran down one side. I knew instinctively that the trench was the fantasy track in his mind. The trench was so deep that there didn't seem to be any way out of it. The rest of his brain, I could see, was virtually unused. Jack had blown his mind on fantasy."

This top-level executive ended up, she confessed finally, packaging chocolate candy into bags for $7.25 an hour. No wonder Jesus Himself tells us, in Matthew 6:

"The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your entire body will be full of light; but if your eye is unsound, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then, the very light in you is darkened, how dense is that darkness?"

Friend, there's a lot more to consider, so stay with us again tomorrow right here.