Super Toilet Bowl

So where do you go when your team loses the Super Bowl?  Your pre-game favourites team? A 43-8 loss to a first time winner of SB?  Why the internet of course, to download some comforting porn.  The UK’s The Independent newspaper today reported on the spike in porn downloads in Colorado, in the immediate aftermath of the Denver Bronco’s loss to the Seattle Seahawks.  Have a read through the stats here. 

Lose the bowl? Never mind, you can always drink from the bowl.

Having just read Mars Hill’s (aka Mark Driscoll’s) excellent – and harrowing – free ebook download Porn Again Christian, the stats give a clear insight into the way in which porn is an excellent drug to mainline for a quick dopamine hit when your team loses the Superbowl/you had a bad day at work/you had a fight with your spouse/your life isn’t working out the way it’s supposed to be/you’re bored.

And Driscoll starts his e-book likening porn to taking a deep draught from the dunny:

“God tells us that his people tend to satisfy their thirst not by drinking from his streams of living water, but instead drinking from man-made toilets (Jer. 2:13). This metaphor is particularly adept in a world where men such as Tom Leykis, Dr. Drew, Howard Stern, and a legion of men’s magazines and porno providers become wealthy by selling glasses of toilet water to thirsty men across our nation, many of whom claim to be sons of God. Meanwhile, the church alone has access to the living water from God’s perfect Word, but largely fails to teach men masculinity in any area, particularly regarding their sexuality.”

While his book his aimed at the Christian audience, the punchy approach it takes spares no one, and the chapter in which the final interview given by serial killer Ted Bundy (for whom porn was a gateway drug) before his execution, is especially chilling. A happy family life, loving parents, every opportunity to blossom, but Ted just couldn’t help himself once he started down the soft porn track, after finding some magazines in a dumpster outside a news agency.

The point isn’t that if you are into porn you will end up a serial killer. No, you’ll probably only be fully culpable for one death – your own.  Or maybe that’s simply naive.  The porn industry has strong links to organised crime, while the world-wide sex trafficking trade has exploded in the past decades.  Perhaps you won’t be directly responsible, but indirectly? That’s not so clear cut.  Don’t believe me?  Then check out the excellent documentary/expose of the trafficking industry, Nefarious: Merchant of Souls by Christian film maker, Benjamin Nolot.

The Independent, in its liberal, laissez faire style, makes light of the Super Bowl stats, making it more hit and giggle, than any real critique of why our culture is so addicted to porn. Of course, there would seem to be hope, given that there was a massive 61 per cent drop off in downloads during those hallowed five hours of Superbowl.  It sounds like one solution for addicts would be to hold Superbowl all day, every day.  But then again, the dopamine levels just couldn’t be sustained by the same thing day in day out. Superbowl would have to change up if it were to keep the level of interest.  Perhaps it could be between three teams, or maybe four of five all at once.  Or maybe the rules could be changed, and the settings could be altered.  Maybe a few animals thrown in for good measure, just to make it unpredictable.  Junior Superbowl could make it onto the main stage.  And if that doesn’t hold them, maybe it could start to get violent, freewheeling punches and a chainsaw. Violent and degrading, making the losers act out in ways that demean them.  A bit more like, well, like the porn spiral, really.

If you haven’t read Driscoll’s little book download it from The Resurgence website. It’s got some tough things to say, but it holds out the empowering gospel as a solution for those hooked on porn, in fact, not just a solution, but a new desire – a godly desire – that can disempower all other desires that would tear us and others apart.

Oh, and Ted Bundy was from Seattle. I wonder how long Superbowl’s dopamine hit  would have satisfied him before he went back to sipping from the online toilet?