What Your Porn Addiction Does to Your Daughter

As a young child, I was faced with images of topless women who graced the doors of my dad’s tool box. I remember thinking,

“Wow! Will I look like that one day? Do boobs even grow that big? I wonder why mom doesn’t look like that.”

I was fascinated with the images. I would do my very best to sneak a peak before my dad caught me looking. I was impressed with the bodies of women that looked so foreign to my own. That was until I got old enough to understand what I was viewing. Then it was just gross. I began to compare my body with the images on dad’s toolbox. I knew there was no way I would be able to ever obtain that kind of figure unless I had surgery to make it possible.

My mom would talk about it with her friends, and all of them had the same general thought,

“They are such perverts. Every man has a magazine, calendar, or porn lying around somewhere. They are animals, they can’t help it.”

This was unnerving to me. I didn’t want every man to be this way. I didn’t want to believe that every man had a stash of garbage lying around. Surely, not every man?! Would I find a man who didn’t view women in this way? Is this what I am expected to look like if I want to keep his eyes on my body and not have trash like this laying around? I digressed like my mom did and just had my mind made up that it was what it was and all men have things like this. Deep down inside however, I ached for my mom.

As a teen, I discovered my dad also had a stash of porn videos as well. Sometimes, when I would wake to go get a drink of water, I would be faced with graphic images as I rounded the corner. Gross. He would be alone, in the living room (my parents divorced) helping himself to a nice dose of filth. I confronted him about it once. I was doing my best to protect my younger siblings from the images casting shadows in my heart. I told mom about it. Again, she blamed it on men in general and had admitted he had those videos a long time. At one point, I stopped myself in the hall and took a look at the scene taking place that my dad was so in to. I wanted to know what exactly it was sexually that men wanted. All I saw on the screen before me were cruel images that resembled nothing to the type of love that should be made. I feared for my body, not wanting to give someone myself like that. I worried that I would HAVE to give myself like that. I spent a lot of time worried that my body would never be enough for anyone because it did not look like that. My mom’s didn’t look like that, so dad had porn. Her friends didn’t look like that, so their husbands had porn. If I don’t look like that, I won’t be able to satisfy my husband, so he will turn to porn.

Fast forward to my marriage. I was so paranoid about porn. It ate at me. I would lay awake at night, waiting for my husband to sneak off and go help himself to a porn video. I combed through all our closets when he was at work, trying to find dirty magazines. I checked bank statements and phone records. I would have nightmares about it. I worried constantly about my body because I wasn’t confident in my sexuality. We were supposed to be enjoying sex, but I continued to feel like he expected me to put on a show for him. I built a wall around our bedroom, and was not able to enjoy all the beautiful things about sex in marriage because of the damage the images had caused for so long. I wasn’t willing to completely let go, because in my mind, letting go meant he had the power to manipulate me like the women in my dad’s porn videos. I simply could not bear the thought of it.

I spent so much of my marriage trying to overcome a barrier that had been planted in my heart as a child. I had no idea the pornographic images would affect my marriage but it did. I wasn’t addicted to porn, my husband wasn’t addicted to porn, but still, there it sat in my bedroom haunting me and telling me I simply was not good enough.

This is what porn is doing to your daughter. You are polluting her sexuality. You are polluting her self image. You are destroying her ability to have good sex with her husband. This addiction is destroying more than just your marriage, it is destroying your daughter’s future marriage as well. Do you want your daughter’s husband to make her feel like her her body isn’t good enough? To make her feel like no matter what she does sexually, her husband will still seek out pleasure from another? This is what she sees in you. This is how she thinks you view her beautiful mother. Not good enough to keep your attention. Your addiction will be found out by your daughter eventually. What will she think of you? What will she think of herself as she sees women barely older than she entertaining her father through a TV or computer screen? The decision to expose your heart to porn affects more than just you, your daughter’s heart is in jeopardy every time you click on that link. Is it really worth crushing your daughter’s heart?

Key verses for this article include Mt. 5:28; Prov. 5:19; 1 Cor. 7:2; Eph. 5:25.

Guest Author: Anonymous