In the outrage following the controversial new Netflix drama Cuties, I’ve been haunted by memories. They say “old sins cast long shadows,” but I feel as if they have ghosts. I see my childhood self in those little girls. I see so many girls I never knew but whom I witnessed being abused. I don’t know their names. I don’t know where they live. I don’t know if they’re still alive. But I can still see their faces.
One face in particular haunts me. She had brown hair and brown eyes like me. She looked maybe 15, just a few years older than I, and she was screaming in fear and pain as she was raped by two older men. Immediately, I clicked the image closed. But closing it didn’t help. I can still see her face 25 years later.
My dad began saving pornography to my computer desktop when I was about 10. We were a Christian family. My mom homeschooled us kids, and my dad sometimes taught Sunday school at church. I tried so hard to believe the porn was all a mistake. I wanted so badly for it not to be his.
One day I caught him watching me as I sat down to write a book report. There was a look in his eyes that I didn’t understand; an expression or anger or maybe lust. Either way, it terrified me. That’s when I knew he knew what I’d seen. That’s when I knew they were my father’s pictures.
I haven’t brought myself to watch Cuties in its entirety, but I’ve seen enough clips to know what it is. Some argue the film draws attention to the issue of child exploitation. That excuse does not hold water. Would we raise awareness about animal cruelty by torturing dogs and filming it? Of course not. Likewise, we shouldn’t raise awareness about child abuse by abusing 11-year-old girls—little girls who are precious, made in the image of God himself.
How I wish I could go back in time and tell my adolescent self that my body was designed by God and holy, no matter what anyone did to it. How I wish I could tell those girls in my father’s pictures that they are worth more than porn.
Porn Is a Weapon
Sexual predators often use “soft porn” to groom their victims. As a child I remember seeing those images and thinking, So, that’s what sex is. I guess this is normal. And there’s no point in telling our pastor, because if this is normal, he’ll just think I’m silly for complaining. Worse, he might tell my dad I complained, and then my dad might hurt me or kill me.
Because, you see, if we’re so used to sexual abuse that we think it’s normal—if we think perversion and violence are acceptable and inherent to masculinity—we are less likely to seek help, let alone report.
As you read this article, there are children watching Cuties. Perhaps, as I did when I was a child, they’re thinking, Those girls are pretty and cool, so when my dad looks at me like that, it’s a compliment, right? If sex is what my body is made for—if this is what’s normal and accepted—I shouldn’t complain. No one would care or help anyway.
The children in Sodom and Gomorrah didn’t understand their cities were evil. Their parents called evil good and good evil; they put darkness for light and light for darkness (Isa. 5:20). This was their way. Their culture. Their normal. Child-abuse victims are no different. The more pop culture sexualizes children and normalizes exploitation, the more it validates and perpetuates the lies of child abusers.
And God Gave Them Over
Pornography is used by abusers in other ways, too. “Soft porn” often functions as a gateway drug, luring the user to harder and more frequent use. As with a drug addict, the craving grows until they ramp up their sin to satisfy their lust. They numb their conscience, systematically breaking down safeguards—such as sympathy and guilt—until the only inhibition left is fear of getting caught.
The more pop culture sexualizes children and normalizes exploitation, the more it validates and perpetuates the lies of child abusers.
Porn also perpetuates abuse because it triggers a sort of spiritual de-sanctification process. Just as Christians grow in the fruit of the Spirit, so an abuser grows in the acts of the flesh (Gal. 5:19–21). Porn enables an abuser to further objectify and dehumanize women, little girls, and little boys, making it easier and easier to enact their devastating fantasies on them. Love is replaced with lust, attraction with objectification, the desire for relationship with the desire to control.
As Romans 1:21–31 explains:
Although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. . . . Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity. . . . They did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil . . . they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.
This is how abusers spiral deeper into depravity. This is how narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths become the evildoers they are. They are born fallen, though not warped to this extent. But they have layered sin upon sin, until nearly nothing good is left.
Little Do They Know, the Dead Are There
Not everyone who looks at porn is an abuser or child predator. But don’t downplay porn’s quietly destructive power. Like Folly in Proverbs 9, porn is invasive, seductive, and ignorant. It lures the weak-minded and evil alike: “Little do they know that the dead are there; that her guests are deep in the realm of the dead” (Prov. 9:18).
It’s urgent we see how porn—even “soft porn” or “artistically transgressive” sexual imagery supposedly intended to raise awareness about child sexualization—can be weaponized to destroy children. I want you to see their faces. Because I still see their faces every day.
It’s urgent we see how porn—even ‘soft porn’ or ‘artistically transgressive’ sexual imagery supposedly intended to raise awareness about child sexualization—can be weaponized to destroy children.
For more than two decades, I watched my dad spiritually decay. I watched his love for me slowly die. Sometimes I’ve wished he could’ve died by any other disease than evil, because then at least I could know I’ll see him in heaven. To my great grief, he knowingly and willingly whittled down his conscience until all that was left was hunger and rage.
When I was 18, I asked my dad to help me pay for college. By then, he’d become like the men in his pictures. He told me educating women is a waste of money. “Get this through your head,” he said. “All that men will ever view you as is a piece of meat.”
This is the message of porn, and it is antithetical to the gospel. It devastates the minds and lives of all who obsess over and participate in it. If love is of God, porn is of Satan.
But we are not a people without hope. On the contrary, “We know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). I have faith that God has and will continue to work through what I’ve endured to build others up and purify his church. Then, like Joseph whose brothers sold him to human traffickers, I will be able to say to those who abused me: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives” (Gen. 50:20).
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