{"id":3103,"date":"2012-09-11T04:19:15","date_gmt":"2012-09-11T04:19:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.msnaughty.com\/blog\/?p=3103"},"modified":"2012-09-11T04:19:15","modified_gmt":"2012-09-11T04:19:15","slug":"a-christian-asks-me-to-stop-making-porn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/2012\/09\/11\/a-christian-asks-me-to-stop-making-porn\/","title":{"rendered":"A Christian Asks Me To Stop Making Porn"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

Yesterday I got an email from a very concerned Christian who was asking me to stop making porn.<\/p>\n

I’m asking you to please not show any more pornography.<\/p>\n

The Lord has returned and wants it to end.\u00a0 It breaks up marriages and promotes adultery and divorce as well as sex before marriage.\u00a0 This ruins careers, also because women become nuns.\u00a0 Telling children not to wait til marriage to have sex is wrong.\u00a0 Please confess this sin and ask God to let you come home.\u00a0 People have light in their eyes and have gone home.\u00a0 The devil is real and so is hell. This is not a joke.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first thing I thought was: The Lord has returned? Nobody else seems to have noticed. And if it is the rapture, surely that means it’s time to celebrate<\/a>?<\/p>\n

I was originally going to just ignore the email but I found myself typing out a response that became rather essay-like as I went along. I guess I ended up putting all of my internal responses to the ongoing Christian attacks on porn into one letter.<\/p>\n

So I thought I’d justify this otherwise wasteful use of my time by posting it here.<\/p>\n

Dear [redacted]<\/p>\n

Thank you for taking the time to email me as obviously you feel concerned about pornography.<\/p>\n

Let me tell you where I stand:<\/p>\n

I am not a Christian and I do not believe in God, the devil, heaven, hell or souls.<\/p>\n

I do not believe in these things because I base my beliefs on evidence. Hard, scientific, unbiased evidence. Right now, I have been given no credible evidence for the existence of supernatural beings like God, Zeus, unicorns, the devil, ghosts or anything like that. If you can offer me anything more substantial than “God told me”, “I hear voices” or “It is written in this ancient mistranslated holy book called The Bible” then I might be more inclined to believe in it.<\/p>\n

I am a humanist. I maintain the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I don’t need some scary god to frighten me into being nice to other people via stories of hell or the devil. Instead, I have simple human compassion and empathy. I am able to imagine myself in someone else’s shoes and think about how I’d feel if I were them.<\/p>\n

I also have my own definition of right and wrong: namely, if something causes harm, then it is wrong. Simple. But if you want to tell me something is wrong or evil, you need to *show* me the harm. And you have to properly show me causality<\/em> – that is, you have to prove to me that one thing has directly caused harm.<\/p>\n

So, by all means, give me some real evidence of what you’re saying and I’ll listen to you.<\/p>\n

I make a very specific kind of sexually explicit material. It is very deliberately different to a lot of mainstream pornography. My films, stories and websites focus on relationships, female pleasure and agency. They emphasise consent, respect for women (and men too), mutual understanding, communication and openness. I have had positive feedback from people who have seen my porn and they say it made them feel closer to their partner or that it enhanced their relationships. Many said they felt joyful about sex and were pleased to see something depicting sex in a positive, respectful way.<\/p>\n

Most people use porn and it doesn’t cause them harm. I have seen numerous scientific studies that back this up (here’s an example<\/a>). Most people are able to see it as a fantasy construct and they are able to separate it out from their real lives.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, there are some people out there with compulsive personalities. And there are plenty of people out there who have pre-existing relationship problems. For these people, porn becomes a problem. But the porn itself isn’t the cause of the problem, it’s only a symptom.<\/p>\n

I suspect that you probably haven’t read this far. Perhaps you only got as far as the bit about me not believing in god and panicked. Anyway, I’ll continue.<\/p>\n

Here’s some more of my personal morality for you:<\/p>\n

I do not believe that pre-marital sex is harmful. I haven’t seen any evidence that having sex without a state-sanctioned marriage contract is harmful.<\/p>\n

Now that we have contraception, there is nothing wrong with having sex purely for pleasure, even with people you’ve only just met. And I don’t care who other people have sex with. That’s their business, not mine. Nor is it yours.<\/p>\n

I’m married to the guy I met when I was 16. We’ve been together for 23 years. We enjoyed 6 years of rather fabulous pre-marital sex before we got married and it didn’t cause us any harm. We have the happiest marriage, full of respect, communication, sharing, trust and deep, deep love. The marriage contract didn’t really make any difference to that; we just publicly celebrated something that was already obvious to us.<\/p>\n

I do believe that adultery can be harmful because it often involves lying and deceit, which are the real problems. Of course, some people have open marriages and are able to have sex with different people with the consent of their partner. Then “adultery” isn’t an issue because there is communication and no lying or sneaking around.<\/p>\n

Adultery has been around for a very long time, well before the modern version of porn, so I’m not seeing causality there. Apparently there’s rather a lot of adultery in your Bible (along with God-sanctioned slavery, rape and murder – I recommend you visit Evil Bible<\/a> to see what that book *really* has to say).<\/p>\n

Divorce is caused by many things, most often a breakdown in communication. Again, porn use may be a symptom of this but given that a huge number of married men use porn while still maintaining happy marriages, I can’t say the statistics back up the idea of causality.<\/p>\n

As to ruined careers leading to women becoming nuns… well, I’ve just got no idea what the hell you mean there.<\/p>\n

To sum up, you haven’t given me any reason whatsoever to stop making my form of positive, loving, feminist pornography beyond the fact that you believe in God and want to tell other people how to live their lives.
\n
\nHe’s *your* god, *you* do what he says.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And if you think it’s wrong to look at porn, *stop looking*. This might start with visiting my porn blog or the porn website where you found my email address.<\/p>\n

Yours sincerely<\/p>\n

Ms Naughty<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In searching for a pic for this piece (unfortunately I don’t have a reliable source for the above photo) I came across a website giving away free Christian porn<\/a>. The site, on the unfortunate domain “televictim.com” offers “Filmed procreation. Porn the way God intended it.” It also provides instructions on the proper use of porn by Christians.<\/p>\n

I’m not keen on that religion (or any other) but if it is making otherwise repressed people happy and letting them experience pleasure, then yay Christian porn!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I got an email from a very concerned Christian who was asking me to stop making porn. Here’s my reply. Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,21],"tags":[182,915,917],"class_list":["post-3103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-porn","category-religion","tag-christian","tag-porn","tag-religion"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3103\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/msnaughty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}