As a woman raised in the LDS church, I was taught that pornography was one of the very worst evils of our modern times. I’ve been thinking about this for years though, and despite the many problematic elements of pornography use, I believe we’ve been dealing with this topic all wrong. The church’s teachings on pornography are at best misguided and unhelpful, and at worst a purposeful misdirection to keep members from noticing far more problematic behavior at the highest levels of male leadership. 

I know this topic is difficult and controversial, and that a lot of women reading this will have been harmed by the pornography use of men in their lives. I see the frequent discussions online in LDS women’s forums about the betrayal wives feel when they discover their husband’s hidden behavior, and I know how painful it is for the men who desperately want to stop viewing pornography but can’t. I do not want to invalidate any of those feelings or experiences. They are very real.

I also know that many women regularly view pornography themselves, but in this specific post I want to talk about men’s use of pornography from a woman’s perspective. I’m posting anonymously because I talk openly about my family members. This is just my opinion, from my own life perspective. It’s okay if you disagree with me.

PART ONE: MY DAD AND PORNOGRAPHY

When I got married in the temple over twenty years ago, my dad didn’t come. He wanted to. He was an active and devoted member of the church. He had a stake calling working closely with the stake presidency, paid a faithful tithing, sang in the ward and stake choirs, literally never missed his home teaching, showed up early and stayed late to help run ward events, held family scripture study, and never missed a chance to share his testimony and publicly declare his belief and dedication to the church he’d converted to in his thirties. My dad (still to this day, now almost eighty) has been the one of most faithful and dedicated members of the church you can find anywhere.

Why didn’t he come to my temple wedding, though? It was because he was caught viewing pornography a few months before my sealing date and declared unworthy to see me get married.

At the time I didn’t really question it. He was the sinner, after all, and I learned this wasn’t the first time he’d been caught with porn. My sister asked me, “Do you even feel comfortable letting Dad around our future kids anymore?” I wasn’t sure what I thought, but his banishment from the temple that day cast a dark cloud over the entire experience, and I still struggle to have happy memories of my wedding day all these years later. 

My mom is now currently dying. She’s been in hospice care for a very long time and has surpassed her life expectancy many times over. She’s in poor health and can be difficult to be around, which isn’t that unusual for someone at the end of their life with dementia. My dad has spent every waking moment caring for her under incredible stress for well over a year now. He hasn’t complained, and hasn’t shown a single sign of stopping no matter how exhausted he is. Any of us should hope and pray for someone as good of a human as my dad to be their companion in life – even if his consistent weakness was viewing pornography. 

I visited my parents recently and by complete coincidence our old stake president and his wife came to visit them at the same time. I felt rising emotions in my chest when it occurred to me that the man coming (who I hadn’t seen since I was a teenager in his ward) might be the same man who wouldn’t allow me to invite my dad to my own wedding after he told him he’d been viewing pornography. As we made casual small talk at the beginning of their visit, I tried to keep my voice calm and said, “I forgot…what years were you the stake president again?” I felt a flood of relief when he told me the years he served and that he was released two years before my wedding. It hadn’t been this stake president, it was the next one. If it had been the other man in front of me, I think I would’ve had an unplanned emotional meltdown with absolutely no idea of how to explain it to the four elderly people I was visiting with.

Luckily for all of us, I didn’t have to confront that particular trauma in person that day – but I did realize how angry I am at the stake president who made that decision. There is such a variety of responses from church leaders over porn use, including some leaders who do nothing at all when men confess to them. Why was there no ability to extend grace to my broken and repentant dad for one single day, or to consider my feelings? Most girls are walked down the aisle by their fathers when they get married, and the only reason they wouldn’t be is because their dad is dead (or not in their life). I didn’t have that issue. My dad was alive and very present, but another man I barely knew decided I couldn’t have him at my wedding because of porn. My mom and dad are both converts, so I already had almost no family there and he took away one of my parents. Sometimes as a woman I’ve felt completely overlooked by men in authority dealing with other men, and this is probably the biggest example of that. Men deal with other men over porn use, and too often the women in their lives tend to be forgotten in the background.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, I was taught my entire life that pornography was evil, and that viewing it would lead men to become sexual deviants and occasionally, you know, serial killers. I can’t believe that anymore, considering two things:

1. Research shows that the vast majority of men (and plenty of women) view pornography regularly, and our society hasn’t broken down into mass murder and rape in the streets. It may not always be the greatest part of human nature, but it’s a pretty normal part of human nature regardless.
2. My dad struggled with pornography use his entire life, and at the end of his life it turns out he’s one of the greatest men I’ve ever known.
    
   

Today I’m angry and sad that the church made my dad feel like a bad person for wanting to look at naked women and sex. (I’m actually glad he liked that stuff, because if he didn’t – I wouldn’t exist!) I’m angry that the church gave my mom (who was a difficult person to be married to due to multiple lifelong undiagnosed mental illnesses) a reason to treat my dad poorly and feel so superior to him. My mom was often mean and her moods were unpredictable, while my dad was unfailingly kind – yet his normal draw to view sexual images made him feel inferior his entire life, and my mom kept a temple recommend while his worthiness came and went. Despite everything, my dad never cheated on my mom. He never visited a prostitute. He never walked out on our family to find an easier companion. Now he’s helping change my mom’s diapers, patiently feeding her with a spoon as she sits in a wheelchair, and has dedicated his entire life to her care despite being healthy enough himself to do more fulfilling activities with his remaining years. Realizing that my dad spent his life believing he was broken because of pornography breaks my heart – and frustrates me at the institution of the church for its unending obsession with men and pornography.

PART TWO: NONE OF THE DISCUSSION ABOUT PORN MAKES SENSE TO ME:

So much of what we teach about the law of chastity (specifically regarding viewing erotic materials) doesn’t make any sense to me. For example:

1. Sex is always taught as the “sin next to murder”. So technically, we’re saying that murder is worse than premarital sex, right? Despite this, I have been told so many times that a movie or show is okay to watch specifically because its rating is for violence, not sex.

If murder is a worse sin than sex, shouldn’t it be better for me to watch a scene of consensual love making than a non-consensual stabbing? Shouldn’t I be able to say, “I’m watching an NC17-rated movie, but don’t worry…it’s only because of some very explicit sex scenes. There’s no murder!”?

Saturday night I went to see the newly released Hunger Games prequel movie in a very packed theater in Utah county, filled with LDS people eager to pay money to watch three hours of violence and murder. I looked at the crowd and wondered how many of them would be in Sacrament Meeting the next morning, totally fine with the people they’d watched get stabbed with a pitchfork the night before.

2. It hasn’t escaped my notice that a lot of LDS women love shows like Bridgerton and Outlander, both of which contain a lot of love scenes. The explanation I’ve heard for why these shows are okay to watch is because they’re showing committed, married sex. “Finally, Hollywood is portraying married sex as a good thing!”, I’ve heard women say.

This breaks down for me immediately because these are not shows teaching morality and LDS chastity standards by any stretch of the imagination. In reality I think these women are saying, “Finally, Hollywood is portraying sex in a way that I don’t feel guilty about watching!”

And the “it’s married sex so it’s fine” thing everyone does has a huge plot hole for me. The people in these hot sex scenes are actors – they aren’t actually married to each other. Using that logic, if a married couple took videos of themselves having sex and uploaded them to a porn site – why would that not be okay to watch, then too? I mean, it’s married sex!

3. We talk about pornography as if it is one single entity, but there are so, so many different types of pornography out there. (Even in Utah, where we declared it a public health crisis, no one has ever defined what pornography actually is. We are just weirdly legislating around a totally undefined term. Is porn a swimsuit issue of a magazine? Is it naked sex? Is it partially clothed sex? Is it a Game of Thrones scene? Is it a Bridgerton scene? Is it the hot lumberjack guy on TikTok who splits logs in a tight shirt with 10 million followers?)

It’s as vague as someone with a severe food allergy asking, “What will we be eating for dinner?”, and their host just answering, “food”. There are a lot of different types of food, some of which would be very damaging to the person, but also plenty that aren’t a big deal. You have to be more specific!

Like food, there’s a very wide range of pornography and why a man might look it up. A sexually inexperienced newly married man might be looking online for help giving his even less experienced new wife her first orgasm. I have such a hard time seeing that as anything but a totally noble pursuit. On the other hand, a fifty year old pedophile might look up child pornography to view a four year old child being raped. Those two actions by two different men are motivated by wildly different intentions, but in general conference they are both simply called “pornography”.

I had a BYU professor who’d once completed a graduate level research project on pornography at a different university. He told us that for most men, watching people have sex simply made them want to have sex too. No Ted Bundy style killing sprees, and no soul stealing deals with Satan – they just wanted to have sex. Few women I know would be angry with men in their lives for simply wanting to have sex, but when the word “pornography” is used over the pulpit to describe both straightforward depictions of sex as well as illegal, sexually abusive porn – how are deliberately uninformed women supposed to do anything but jump to the very worst conclusion? (And how are teenage boys supposed to understand that looking up pictures of boobs is very different from what a rapist going to prison has done because we call all of it “the sin next to murder”? We tell stories about serial killers blaming their crimes on pornography, while not honestly pointing out to kids that billions of other people have also consumed pornographic materials and literally never killed a single person because of them.)

Just like my sister and I wondered at first if my dad should ever be alone with our future children, I’ve heard many women panic about child molestation when they discover their husband’s pornography use. It is highly unlikely that an otherwise decent man who likes watching pretty people have sex is also a pedophile, but when women are given the implied message that those things are somehow connected to each other, marriages and family relationships face completely unnecessary challenges. 

4. If the church really does hate pornography so very much, why do they take the scientifically least effective route possible to limit and end its use? I know a mental health professional who specializes in addiction, and since learning that about him I’ve occasionally picked his brain for advice on overcoming my own compulsive behaviors (for example, what should I do when I find myself eating cookies in the pantry at 10 pm when I’m not hungry and really, really don’t want to be doing it?). 

He’s given me a three part solution: 1. Avoid fear. 2. Avoid shame. 3. “What you resist, persists.” He’s told me to accept my normal human weaknesses with compassion, and avoid aiming for perfection through hypervigilance. I want to break his professional advice down for how we treat unwanted pornography use in the church.

Fear: We make men terrified of porn from childhood on with stories of Ted Bundy. We make them terrified that no woman will marry them if they admit they’ve looked at it, and that their spouse will leave them if they’re caught. 

Shame: We make men feel intense shame for viewing pornography, leading to secrecy and more shame. 

Resisting: Instead of just letting men move on and try to do better the next time, we take porn use (even just once) and turn it into a huge issue – releasing men from callings, taking away their temple recommends, making them publicly not take the sacrament, and sending them to church sponsored Addiction Recovery Programs. This white knuckle approach that makes it central to everything in their life does the exact opposite of everything my addiction specialist friend suggested to me. 

I’ve read many online discussions about pornography use in the church, and to summarize them all, I’d say this: there are so, so many men in the LDS church viewing pornography in secret. I think it’s much more likely that a man is than isn’t. 

In an environment where so many men are exhibiting similar behavior, is it really fair to place the blame on the individuals rather than critically examining the system that so many of them are reacting nearly identically to? We were all raised in a culture that valued total purity before marriage, yet offered almost no sexual education before or after marriage, and provides no professional premarital or marital counseling. We rarely talk about sex, and right up to your wedding night your sexuality is treated as a terrible sin. Curiosity combined with a genuine need to learn about something that will be a huge part of most people’s adult lives leads members of the church to the internet to explore. It’s very easy to see how anyone would be repeatedly pulled back to what they’re viewing there. Internet pornography is often the only available outlet to explore this important part of our lives that’s a taboo discussion everywhere else.

Once stuck compulsively in this behavior we tell men to just try harder to be righteous, but make no attempt to address the root causes of their behavior (loneliness, stress, anxiety, boredom, depression, exhaustion) or to provide a replacement activity to self soothe (exercise, music, companionship, Netflix, sports).

Instead, attempts to change frequently involve punishment (like my dad missing my wedding), shame, repentance, more shame, guilt, secrecy, fear, paranoia, hopelessness, loneliness, self hatred, and more shame. It’s not surprising at all that men turn to pornography even more the harder they try to stop, as the way they are treated (like alcoholics or drug addicts in the church’s pornography addiction programs) is the worst possible way to treat an unwanted behavior. It turns normal human weaknesses into compulsive addictions. 

Unlike the treatment of a drug addict (where there is no healthy level of daily interaction with say, cocaine or heroin), there has to be daily interaction with your sexuality. Similar to compulsive eating, you need to find healthier ways to eat and manage your appetite, not just avoid food for the rest of your life. The church doesn’t allow for that flexibility when it comes to sex, which leads to failure after failure in curing men’s unwanted behavior. 

5. Literally everywhere else in society, the people who are most critical of something are usually the same ones who consume it regularly. For example, film critics, art critics, and television critics all live and breathe the medium they are critiquing. The biggest critics of pornography in the church however, are the ones who claim they’ve never watched it. Elderly men who aged out of their testosterone and sex drive many years before pornography became easily accessible on the internet are the ones passing out the fear and shame to the younger ones. The church treats pornography as the biggest issue facing men today, yet will only let men who have never seen it make the rules and write the general conference talks about it. This reminds me of when heterosexual people give advice on how to be gay in the church, or men give conference talks on how to be better women and mothers. 

For example, the church teaches that “Much of pornography shows violence, domination, and aggression toward others.” On the other hand, Psychology Today talks about 2% of porn videos depicting violence against women, making it less violent than many TV shows and movies.

For the record, I want zero percent of the media we consume to include violence against women – but this demonstrates to me that the person writing for the church manuals might not be very personally experienced in the world of pornography.

6. As a young woman, I wasn’t allowed to wear sleeveless dresses to church dances because it would be immodest. When I was a Mia Maid, two priests came into my young women’s class and one told us about going to a dance with a girl who showed up in a strapless dress and how he had to keep offering her his jacket and hoping she’d cover up with it.  As a nursing mom I had to go to the mother’s room to feed my babies, lest I turn the men and boys in my ward into porn addicts. Elder Dallin H. Oaks told me that I’d “become pornography” for men if I dressed immodestly, and Elder Tad Callister warned me that I should dress modestly to “contribute to the moral purity of men”. There is so much concern about women and girls covering our entire bodies to avoid tempting men.

But then we all go to the temple for the first time and there’s a completely naked lady in the movie and everybody’s like, sure that’s fine.

If the teenage boys in my ward were supposedly struggling to avoid porn addictions because they’d seen a mom with a nursing cover over their baby but still *knew* there were boobs underneath it, how is a totally naked, beautiful Eve projected on a large movie screen not going to cause porn addictions for all the new missionaries? Explain this to me.

PART THREE: WHY I’M MAD AT CHURCH LEADERS FOR MAKING PORN SUCH A BIG DEAL

Like all of us, church leaders make mistakes – including how they’ve dealt with the relatively new issue of modern internet pornography use. I would be okay with those mistakes if they would simply acknowledge what’s happened and apologize. 

Women, unfortunately, are systematically excluded from all decision-making power and positions of authority in the church. (This included the decision to keep my dad out of the temple on my wedding day.) We wait for men to decide that change is needed, so all I can do is watch helplessly as the next generation of teenagers grows up with the same issues I struggled with. Change is painfully slow, and waiting for it is excruciating when you have no ability to contribute to it. 

I feel like top church leaders could have a much bigger moral impact on the world by fixing their own issues than lecturing other men about looking at illicit images online (including hoarding wealth in a suffering world, harm to LGBTQ youth up to the point of suicides, refusing to acknowledge past mistakes of leaders for fear it will open them up to modern day criticism, and breaking and bending federal and state laws for their own benefit).

I want a better church for my friends, family, neighbors and children. I want a church healthy enough that men like my dad aren’t compulsively viewing pornography as an escape. I want a world where women’s ideas and leadership are treated equally to men’s, and I want our leaders to be and do much better with our money and their words. Within our church is child sex abuse, rape, assault, homophobia, racism, and a total lack of representation for women in upper church leadership. But instead of addressing these issues they have the power to fix, our leaders stand at the pulpit and tell us the most pressing issue of the day is that all the younger men in Elder’s Quorum keep looking at boobs on their laptops.

Are we supposed to be so distracted by that sin that we don’t notice any of the problems the leaders need to work on? Many men (like my dad) throughout the church show real humility and a desire to repent and make use of the atonement when it comes to their pornography use. I wish the men at the top would show the same willingness to fix their own shortcomings, and that the rest of us could have more compassion and less judgement for the humanity of everyone in the church dealing with unwanted pornography use.