So I really don't know who Terry Crews is. My 18 year old tells me he used to play sports and now he's an anti-porn advocate. If that's true, that's a good thing to be. Porn is destroying lives right and left, and need all the enemies it can get.
Anyhow, he gave an interview the other day, and said some pretty blunt things. Reading them was like being punched in the solar plexus--I recognized their truth instantly from my lived experience, and it hurt badly. Here's what he said about "the cult of masculinity":
"This is what happens with men and women. […] As a woman you talk, but a guy is not looking at you as even all the way human. This is what you have to understand — there is a humanity issue here,” he continued. “[Women are] like, ‘Why don’t you hear me? Why don’t you see my feelings?’ And [men are] like, ‘But you’re not all the way human. You’re here for me, you’re here for my deal.’ It’s real."
"You go to the strip club, and here’s the woman, and the whole thing. And once she starts talking about that she has kids or she starts talking about anything in her life, it’s like, ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ Because [she’s] becoming a human before my eyes. I don’t want you to be a human. I want you to be an object. I want you to be something pretty to look at. But as you talk, you’re making things too real for me."
Wow. Women, do you feel the truth here? Even the best men who do regard you as human usually assume you are there for them; they are not there for you. And the not-so-good men really do see you as some sort of sub-human creature. It gets confusing for a woman because when men have sexual interest in you, you assume they must see you as a human being in order to have that interest. No, sirree: if they have sexual interest in you, that goes hand-in-hand (for most of them) with you being sub-human. No cognitive dissonanace for them at all.
And I guess that does come around to the issue of porn, and what "sexual interest" is defined as in porn. It's defined as some sort of violence against someone who, because she is female, is not worthy of any respect at all. She has no human rights in sexual intercourse as interpreted through porn. She is just a thing to use to reach ejaculation.
Talk about poisoning the well! Degraded sex cannot be the origin of anything good. And how deeply awful that sometimes this degraded sex results in conception of a new life, for that new life is blighted at its very genesis.
Consider how one man, his brains boiled by porn, interprets who women are: "the evacuation of will: wilting faces, trembling legs, eyes rolled back into heads . . . distilling the femaleness to its barest essentials--an open mouth, an expectant asshole, blank, blank eyes." Clearly this is not a human being he is describing. Where did he get this idea that females embody "the evacuation of will"? From porn, of course.
I'm to the point where I don't think men and women are going to make it unless men rethink what sex is for them. If sex cannot be something that happens between two full human beings who respect and love and care for each other, then, frankly, it's all over. Isn't that what Jacob was trying to convey to the Nephite men when he told them the taking of concubines was going to lead to the destruction of the entire Nephite civilization? No doubt they thought he was nuts, and making a mountain out of a molehill. But his vision was clear-eyed. Degraded sex is the beginning of a long road that leads to destruction.